Frozen

Saw Frozen (thanks, Chris!) I liked it. It was huge for a while so you're probably all familiar with the film, but in case you missed out (or are an Internet historian from the far future) the story is this: Elsa and Anna are young sisters who are left in charge of some vaguely Nordic kingdom. Elsa has awesome ice magic powers but for some damn fool reason must hide them away from the the world. Anna is unaware of her sister's powers (because of the hiding and all) and misses her awesome older sister who used to have so much ice-and-snow related fun with her. After a nasty incident at a ball where her powers get out of hand, Elsa flees (in what may be a rage) into the icy mountains to make a giant pointy ice castle and curse the kingdom with (presumably) eternal winter.

Anyone approaching this story cold would assume Elsa is the villain. She's got terrifying snowman guards, is a witch, and has awesome destructive powers. Instead though, she's only escaping into the mountains to protect the village from herself, and is really distraught about her powers which seem to be more a manifestation of her moods than of her will.

I'm pretty damn sure that this is Disney doing its best to make a feminist film. It was written and (co-)directed by a woman. It stars two female protagonists and the romance is relegated to a side-story. It doesn't want to have evil queens and wicked stepmothers, so it makes Elsa completely sympathetic, shifting responsibility for the story's conflict onto the shoulders of the male characters (notice Elsa's father teaches her to repress her emotions in order to control them.) Not that all of the men are evil either. This is Disney. It needs to walk the fine line of being progressive but not preachy and without suggesting anything so gauche as that there might be something wrong with the status quo. Allegedly, this film's story was being worked on for more than a decade. What we get in the end is this really well-crafted and fairly ambiguous film. It's an unconventional film from a studio which owns (and partially even defines) the concept of conventional entertainment.

The film is very enjoyable. It is a big-budget Disney film after all, so almost everything in it is perfect. My only minor complaint is that I wish Elsa hadn't been such a wimp. At one point she's imprisoned and breaks out, her tumultuous emotions summoning an ice-storm that blankets the town in a thick blizzard of fog and hail. In the middle of all of this, she's pathetically dithering about on a frozen lake, clutching her sides like a crazy woman. She should be soaring in the clouds like a terrible and vengeful god! But of course then she sort of would be the bad guy, huh?

Anyway, the film is great. Not as progressive as one might like (it has been suggested, for instance, that Elsa is a crypto-lesbian. Why not just make her an actual lesbian or, better yet, make Anna be queer? The answer of course is that that would be ~~alienating!!~~) but certainly more progressive than one might expect from Disney (who has yet to have any gay characters at all, now that I think about it.) A good film.