Richelle Wilson “Defrosting the Snow Queen: The Missing Feminist Finale in Disney’s Frozen” 2014 Presentation excerpt When Disney’s animated feature film Frozen was theatrically released in November 2013, it shared the screen with another important premiere: that of the Disney short film Get a Horse! The short features Mickey and the old gang in what appears to be a vintage cartoon sequence from a bygone era, back when America’s favorite mouse was black-and-white, hand drawn, and whistling Dixieland tunes. At a crucial moment in the short, Mickey and the gang “break the fourth wall” by emerging from the two-dimensional screen as 3D, CGI versions of themselves. The short seems to be at least in part a commentary on how Disney is able to both honor and transcend its past, ultimately stepping into a new dimension that is progressive and cutting-edge. However, the re-imagining of Disney animation in Get a Horse! does not manage to fully escape its past: it is imbued with the patriarchal presence of Walt Disney’s voice, which was resurrected in samples to create the entire voice track for Mickey. Strikingly, Frozen shares many of the same qualities as the short film that accompanied it throughout its entire theatrical run. Popular reception of Frozen hails it as singular in the Disney canon for its denial of fairy-tale tropes in favor of “strong female characters” and a deadly curse ostensibly broken by sisterly love rather than the hackneyed “true love’s kiss.” In the wake of all the feminist discussions spurred by the film, it is significant to note that both Frozen and Get a Horse! are the first animated films in their class to be directed in full by women. This is rightly viewed as a triumph—a step forward out of the shadow of our hegemónic past and into a more egalitarian society. The problem remains, however, that both films are themselves haunted by a patriarchal history: in the case of Get a Horse!, it is the voice of Walt Disney that keeps the film shackled to the past and unable to truly escape its own parameters. Likewise, Frozen offers merely the semblance of women in power. Elsa and Anna are heirs to the throne, but what they actually inherit is the emotionally damaging legacy of their deceased father, who early in the film tells Elsa to “conceal, don’t feel” in response to outbursts of her magical powers. Even after their father’s death, the girls continue to define their self-expression and relationships in the context of patriarchal imperatives from both their father and the troll king. Our study of Frozen is comprised of three distinct parts: a discussion of narratology and fairy tales, an examination of the film’s music, and the thread of feminist theory that weaves through both formalist analyses. Our argument is that not only has Frozen mistakenly been heralded as a feminist Disney princess movie by the general public, but that the film creates cues and expectations for its own progressive feminism and then structurally undermines this purpose with a narrative designed to vilify Elsa and a missing musical finale whose absence secures the triumph of the marriage plot. The full paper begins with an examination of the text on which the film is loosely based, Hans Christian Andersen’s Snedronningen (The Snow Queen). The tale begins with a frame narrative in which Andersen, the storyteller, explains the aetiology of the Snow Queen. It all starts with a mirror, he says, which was created by a goblin defined as the devil himself, who endows this mirror with the power to make every good and beautiful thing reflected in it appear ugly and diminished. As he ascends into the skies in an attempt to reflect heaven itself in this cursed mirror, the mirror shatters into “hundreds of millions of billions of bits,” some so tiny that they fly through the air and lodge imperceptibly into people’s eyes—and in the worse cases, their hearts. This is, of course, how the Snow Queen’s heart came to be frozen. While Andersen’s story concentrates the locus of evil in the devil and posits the Snow Queen as a victim of his shattered mirror, Frozen fails to provide any explanation as to the nature and origin of Elsa’s powers. Consequently, these abilities are seen as a curse, and her failure to properly control them in early scenes of the film situate her as a “madwoman in the attic.” This subtly validates her father’s mantra, “conceal, don’t feel,” and suggests that Elsa cannot control her powers simply because she is too volatile. Furthermore, in The Snow Queen, the frosting-over of emotion is seen as unequivocally harmful, while in Frozen it would appear that Elsa is most beloved by the audience when she reaches the point where “the cold doesn’t bother her anyway.” It is no surprise that a 21st-century adaptation of the Snow Queen tale should reflect certain values of its contemporary society. That Disney saw fit to portray two women at the heart of Frozen and even attempt to mock their own formulaic and idealized portrayals of one-day engagements is not out of character, as we saw in 2008’s Enchanted. However, it is important to note that feminist criticism calls for an altering of “contemporary socio-political arrangements,” which is to say the very structure of society both inside and outside the context of the narrative. The most effective feminist fairy tales challenge existing hierarchies and systems of power. What is a “strong heroine” if she is not at least questioning the patriarchal system? If she is only benignly embarking on adventure before safely returning to a hegemonic community in nuptial bliss? Frozen does not feature any real rebellion against convention. Though Elsa is unusual by virtue of her powers, her retreat into isolation represents an unsympathetic act of subversion, or at best a misguided reaction to her own emotions on her journey to redemption. Often, a woman’s only power in traditional fairy tales is magic, which symbolizes latent potential. Feminist tales like Meghan Collins’s The Green Woman “view the ‘black magic’ of witches as the true healing power of women and possibly men” (Zipes 25). In the case of Frozen, Elsa’s magical powers are immediately considered a liability and eventually foment to create the central problem of the plot when she freezes over Arendelle in an emotional outburst. As such, she is cast as the villain, if a complicated one because the damage she has done to the kingdom is by accident. The problems that arise later in the film are only auxiliary to this: Prince Hans has malicious designs to overtake the kingdom for himself at any cost—a devious scheme already comically undertaken by the Duke of Weselton. We are inclined to forgive Elsa her trespasses and, in the absence of any other villain, Prince Hans emerges as the prime candidate for audience hatred. Is he truly a compelling villain, though? His villainy is a counterpart to the “strong heroism” discussed earlier because it distracts from the greater undercurrent of systemic wrongs perpetrated early in the film by Elsa’s father, the king, and the troll who heals the young Anna— unsurprisingly, also a king. The troll king’s possession of healing abilities is doubly offensive because it strips women of one of the few powers they have historically been granted in fairy tales. The subtler but more powerful harm in the story comes from these early patriarchs, who are summarily dismissed from on-screen participation apart from the king troll’s return at the end to offer his wisdom in healing and authoritative approval of the would-be marriage of Anna and Kristoff. Thus, Frozen only teaches children to reject the patently evil, caricatured in Hans, and to continue ignoring the ramifications of the patriarchy’s harmful advice to “conceal, don’t feel.” That the king is absent in Frozen does not mean his power died with him, as Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar illustrate in their analysis of Snow White. The Queen’s husband and Snow White’s father… never actually appears in this story at all, a fact that emphasizes the almost stifling intensity with which the tale concentrates on the conflict in the mirror between mother and daughter, woman and woman, self and self. At the same time, though, there is clearly at least one way in which the King is present. His, surely, is the voice of the looking glass, the patriarchal voice of judgment that rules the Queen’s—and every woman’s—selfevaluation…. [H]e need no longer appear in the story because, having assimilated the meaning of her own sexuality… the woman has internalized the King’s rules: his voice resides now in her own mirror, her own mind. (202) [PRESENTATION ON MUSICAL TREATMENT] CONCLUSION Just as Elsa’s voice is absent from the musical conclusion of the film, so is she silenced throughout the narrative by the memory of her father’s advice to repress her feelings and to limit her self-expression. While women are the directors and stars of this film, it is ultimately not they who speak: it is the inescapable echo of the patriarchy.