Don’t worry. This is not going to turn into a My Little Pony blog.
A long time back I heard Disney people worrying aloud that they were having trouble making “the Snow Queen” acceptable to modern audiences. So naturally I assumed they were making it revoltingly feminist and politically correct. And in due course it came out, the feminists loved it, pronouncing it the first feminist Disney movie. Also, people complained “Frozen” did not much resemble “the Snow Queen”. So naturally I assumed Disney had murdered a perfectly good fairy tale to make it PC.
So I watched it so I could tell you how evil Disney was.
Nope. It was the original fairy tale that was feminist in mythic proportion, and Disney had to murder it to avoid scandalizing their audience.
In “the Snow Queen”, the original fairy tale, the heroine’s first love interest turns evil, and is abducted by the Snow Queen. The heroine then goes forth to rescue the first love interest from the Snow Queen, and his own evil.
In “Frozen”, the Disney movie, the snow queen is the beloved sister of the heroine. The Snow Queen flees her kingdom, her sister, and herself, turning evil, and casting a spell of eternal winter on her kingdom. The heroine then goes forth to rescue her sister, the Snow Queen, from herself, to cure her, and thereby save her beloved sister, and save the kingdom from eternal winter. Subsequently her first love interest turns evil.
In “the Snow Queen”, the heroine, in the course of pursuing McGuffin boy, her first love interest, is abducted by the second love interest, little Robber Girl, who holds a knife to the heroine’s throat. Second love interest then takes the heroine to bed, and they sleep wrapped around each other, beside Robber Girl’s talking reindeer.
Robber girl is incredibly alpha, narcissistic, psychopathic, violent, carries a sharp knife, her behavior is completely inappropriate at all times and is all round completely counter stereotypical for a female. And did I mention she is a robber.
In the morning she and the talking reindeer assist the heroine to find the Snow Queen and love interest number one.
It seems that Disney found narcissistic knife wielding psychopathic Robber Girl a bit much, so made love interest number two male instead of female, beta instead of alpha, peaceable and wishy washy instead of violent. And he does not court ladies by holding a sharp knife to their throats.
So, in “Frozen”, the Disney movie, the heroine, in the course of pursing McGuffin girl, her beloved sister, meets the the second love interest, Mr wishy washy beta nice guy. He attempts to rob the shopkeeper, but is just too nice and insufficiently violent. He and the heroine then wander in the snowstorm created by the Snow Queen. They find shelter together, and sleep in the same place, the heroine an arms length from the second love interest, and the talking reindeer an arms length from him on the other side.
In the morning he and the talking reindeer assist the heroine to find the Snow Queen.
In “the Snow Queen” she confronts the Snow Queen. In addition to the fact that love interest number one has turned evil, his heart has been frozen by the snow queen. The Heroine’s love, however, cures everything. The Snow Queen yields. The end.
In “Frozen” she and nice guy love interest confront the Snow Queen, who freezes the heroine’s heart. Nice guy love interest number two sends her back to love interest number one, who turns evil. The Snow Queen, horrified by what she has done to her sister, shows up. Evil love interest number one attempts to kill the Snow Queen and the heroine to make himself king and end the eternal winter, but the heroine cures her sister of evil, and cures her own frozen heart, by her sisterly love. The Snow Queen, cured of evil, now finds that she can unfreeze what she has frozen, so her powers no longer terrify her subjects. Nice guy beta male love interest number two politely asks permission to kiss the heroine, Heroine grants permission, then sucker punches first love interest turned evil, causing him to fall into the sea. The people, relieved that their queen is no longer casting eternal winter, cheer their queen. The end.
After having read the original fairy tale, the only revoltingly feminist part of the Disney movie was that sucker punch. A girl cannot punch a man hard enough to make him fall into the sea like that. Since love interest number one is Machiavellian, narcissistic, and psychopathic, realistically he would punch her back without worrying about hitting a girl.
So all up the major change that Disney made to the fairy tale is that it now teaches little princesses to choose the nice guy. Not that they will. And it no longer teaches them that they can cure bad boys of badness. Not that they will stop trying. The only bad things about the movie is that it teaches boys that nice boys can get the girl. They can’t. And it teaches girls that they can punch boys. They can only punch nice boys. Punching bad boys is seriously inadvisable.
Not sure what makes the movie feminist. I suppose that the Snow Queen has really cool supervillain magic powers, that the heroine saves the day, rather than love interest one or love interest two, and that the kingdom has a queen, not a king. Which is, as feminism, goes, fairly harmless.
The Snow Queen shows every fault stereotypical of women in power. She is fearful, emotional, irrational, unreasonable, changeable, unpredictable, flighty, and bitchy. At the end the people love her, but this appears to be because she stops freezing them. In the final scene, where people are cheering her return as queen, and she is entertaining them with her display of (quite dangerous) magic powers, she is still wearing her sexy super villain costume, rather than her crown and scepter.
Still, a queen in sexy supervillain costume with supervillain powers is a lot more appropriate than little robber girl with her sharp knife.
If you wanted to convey a fully realistic message, you could make a porn of the original fairy tale, in which the heroine successfully thaws love interest number one’s frozen heart, but totally fails to cure love interest number one of evil. In the grand finale, evil love interest number one does the heroine and the snow queen, while knife wielding love interest number two and evil love interest number one do the heroine. Evil love interest number one then ignores the heroine to (cautiously) hit on knife wielding love interest number two.
But, on the whole, congrats to Disney for fooling the feminists into cheering.