6 ‘Love is an Open Door’: Revising and Repeating Disney’s Musical Tropes in Frozen

6 ‘LOVE IS AN OPEN DOOR’: REVISING AND REPEATING DISNEY’S MUSICAL TROPES IN FROZEN Copyright © 2018. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved. Ryan Bunch When it comes to the animated film musical, the Disney formula dominates like no other. Although there are some notable alternatives, such as the films of Don Bluth, it is the Disney canon that overwhelmingly defines this subgenre of film musical, its conventions and its themes.1 Disney animated features have always included songs, but since the so-called Disney Renaissance of the late 1980s and 1990s, Disney’s animated features have both modelled their songs and forms on the contemporary Broadway musical and influenced it in turn. The tropes and conventions deployed in these influential animated musicals are recognisable to audiences and deliberately referenced in each new film. Frozen (Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee, 2013) has been widely acknowledged for devising a departure from, or variation on, Disney’s animated musical tropes – specifically those associated with the Disney Princess franchise, which are faulted (fairly or not) for portraying inactive princesses who find their heart’s desire through marriage to a prince. In the common view, Frozen commits an inversion of gendered tropes by emphasising a relationship between sisters rather than a heterosexual couple, producing, for many, a more feminist Disney princess musical.2 For several months after the movie was released in late 2013, a flood of articles appeared on the Internet and in the popular press debating critical questions surrounding Frozen, including whether or not Frozen was a feminist or conceivably queer film.3 These commentaries produced an invigorating debate but often emphasised certain aspects of the film over others – in many cases privileging narrative over musical affect or, in others, showing a preoccupation Contemporary Musical Film, edited by Kevin J. Donnelly, and Beth Carroll, Edinburgh University Press, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5013861. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-09-22 00:27:02. 89 Copyright © 2018. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved. RYAN BUNCH with the physical appearance of the animated characters. One commentator complained of female characters’ eyes being unrealistically bigger than their wrists, while another protested that a film genre with a talking snowman need not be held to such standards of realism.4 This latter position might be reactionary, but it is a reminder that an animated film musical does have its own genre conventions, which should be taken into account. It might be more productive, therefore, to see Frozen as fitting into a tradition of Disney films in which recognisable tropes are communicated through complex interactions of music and animation, along with narrative. These tropes, repeated and revised from one film to the next, come from the fairy tale, the musical and the established practices of Disney films themselves. My hope is that directing our attention to these tropes can contribute some nuance to discussions of Frozen’s gender politics. Where Frozen either replicates or revises these existing patterns, it brings their contradictions and complexities to the surface. Among the tropes employed in Frozen and other animated Disney musicals, those with roots in the fairy tale tradition are perhaps most fundamental. Fairy tale and musical theatre conventions have been central to the Disney cinematic canon, starting with Disney’s first animated feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (David Hand, 1937). Prominent among these is the fairy tale romance, which Disney critics blame for regressive gender politics in the films. The trope of heterosexual coupling or marriage is also pervasive in the musical genre as described by scholars such as Rick Altman and Raymond Knapp.5 For Altman, film musicals follow a dual-focus narrative in which thematic binaries are reconciled by the romantic pairing of the musical’s male and female leads in an alternative to traditional linear narrative. This dual focus involves pairs of scenes or songs in a musical that characterise the male and female leads as opposites to be reconciled by the end of the film. Knapp further identifies the reconciling of different values represented by the leading couple in this type of narrative – for example, Maria’s spontaneity and the Captain’s severity in The Sound of Music (Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein II, 1959) – by what he terms the marriage trope.6 The fulfilment of this trope at the end of a musical in literal or symbolic marriage may lead to a healing of the community, whether a family (as in The Sound of Music), town or nation, as, for example, when the marriage of Laurie and Curlie in Oklahoma! (Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein II, 1943) coincides with the extermination of the outside threat, Judd Frye, and the entry of Oklahoma as a US state. A similar trope in fairy tales and myths involves the healing of the land and breaking of a spell with the conclusion of a quest.7 Examples of the restoration of society accompanied by a royal union in the Disney canon include the waking of the kingdom after Prince Philip rescues Aurora in Sleeping Beauty (Clyde Geronimi, 1959), the restoration of Ursula’s imprisoned mer-folk after Prince 90 Contemporary Musical Film, edited by Kevin J. Donnelly, and Beth Carroll, Edinburgh University Press, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5013861. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-09-22 00:27:02. Copyright © 2018. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved. DISNEY’S MUSICAL TROPES IN FROZEN Eric impales her in The Little Mermaid (Ron Clements and John Musker, 1989), and the disenchantment of the palace staff when the Beast-Prince earns Belle’s love in Beauty and the Beast (Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise, 1991). All of this is to say nothing of the fact that the kingdom gets a future queen and assurance of the royal lineage out of these unions. These heterosexual marriage plots and their power to restore social order can easily be seen as upholding existing ideologies – and here we might think of how ‘Disneyfication’, with its mostly cautious corporate agenda, meshes with what Jane Feuer views as the film musical’s culturally conservative tendencies.8 It might be said that, in musicals of recent times, these conservative and heteronormative representations have shared the stage with more progressive narratives in musicals explicitly treating themes of queerness and homosexuality or in more ostensibly feminist musicals. Nonetheless, the basic structures of musicals tend to privilege the heterosexual marriage or romance plot, and since Disney has not yet ventured to produce any films with openly queer characters, the format remains the traditional one, with any queer readability relegated to subtext. The prominence of marriage plots in the Disney fairy tale musical provides the basis for Frozen’s attempt to reinvent the genre by replacing the romantic couple with two sisters. As we will see, Anna’s relationship with Elsa, rather than with either of her male love interests, is easily readable as the ‘couple’ relationship for purposes of the dual-focus narrative in Frozen.9 The more immediate influences on Frozen’s tropes come from the films of the Disney Renaissance, a period of resurgence in Disney animation beginning with 1989’s The Little Mermaid. The most common type of story told by these films is of young people longing to escape from undesirable circumstances. Ariel wants to leave her undersea world to explore the human world above, Belle wants adventure far from her provincial town, Aladdin wishes to escape a life of poverty, Pocahontas an arranged marriage, Quasimodo the isolation of the cathedral, and Mulan the gender roles of a traditional society into which she does not seem to fit. To express their aspirations, these young people turn to the most liberating convention of the musical – they burst into song. As Jennifer Fleeger notes, in contrast to the vague dreams of love and happiness expressed by the more passive early Disney princesses of Snow White, Cinderella (Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, Hamilton Luske, 1950) and Sleeping Beauty, princesses of the Disney Renaissance sing about exactly what they want (usually not initially a prince), in the specific terms of the modern musical theatre ‘I Want’ song.10 These songs express the protagonists’ central motivating desires, and are a specialty of young women throughout the repertoires of both musicals and Disney films. In these moments of empowering excess, the characters sometimes seem to float or fly in their animated environments as though the desire to escape the narrative limitations imposed on them makes them want to defy the boundaries of the body itself. Ariel floats upward Contemporary Musical Film, edited by Kevin J. Donnelly, and Beth Carroll, Edinburgh University Press, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5013861. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-09-22 00:27:02. 91 Copyright © 2018. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved. RYAN BUNCH in her underwater grotto as she dreams of life on the land, Pocahontas floats off the ground on the ‘Colors of the Wind,’ and Quasimodo swings from the spires of Notre Dame Cathedral. These animated musical numbers rely on the ability of animation to represent plasticity in the bodies of their characters, a quality Sergei Eisenstein described as plasmatic, and which he saw as disrupting realist narrative and ideology.11 Plasmatic characters are most radically in evidence in the early cartoon shorts of Disney, but even in the relatively realist feature films, plasmatic moments and characters still occur, and may be significant when they do. The achievement of the special register of song for which musicals strive is a challenge in animation, because, as Daniel Goldmark notes, animation is already in a special register.12 In recent Disney film musicals this shift into a higher register of feeling is achieved through a combination of selectively plasmatic animation and the expressive style of contemporary belted Broadway singing. Music and animation are thus both capable of breaking the narratives of musical films, and one way to assess Disney’s animated musicals is to see the liberating jouissance of music and animation in competition with linear, patriarchal narratives. For Stacy Wolf, songs in musicals give young women access to affective powers in spite of narratives in which their agency may be suppressed.13 For Elizabeth Bell, on the other hand, the affects of animation and music are insufficient to overcome what she sees as the dominating narratives.14 In The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast, the protagonists’ desires for freedom and adventure, strongly expressed in song at the beginning of the movie, are narratively diverted into heteronormative romance by the end of the film. Ariel’s general fascination with humans is eventually overshadowed by her more particular infatuation with Prince Eric. This change in the object of her desire is musicalised in the change from ‘Part of That World,’ to ‘Part of Your World’ in the song’s reprise, sung after she rescues Eric from a shipwreck. This binary choice between momentary affect and crushing narrative is not the only one we have, however. More nuanced analyses taking careful account of both music and technologies of animation have been offered by Susan Smith and Jennifer Fleeger, among others.15 Referencing Altman, Fleeger notes that the dual-focus narratives in Disney film musicals are not strictly between the princesses and their princes, who are often rather vaguely sketched, but more often between the young women and their oppressive environments.16 For example, Ariel and Belle long to escape the sea and the village respectively, and their ‘I Want’ songs are in a duality with songs that reveal the dangers of those spaces – Ursula’s collection of ‘Unfortunate Souls’ and the provincial scapegoating of the villagers’ ‘Mob Song’. Even Altman’s theory, though based in binary distinctions of gender, gives the female protagonist rather equal time and attention with the male lead. This together with the fact that women tend 92 Contemporary Musical Film, edited by Kevin J. Donnelly, and Beth Carroll, Edinburgh University Press, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5013861. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-09-22 00:27:02. DISNEY’S MUSICAL TROPES IN FROZEN to be the focal point, vocally, in musicals give them a great deal of significance. No single aspect of a film, then – narrative, music, or animation – is reducible to a single agenda. By taking a more multifaceted approach to Disney’s animated musicals, we might discover that in any Disney film there is already a range of possibilities arising from the complex interplay of words and music, animated plasticity and realism, narrative and affect. I would like to keep these operations in mind in exploring the gendered dynamics of Frozen by paying attention to the ways in which all of these elements repeat and revise the existing tropes. The first few scenes and songs in Frozen signal the use of familiar musical and narrative tropes while also introducing variations on them. The film begins with ‘Frozen Heart’, a standard opening song of a type common in musicals and Disney films. These songs, much like overtures, set the tone and often express a theme of the film. A classic example is ‘When You Wish Upon a Star’, sung by Jiminy Cricket over the opening credits of Pinocchio (Hamilton Luske and Ben Sharpsteen, 1940). Closer in style to ‘Frozen Heart’ is ‘Fathoms Below’, which opens The Little Mermaid. Like this song, which is a sea shanty, ‘Frozen Heart’ is a faux folk song with a melody that slides between the melodic and harmonic versions of the minor scale, vaguely evoking a stereotype of European folk music opposed to the major key sonorities associated with either the refined tradition of classical music or the mainstream of commercial popular music. Sung by icemen as they work, it foreshadows the story of Anna and Elsa’s frosty relationship: Copyright © 2018. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved. Born of cold and winter air And mountain rain combining This icy force both foul and fair Has a frozen heart worth mining Cut through the heart, cold and clear Strike for love and strike for fear There’s beauty and there’s danger here Split the ice apart Beware the frozen heart ‘Frozen Heart’ signals that this will be a film in which we can expect to encounter some established Disney musical tropes, and following this musical opening, a number of familiar narrative tropes are presented. Elsa, the princess and soon-to-be-queen of Arendelle, has magical freezing powers that accidentally harm her sister Anna during their childhood play. In order to keep this dangerous power a secret, both sisters are confined to the palace and denied contact with each other or the outside world. This trope of a princess Contemporary Musical Film, edited by Kevin J. Donnelly, and Beth Carroll, Edinburgh University Press, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5013861. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-09-22 00:27:02. 93 RYAN BUNCH Copyright © 2018. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved. imprisoned is a standard of fairy tales, one strengthened in the contemporary imagination by Disney’s habitual choice of stories that include princesses not allowed to leave the house or its environs, among them, Cinderella (1950), Sleeping Beauty (1959), Beauty and the Beast (1991), The Little Mermaid and Tangled (Nathan Greno and Byron Howard, 2010), based on the story of Rapunzel. Doors and windows symbolise the separation between the sisters, their condition of being shut in, and Elsa’s inability to love because of her fear that she will hurt someone, especially Anna. Like their predecessors, Elsa and Anna are trapped, but the themes of restraint and freedom are more complicated because of the two sisters’ character arcs – Anna is open and ready to meet the world while Elsa seeks security in confinement and isolation. The next two songs show Anna and Elsa to be differently embodied in animation and music, with Anna given sung material from the tradition of ‘I Want’ songs and love duets for which Disney princesses are known and having the more plasmatic physical constitution, while Elsa is more bodily contained and given a more constrained range of vocal expression. ‘Do You Want to Build a Snowman?’ establishes the relationship between Anna and Elsa during the period of their separation, collapsing time to show them growing up and depicting the death of their parents. Over the course of several verses, each at a different stage of growth for the girls from childhood to adolescence, Anna tries to convince Elsa to come out and play. During this sequence, Anna is bursting with physical excess and plasmatic animation, running and sliding across the floor to knock on Elsa’s door. Elsa repeatedly tells her to go away. Although ‘For the First Time in Forever’ might seem a more obvious choice as Frozen’s major ‘I Want’ song, ‘Do You Want to Build a Snowman’ establishes for the audience Anna’s deepest desire, to be close to her sister: Please, I know you’re in there People are asking where you’ve been They say ‘have courage’, and I’m trying to I’m right out here for you, just let me in We only have each other It’s just you and me What are we gonna do? Do you want to build a snowman? There is no response from Elsa to this final plea. The unanswered question and Anna’s unfulfilled desire are underscored by the accompaniment, which ends the song on the subdominant harmony of an incomplete cadence. ‘For the First Time in Forever’ continues this delineation of the two characters as high-spirited princess and cautious queen. On her eighteenth birth- 94 Contemporary Musical Film, edited by Kevin J. Donnelly, and Beth Carroll, Edinburgh University Press, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5013861. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-09-22 00:27:02. Copyright © 2018. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved. DISNEY’S MUSICAL TROPES IN FROZEN day, Elsa is about to have her coronation, and for the first time since Anna’s accident, the palace doors will be opened. ‘For the First Time in Forever’ and its reprise introduce a type of song rare, if not unheard of, in previous Disney films – the fully formed musical scene with characters in different psychological states singing in counterpoint with each other. Anna sings the bulk of the song as a Broadway-style number with a pulsating accompaniment resembling that of ‘Don’t Rain on My Parade’, from Funny Girl (Jule Styne and Bob Merrill, 1964), in anticipation of gaining her freedom and finding true love. Anna’s physical lightness in this performance signals her kinship to the traditional Disney princess. She displays a good deal of plasmatic quality, sliding down a spiral banister, lingering in mid-air to pose with the paintings on the walls, and indulging again in her signature move, sliding across the floor of the palace, garments fluttering. We also see her doing traditional Disney princess things like talking to animals – she shares her secret romantic longing with the birds, in this case some baby ducks: ‘Maybe I’ll meet the one!’ By contrast, Elsa is the picture of agony – staid, earthbound and afraid to move, crossing her gloved hands in front of her tightly fitting frock with its high collar and singing her mantra, ‘conceal, don’t feel’, as she tries not to freeze the orb and sceptre she must hold without gloves at the coronation. She is in both musical and animated counterpoint to Anna. The song is packed with ‘I Want’ tropes, linking Anna’s desire to escape confinement with her desire for romantic love. As noted, in many earlier Disney films, the heroines sing about their longing for adventure before that desire gets diverted into heteronormative romance. Frozen collapses this process into one song. At first, Anna sings about the excitement of the open doors and windows and of generally being around people, but soon she is fantasising about meeting her true love. Because of the way ‘For the First Time in Forever’ focuses on these two themes, which have been the motivations for such songs in earlier Disney films, it is not surprising that many would, at first viewing, take this for the main ‘I Want’ song. Indeed, the song is composed to make us think of it as such, setting us up to believe we are watching another formula Disney film so that the filmmakers can pull the rug from under us later, when Anna’s desire for romantic love turns out to be less the key to Frozen than her desire to be reunited with Elsa. ‘For the First Time in Forever’ thus combines and compresses the tropes of earlier Disney films while also introducing an ironic inversion in which Elsa seeks security and isolation rather than exposure and contact. Anna does indeed meet someone as soon as she steps outside the palace. Prince Hans of the Southern Isles is among the foreign dignitaries who have arrived in Arendelle for Elsa’s coronation. During the party that follows, he and Anna sing ‘Love Is an Open Door’, a song that replicates and parodies the cliché, common to fairy tales, musicals and Disney films, of love at first sight, Contemporary Musical Film, edited by Kevin J. Donnelly, and Beth Carroll, Edinburgh University Press, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5013861. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-09-22 00:27:02. 95 Copyright © 2018. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved. RYAN BUNCH expressed in a song immediately after meeting. However, ‘Love Is an Open Door’ is different from ‘Once Upon a Dream’ or ‘A Whole New World’. The song is playful, silly (‘we finish each other’s’ – sandwiches!’) and superficial – not like a true love duet or ballad. Anna and Hans’s comedic and anachronistic robotic movements on the lines ‘our mental synchronization can have but one explanation / you and I were just meant to be’ serve as a subtle metacommentary in animation on the absurdity of their belief in instant love. While the narrative suggests one thing about the budding romance of Anna and Hans, the musical and animated affect of the song betray a different story, the one that we will see at the end of the film when we learn that Hans is only using Anna to seize the throne. Taken at face value on first viewing, ‘Love Is an Open Door’ is a superficial and somewhat insincere misdirection of our expectations. The eventual unravelling of the narrative thread allows us on re-watching to see the ruse being played, so the interplay of narrative, visual and song is important in our reception of events on screen. Anna accepts Hans’s offer of marriage at the end of the song, and they immediately express their intentions to Elsa, who, just in case we in the audience have missed it, calls out the absurdity of the cliché: ‘You can’t marry a man you just met.’ This leads to a confrontation in which Elsa, in a moment of passion, loses control of her powers, revealing her secret to the assembled guests. When the scheming Duke of Weselton accuses her of being a sorceress and a monster, she is compelled to flee, freezing the entire kingdom in her wake. Still frightened by her own power, but alone and unburdened of her secret, Elsa sings the song that most defines her. ‘Let It Go’ is unusual in the Disney repertoire in its particular hybridisation and revision of existing tropes. As Elsa trudges up the snow-covered North Mountain, ‘Let It Go’ opens with a minorkey piano introduction. The style is noticeably pop, and unlike Ariel’s motive in ‘Part of That World’, which strives upward like floating bubbles, Elsa’s instrumental introduction turns back on itself, swirling around like the magic snowflakes that materialise from her hands. The combination of the popinfluenced piano music and the distant visual at the beginning of the song cause the scene to feel more like a music video than a musical number, as though a pre-existing pop song in the soundtrack has come to the foreground to give us a glimpse into Elsa’s interior subjectivity.17 As the song moves into its majorkey chorus, Elsa’s ‘swirling storm inside’ becomes more and more externalised, and she begins to let her power go. She removes her gloves and allows the snow to swirl out of her body, releasing and diffusing her emotional excess into the environment. The words echo this externalisation of pent up power (‘Let it go, let it go, can’t hold it back anymore’), but paradoxically mix these sentiments with images of slamming doors shut, as Elsa declares, ‘I’m never going back’ and ‘I’m alone and free’. She lets her cape fly on the wind on the words ‘The 96 Contemporary Musical Film, edited by Kevin J. Donnelly, and Beth Carroll, Edinburgh University Press, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5013861. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-09-22 00:27:02. Copyright © 2018. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved. DISNEY’S MUSICAL TROPES IN FROZEN cold never bothered me anyway’. Stomping the ground and singing ‘here I am and here I’ll stay’, Elsa magically creates the ice castle in which she will isolate herself from the community. In a dramatic ending, the camera pulls back to show the castle from a distance, but instead of staying in flight in the open air, we suddenly pull in tight again, and Elsa confidently slams the door on us. The emotional heart of a Disney musical is usually an ‘I Want’ song, but this one is more ‘I Am’. In contrast to the traditional princess, Elsa has chosen her form of freedom by isolating herself and shutting herself in, and the pop style of the music, with its exhilarating groove and motoric rhythm, gives the sequence a feeling of inevitability rather than the expectant yearning of the Broadwaystyle ‘I Want’ song. At this point, it is worth mentioning that Elsa is technically the villain of the movie. In the film’s long production history, her character evolved from that of the wicked Snow Queen in Andersen’s fairy tale, on which Frozen was loosely based. When the songwriters composed ‘Let It Go’, the song prompted a rewrite of the character.18 Nonetheless, Elsa contains vestiges of the Disney villainess, admired for her power, independence and agency. Her embodiment and carriage reflect these origins by more closely resembling those of Disney queens and villains than those of Anna and the plasmatic princesses, who float on ocean currents or levitate on the wind.19 Elsa remains bodily planted during her most liberating song, while her magic swirls about her. Princesses are limited by their environment, but Elsa, like Disney villainesses, can manipulate it. Her pose at the end of ‘Let It Go’, with arms outstretched, recalls a similar characteristic posture associated with Sleeping Beauty’s Maleficent. In its projection of power and competency, ‘Let It Go’ is the kind of song usually given to Disney’s antagonistic divas like Ursula (‘Poor Unfortunate Souls’ from The Little Mermaid) and Mother Gothel (‘Mother Knows Best’ from Tangled), but with a twist, in that Elsa is a sympathetic character, and the style of the music suits her combination of power and relatability. Fleeger notes that the pop style of singing heard in recent Disney films fits into a twenty-first century musical aesthetic in which prerecording and spectacle are not antithetical to liveness or authenticity.20 The pop style of ‘Let It Go’ might therefore be experienced as having more intimacy and honesty than the more musical-theatre derived style it resides alongside in Frozen. The song’s resemblance to a pop anthem makes Elsa sympathetic and allows fans to take on her empowering embodiment as a heroine rather than a villainess. Indeed, with ‘Let It Go’, we even have the strong suggestion that Elsa, not Anna, is the most important character in Frozen. It is the only powerful solo and the musical centrepiece of the movie, whereas all of Anna’s songs are in scenes shared with either Elsa or Hans. With this amount of focus placed on Elsa, we now might want to reconsider any notions we had of Anna and Hans forming the central couple of the Contemporary Musical Film, edited by Kevin J. Donnelly, and Beth Carroll, Edinburgh University Press, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5013861. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-09-22 00:27:02. 97 Copyright © 2018. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved. RYAN BUNCH musical. Dispensing with a linear assumption of narrative and instead following Altman’s model of the dual-focus narrative, we can look to the songs for clues about the central relationship. If we trust what the songs are telling us, ‘Do You Want to Build a Snowman’ and ‘For the First Time in Forever’ have signalled from the beginning that Elsa and Anna are the important characters, and their dualistic characterisations only strengthen this view according to the conventions of the musical. The next song, ‘Love Is an Open Door’, seems to point in a different direction, suggesting a relationship between Anna and Hans, but if we have already seen the movie, we know that Hans is really a distraction. If we instead think of ‘Love Is an Open Door’ as Anna’s song (since Hans’s part in it is insincere) and pair it in juxtaposition to the next song, ‘Let It Go’, we can see again the duality of the sisters’ characters, showing Anna in one song to be open, trusting, and naive, and Elsa in the other happily isolated and closed off from the world. This emphasis on Anna and Elsa as the central ‘couple’ in the film is further confirmed by the trivial nature of the songs given to the remaining male characters. When Anna sets off to find Elsa, along the way she meets three male companions – the iceman Kristoff, who guides her up the North Mountain, his reindeer Sven, and the snowman Olaf. Whereas Elsa, with her secret powers and apparent lack of interest in male companionship is easily read as queer, the next few scenes seem designed to deny any gender deviance on the part of Kristoff or Anna. Kristoff first appears as a gruff and burly stranger who is dismissive towards Anna. By convention, we immediately know he is the guy she is really going to wind up with. In a series of battle-of-the-sexes interactions, Anna bargains for his help, overcoming her gendered disadvantage with the class and wealth privilege that enables her to buy the supplies Kristoff needs. In delivering these, she interrupts Kristoff’s ‘duet’ with Sven, ‘Reindeers Are Better Than People’. This brief comic charm song, in which Kristoff sings the mute Reindeer’s part in a character voice, is Kristoff’s only number, as though to sing in earnest would compromise his brand of masculinity. His homosocial bond with Sven, expressed in this song, is undercut by its humour and triangulated by Anna’s intrusion as a possible love interest. Throughout this section of the film, Anna and Kristoff carry on in gender-stereotyped roles, as Kristoff displays the kind of overprotection towards his sled that a young man might show for an automobile. Meanwhile, Anna babbles, expresses emotion, and feigns independence with comic results as Kristoff shows his know-how. Olaf provides some comic relief by disrupting these heteronormative goingson. When he pinches Sven’s cheeks and calls him ‘my cute little reindeer’, Kristoff snaps, ‘Don’t talk to him like that’. He seems offended by this show of affection between Olaf and Sven, but Olaf has also touched a nerve regarding Kristoff’s own attachment to Sven. Later, the trolls sing of Kristoff”s ‘thing with the reindeer/that’s a little outside of nature’s laws’. Olaf’s own song, 98 Contemporary Musical Film, edited by Kevin J. Donnelly, and Beth Carroll, Edinburgh University Press, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5013861. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-09-22 00:27:02. DISNEY’S MUSICAL TROPES IN FROZEN Copyright © 2018. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved. ‘In Summer’, is another comic charm song, evocative of any classic soft-shoe number such as ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ or Lumiere’s introduction to ‘Be Our Guest’, rendering Olaf’s rather queer personality harmless through humour and infantile innocence. That the male characters get such throwaway songs gives further emphasis to the two sisters, and notably, Anna and Kristoff never sing together. Anna and Elsa, however, have another duet, and it is a strong musical expression of their predicament. On arrival at Elsa’s ice palace, Anna, while trying to convince her sister not to shut her out again, transitions from speech into song for a reprise of ‘For the First Time in Forever’. This reprise is especially striking in its overt, stagey theatricality and is the best evidence yet that Frozen has been written with a Broadway production already in mind. Here, Anna and Elsa are in direct conversation (before, their counterpoint was not addressed to each other). Again singing in counterpoint to Anna, Elsa learns that she has frozen all of Arendelle and because of her fearful emotions is unable to reverse the spell. Realising that she has not learned to control her power, she is overcome with fear and accidentally strikes Anna again, this time freezing her heart. Elsa creates a monstrous snowman to throw Anna and her friends out before more harm is done. Anna’s condition is serious, and her heart will completely freeze if something is not done in time. Kristoff takes her to consult with his adoptive family of trolls, whom he describes as ‘love experts’. The trolls, who can see where things are going between the two of them, sing ‘Fixer Upper’, which is no mere diversion or conditional love song – it also contains the key to all of Anna’s, Elsa’s and Arendelle’s problems, extolling love of family as much as love of significant other. Everyone’s a bit of a fixer upper That’s what it’s all about Father, sister, brother We need each other To raise us up and round us out ‘Fixer Upper’ encapsulates the theme of family love – compressing the film’s shift of focus from romance to family into one song. At the end of the song, Anna takes a turn for the worse, and Grand Pabbie troll declares that only an ‘act of true’ love can cure her frozen heart and save her from death. Everyone assumes this means a kiss of true love from Hans. At this point, the film does what many film musicals, even Disney ones, often do – it stops being a musical and resolves its remaining issues, including the overturning of the expected conventions, through narrative action. Anna races back to the castle to be kissed by Hans, and here is where the tables are Contemporary Musical Film, edited by Kevin J. Donnelly, and Beth Carroll, Edinburgh University Press, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5013861. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-09-22 00:27:02. 99 Copyright © 2018. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved. RYAN BUNCH turned. Hans turns out to be the true villain, revealing that he does not love Anna and plans to have Elsa executed so he can take the throne. It then seems that Kristoff will be Anna’s true love, but before she can kiss him, she sees Hans about to kill Elsa, so she intervenes to save her sister, just as her frozen heart spreads and she turns into solid ice. There is silence as plasmatic Anna has now become the frozen one. This is Elsa’s worst fear come true, but it turns out that Anna has just committed an act of true love for her sister. The spell is broken and Anna comes back to life. Elsa now realises that love is the solution and is able to thaw the kingdom, bringing about a healing of the land, which takes place not in a standard musical number, but to the purely affective choral singing of Frode Fjellheim’s ‘Vuelie’. This is the completion of the dual focus narrative, with the two sisters resolving their differences and restoring the kingdom. Meanwhile, the false marriage trope between Anna and Hans has been subverted, but importantly, the true romance between Anna and Kristoff remains. They kiss at the end of the film – and in Disney terms is this not essentially a consummating act signalling an inevitable marriage? Even a revision of the traditional marriage trope still requires its repetition, which reinforces its potency by its mere presence. Earlier Disney princesses seek adventure but find romance. Anna seeks romance, but finds adventure, but then also finds romance again. In the end, the narrative does not simply reverse or negate the traditional romance, but offers it as one relationship among many that matter. In the end, Frozen both upholds and provides an alternative to the conventional fairy tale narrative. The songs, interestingly, help to set up both possibilities, but do not participate in their resolutions – neither Anna and Elsa nor Anna and Kristoff sing in musical expression of their relationship at the end. Nor does Frozen so much eliminate patriarchal narratives as add alternative voices by doubling down with its two heroines on what has always been the affective heart of the Disney princess musical – feminine vocal energy and power. Elsa in her ambivalence and Anna in her selflessness do in some measure rewrite older stereotypes of the Disney princess, and both are available as role models. Although free-spirited Anna is meant to appeal to modern girls, sales of merchandise and other evidence suggest that Elsa is more popular – after all, she is the one with magic powers and the best song. Indeed, there was a crisis of supply and demand in 2014 when Disney sold out of Elsa dresses.21 As Sean Griffin suggests, audiences are capable of making their own meanings and uses of Disney films, revising the intended or dominant readings of them.22 The many elements that go into an animated musical contribute to an open text that, because of its own complexities, imperfections, and contradictions, is big enough to accommodate our own. Like the open doors symbolising personal connection in Frozen, the musical provides a space for active participation, debate and negotiation with its critically engaged audiences. 100 Contemporary Musical Film, edited by Kevin J. Donnelly, and Beth Carroll, Edinburgh University Press, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5013861. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-09-22 00:27:02. DISNEY’S MUSICAL TROPES IN FROZEN Copyright © 2018. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved. Notes 1. Examples of Don Bluth’s musical films include An American Tail (1986) and Anastasia (1997). 2. Michael Macaluso, ‘The postfeminist princess: public discourse and Disney’s curricular guide to feminism’, in Jennifer A. Sandlin and Julie C. Garlen (eds), Disney, Culture and Curriculum (New York and London: Routledge, 2016), Kindle edition. 3. For examples, see Macaluso as well as Dani Colman, ‘The problem with false feminism (or why “Frozen” left me cold)’, Medium, 1 February 2014, available at <https://medium.com/disney-and-animation/the-problem-with-false-feminism7c0bbc7252ef> (last accessed 20 May 2015); Melissa Leon, ‘Disney’s sublimely subversive Frozen isn’t your typical princess movie’, The Daily Beast, 29 November 2013, available at <http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/11/29/disney-ssublimely-subversive-frozen-isn-t-your-stereotypical-princess-movie.html> (last accessed 6 January 2017); and R. Kurt Osenlund, ‘Frozen’, Slant, 13 November 2003, available at <http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/frozen-2013> (last accessed 6 January 2017). 4. Philip N. Cohen, ‘“Help, my eyeball is bigger than my wrist!”: gender dimorphism in Frozen’, Huffington Post, 18 December 2013, available at <http://www. huffingtonpost.com/philip-n-cohen/gender-dimorphism-frozen_b_4467178.html> (last accessed 6 January 2017); Kara Wahlgren, ‘For the love of Olaf, can we stop dissecting Frozen?’, Huffington Post, 4 March 2014, available at <http://www. huffingtonpost.com/kara-wahlgren/for-the-love-of-olaf-can-we-stop-dissecting-fro zen_b_4893806.html> (last accessed 6 January 2017). 5. Rick Altman, The American Film Musical (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), pp. 16–58; Raymond Knapp, The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), p. 9. As discussed by Jennifer Fleeger, Mismatched Women: The Siren’s Song Through the Machine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 107, the Disney Princess franchise is part of a marketing strategy, largely aimed at girls, that extends beyond the films to other merchandise. 6. Knapp, The American Musical, p. 9. 7. In his discussion of the subgenre of the fairy tale musical, Altman, The American Film Musical, p. 149, puts special emphasis on the marriage trope and the welfare of the kingdom. 8. Jane Feuer, The Hollywood Musical, 2nd edn (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), p. x. 9. This same-sex narrative coupling is also evident in the Broadway musical Wicked (2003), as noted by Stacy Wolf, Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 197–218. 10. Fleeger, Mismatched Women, p. 120. 11. On Eisenstein, plasmaticness, and the animated musical see Susan Smith, ‘The animated musical’, in Raymond Knapp, Mitchell Morris and Stacy Wolf (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the American Musical (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp 170–3. 12. Daniel Goldmark, Tunes for ’Toons: Music and the Hollywood Cartoon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), p. 93. 13. Wolf, Changed for Good, pp. 6–7, 12. 14. Elizabeth Bell, ‘Somatexts at the Disney shop: constructing the pentimentos of women’s animated bodies’, in Elizabeth Bell, Lynda Haas and Laura Sells (eds), Contemporary Musical Film, edited by Kevin J. Donnelly, and Beth Carroll, Edinburgh University Press, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5013861. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-09-22 00:27:02. 101 RYAN BUNCH 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics of Film, Gender, and Culture (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 114. Smith, ‘The animated musical’, pp. 167–78; Fleeger, Mismatched Women, pp. 106–36. Fleeger, Mismatched Women, pp. 120–1. Robin Stilwell, ‘The fantastical gap between diegetic and nondiegetic’, in Daniel Goldmark, Lawrence Kramer and Richard Leppert (eds), Beyond the Soundtrack: Representing Music in Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), pp. 190–7. Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez, ‘Songwriters behind Frozen let go of the princess mythology’, transcript of interview by Terry Gross, NPR Music, 10 April 2014, available at <http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript. php?storyId=301420227> (last accessed 6 January 2017). See Bell, ‘Somatexts at the Disney shop’, pp. 107–20, on the three feminine archetypes in Disney fairy tales: dancing girls, femmes fatales and grandmothers. Sean Griffin, Tinker Belles and Evil Queens: The Walt Disney Company from the Inside Out (New York: New York University Press, 2000), pp. 67–77, 141–2, 146–7, 211–13, discusses both princesses and villains in the performance of gender. Fleeger, Mismatched Women, pp. 129, 133. Lisa Liddane, ‘Most-wanted dress in the U.S.: “Frozen’s” Elsa frock’, The Orange County Register, 11 April 2014, available at <http://www.ocregister.com/articles/ costume-609376-costumes-stores.html> (last accessed 10 January 2017); Ellen Byron and Paul Ziobro, ‘Elsa dominates Anna in Frozen merchandise sales’, Wall Street Journal, 4 November 2014, <http://www.wsj.com/articles/elsa-dominates-anna-infrozen-merchandise-sales-1415131605> (last accessed 10 January 2017). Griffin, Tinker Belles and Evil Queens, pp. 48–89. Copyright © 2018. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved. Bibliography Altman, Rick, The American Film Musical (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). Anderson-Lopez, Kristen and Robert Lopez, ‘Songwriters behind Frozen let go of the princess mythology’, transcript of interview by Terry Gross, NPR Music, 10 April 2014, <http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=301420227> (last accessed 6 January 2017). Bell, Elizabeth, ‘Somatexts at the Disney shop: constructing the pentimentos of women’s animated bodies’, in Elizabeth Bell, Lynda Haas and Laura Sells (eds), From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics of Film, Gender, and Culture, (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995), pp. 107–24. Byron, Ellen and Paul Ziobro, ‘Elsa dominates Anna in Frozen merchandise sales’, Wall Street Journal, 4 November 2014, <http://www.wsj.com/articles/elsa-dominates-anna-in-frozen-merchandise-sales-1415131605> (last accessed 10 January 2017). Cohen, Philip N., ‘“Help, my eyeball is bigger than my wrist!”: gender dimorphism in Frozen’, Huffington Post, 18 December 2013, <http://www.huffingtonpost. com/philip-n-cohen/gender-dimorphism-frozen_b_4467178.html> (last accessed 6 January 2017). Colman, Dani, ‘The problem with false feminism (or why “Frozen” left me cold)’, Medium, <https://medium.com/disney-and-animation/the-problem-with-false-femi nism-7c0bbc7252ef> (last accessed 20 May 2015). Feuer, Jane, The Hollywood Musical, 2nd edn (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). 102 Contemporary Musical Film, edited by Kevin J. Donnelly, and Beth Carroll, Edinburgh University Press, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5013861. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-09-22 00:27:02. DISNEY’S MUSICAL TROPES IN FROZEN Copyright © 2018. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved. Fleeger, Jennifer, Mismatched Women: The Siren’s Song Through the Machine (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). Goldmark, Daniel, Tunes for ’Toons: Music and the Hollywood Cartoon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). Knapp, Raymond, The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). Leon, Melissa, ‘Disney’s sublimely subversive Frozen isn’t your typical princess movie’, Daily Beast, 29 November 2013, <http://www.thedailybeast.com/arti cles/2013/11/29/disney-s-sublimely-subversive-frozen-isn-t-your-stereotypical-prince ss-movie.html> (last accessed 6 January 2017). Liddane, Lisa, ‘Most-wanted dress in the U.S.: “Frozen’s” Elsa frock’, The Orange County Register, 11 April 2014, <http://www.ocregister.com/articles/costume609376-costumes-stores.html> (last accessed 10 January 2017). Macaluso, Michael, ‘The postfeminist princess: public discourse and Disney’s curricular guide to feminism’, in Jennifer A. Sandlin and Julie C. Garlen (eds), Disney, Culture and Curriculum (New York and London: Routledge, 2016). Kindle edition. Osenlund, R. Kurt, ‘Frozen’, Slant, 13 November 2003, <http://www.slantmagazine. com/film/review/frozen-2013> (last accessed 6 January 2017). Sells, Laura, ‘Where do the mermaids stand? Voice and body in The Little Mermaid’, in Elizabeth Bell, Lynda Haas and Laura Sells (eds), From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics of Film, Gender, and Culture (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995), pp. 175–92. Smith, Susan, ‘The animated film musical’, in Raymond Knapp, Mitchell Morris and Stacy Wolf (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the American Musical (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Stilwell, Robynn, ‘The fantastical gap between diegetic and nondiegetic’, in Daniel Goldmark, Lawrence Kramer and Richard Leppert (eds), Beyond the Soundtrack: Representing Music in Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). Wahlgren, Kara, ‘For the love of Olaf, can we stop dissecting Frozen?’, Huffington Post, 4 March 2014 <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kara-wahlgren/for-the-loveof-olaf-can-we-stop-dissecting-frozen_b_4893806.html> (last accessed 6 January 2017). Wolf, Stacy, Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Contemporary Musical Film, edited by Kevin J. Donnelly, and Beth Carroll, Edinburgh University Press, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5013861. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-09-22 00:27:02. 103 Copyright © 2018. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved. Contemporary Musical Film, edited by Kevin J. Donnelly, and Beth Carroll, Edinburgh University Press, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5013861. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-09-22 00:27:02. PART TWO Copyright © 2018. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved. STAGE TO SCREEN Contemporary Musical Film, edited by Kevin J. Donnelly, and Beth Carroll, Edinburgh University Press, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5013861. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-09-22 00:27:02. Copyright © 2018. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved. Contemporary Musical Film, edited by Kevin J. Donnelly, and Beth Carroll, Edinburgh University Press, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5013861. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-09-22 00:27:02.