(This was supposed to be some Lady Links but I uh, ran out of time. Um. Sorry about that. Go see Frozen.)
So I’m way late to the Frozen party. I don’t know why. I just assumed it was Yet Another Disney Princess Movie and I felt really meh about that. Cause we’ve seen that story and I’m over it. It wasn’t until my friend Summer took her nephew to see it and came back and told me that it had similar themes to those in Brave that I realized it was something I should spend my time and money on.
AND IT WAS.
I wrote a whole review of Brave when it came out and it’s really kind of late to do that for Frozen so I’ll just say one thing about it. After a warning about spoilers. If you don’t want to be spoiled, don’t read the next paragraph!
SPOILERS:
Romantic love is definitely an important kind of love, but it’s not the only important kind of love. Unfortunately our culture devotes an unbalanced amount of time to romantic love over every other kind of love – especially in princess movies. So when this movie started going on and on about an Act of True Love, I saw forward and crossed my fingers that it would turn out to be a different kind of love. AND IT WAS. In this movie there was a romance and a choice between two men. There was love at first sight and there was the kind of love that develops by working together with a friend. But the love that saved the day – the True Love – was a sister’s love. And I jumped up, tears streaming down my face, cheering and clapping and wanting desperately to hug all the people who wrote this movie. Well. Most of that I did internally. But there may or may not have been copious amounts of tears involved.
/SPOILERS.
So basically. GO SEE IT. Take every child you can find to go see it. Just grab random children on your way in* and tell their parents you’re teaching them important life lessons. I’m sure they won’t mind.
So if you’ve been wary of seeing this because Princess Movies, let it go (OH YES I DID JUST DO THAT) and go see it. You won’t be sorry.
*The views expressed by the blogger are not endorsed by the owner of this blog or your local police authorities.
Maybe I will bite the bullet and see it, but I think I had the movie ruined for me before it was widely released in theaters because I read a really thoughtful but quite scathing opinion piece about how much violence the writers had done to the original fairy tale, and it really upset me. I ended up reading the original story and decided that I didn’t really want anything to do with another Disney-fied version of such a good original story. Maybe if I try to divorce my mind enough from the story and decide that Disney didn’t, in fact, draw inspiration from a story that’s way better, then maybe I can see it and not hate it. :( I guess this is what happens when the internet becomes so awesome: we end up reading really smart things by really smart people and kinda have the joy of childlike wonder spoiled by it. Le sigh.
I haven’t read the original for so many years that I can’t remember much but I really didn’t recognize anything much in this movie. So I decided to think of it as a device to give us this sister-story.
There’s a lot of anger and frustration over this also because its yet another white princess and I realize that it sure would have been nice if they’d used some other story entirely for this. Maybe one from a culture that’s not, you know. White.
But they did. And they did change the original story. But they also took a huge step forward for children to have a mainstream story focusing on other kinds of true love. And that’s such an important thing in and of itself that I am willing to overlook the problematic aspects.