That's no blizzard. That's my sister.

Rating: Null/10 (17 February 2015)

"Any woman who chooses to behave like a full human being should be warned that the armies of the status quo will treat her as something of a dirty joke. She will need her sisterhood." - Gloria Steinem
An animated feature by Walt Disney Studios, "Frozen" stars Idina Menzel as Elsa, a young queen who hides the fact that she possesses cryokinetic powers. Ashamed of who she is, and filled with self-loathing, Elsa spends her life in isolation. Worried about Elsa is Princess Anna (Kristen Bell), Elsa's younger sister.
"Frozen's" second act finds Elsa's secret being revealed to the citizens of her kingdom. With her secret out, Elsa promptly embraces who she is, the once timid girl becoming a sexy and assertive spokesperson for raging cryo-femininity. Owning her identity, and singing "Let it Go" with lungs like trumpets, Elsa begins to strut her stuff like a MTV diva. You go girl!
Disney typically offers a rather puritanical, sexist and classist take on romance. In "Frozen", however, these conventions are toyed with and then rejected. We the audience are manipulated into expecting a conventional prince-saves-damsel-in-distress climax, only to get something a bit different. In the end, it is the "true love" which exists between sisters, women and girls that rescues our cast from loneliness and doom. The film doesn't reject men, or heteronomative love, but presents sororal love on equal or greater terms.
Like most recent Walt Disney Features, "Frozen" thinks children are stupid. The film is aggressively manic, believes its audience has short attention spans, holds no shot for longer than a few moments, and lacks even an once of thematic, visual or emotional subtlety. "Frozen's" camera moves fast, characters are incessantly yapping and patience is presented as the ultimate vice. Graceless, frenetic and reluctant to let any scene breathe, the film doesn't so much talk down to kids, as treat them as easily distracted morons. Why, Disney? Why fill a film with gorgeous spaces, places and compositions, only to hack at each with an editor's knife?
Disney has made a number of quasi-feminist works ("Brave" and "Mulan" in particular). "Frozen" itself works as a broad allegory for the acceptance of everything from homosexuality to femininity to personal idiosyncrasies. These admirable traits, however, are increasingly diluted by Elsa's behaviour. In the world of "Frozen", "being true to yourself" and "unleashing your personality" ultimately means becoming a skinny white chick who lives in a castle and dances like a fashion model/pop-star. The film doesn't usher the isolated, alienated and insecure out of their shells, it tells them to step out only if they look like Taylor Swift. Elsewhere "Frozen" continues Disney's creepy infatuation with dead parents, feudalism, divine rights, absolute rule and monarchy.
Hayao Miyazaki animated "Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind" in 1984. Despite a talented, brave and at times insecure girl at its centre, the film didn't feel any need to get on a soap-box or self-reflexively flash its "feminist" credentials. Simply interested in good characters, Miyazaki treats the "tenets" of feminism as being implicitly understood. Virtually all of Miyazaki's subsequent films, and those produced by his animation studio ("Only Yesterday", "From Up on Poppy Hill", "The Secret World of Arrietty"), feature similar portrayals of girls or women. Disney, in contrast, cannot help but turn each of its modern female characters into a blatant mission statement. Disney's modern women/girls aren't characters so much as they are a neurotic mega-corporation's attempts at penance. Inspired by Hans Christian Andersen, the film was written and co-directed by Jennifer Lee.
7.9/10 – Better recent animated films: Chomet's "The Illusionist", Hosoda's "The Girl Who Leapt Through Time", "Summer Wars", "Only Yesterday", "The Secret World of Arrietty", Oshii's "The Sky Crawlers", "From Up on Poppy Hill" and Yeon Sang-ho's "The King of Pigs". Worth one viewing.