By Lauren Barbour

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Frozen won two Oscars and a Golden Globe for best animated feature and on top of its box office profits of one billion dollars and more worldwide, has received an abundance of positive feedback. At least some of its popularity is due to its non-stereotypical female roles, its emphasis on the relationship between two women and how familial love is prioritized over romance. Those impressions, however, are misleading.

While the movie is praised for the tight-knit relationship between two sisters – the supposed central theme – Anna’s goal of reconciling and reconnecting with Elsa is actually a secondary motivation. Until circumstances provoked her into actively going after her sister, Anna’s attention lay entirely elsewhere. At the beginning of the movie, following the classic Disney pattern, the main heroine, Anna, gets a song in which she introduces her goals. And it’s not Do You Want to Build a Snowman? Within the timeline of the movie, when the majority of the plot takes place, Anna seems to have given up on her sister and has shifted her feelings to the “totally crazy” idea of finding romance.

Which, in and of itself, isn’t wrong; people fall in love. Pretending that they don’t is ridiculous but we should not avoid admitting that this is what serves as Anna’s drive. The problem isn’t with those feelings but with how they’re treated. While Disney attempts to poke fun at their own trope of a woman marrying someone she’s just met, it’s done so in a way that frames Anna as being rash and foolish. Half of her relationship with Kristoff consists of him berating her for a choice she made and with a man portrayed as the sensible one. The brunt of criticism falls on Anna, while no one calls Hans out on his being head over heels for a girl he’s known for a day, much less for proposing to her.

Aside from her decision to get married though, Anna’s autonomy is, for the most part, compromised, especially during the song Fixer Upper. The piece consisted of the trolls attempting to force a marriage ceremony between Anna and Kristoff, a man she, at that point, had no interest in. Even when they were told she was engaged to someone else, they replied the same way everyone else in the movie had: that her feelings were invalid and she didn’t know what she was thinking. Anna’s opinion on the matter was completely disregarded.

The relationship between the two sisters is equally neglected. Consider the Bechdel test. Named for Alison Bechdel, it asks whether a work of fiction features two women who have at least one conversation that isn’t about a man. And while it’s true that Anna and Elsa pass, it hardly serves as an indicator of how mold-breaking the movie is, how many standards it challenges. Two women could talk about their preferences in coffee and pass the Bechdel test and it wouldn’t tell us anything about their characters, or about their existence as people, as opposed to foils. So yes, while the test is a good start, it should not be regarded as an absolute standard. In Frozen, it certainly doesn’t reveal much about the state of the sisters’ relationship.

When it comes to family, one thing Disney does right comes at the end, when it turns out that the “act of true love” needed to save Anna involves her sister, rather than her love interest. That’s excellent, but it’s hardly new territory. Brave did that job, and did it very well. In fact, Frozen seems like a step backwards compared to Brave. It allowed a whole movie to explore the shifting relationship between two women and held a lot more depth because of it. While Disney’s attempt to do that while showcasing other relationships is praiseworthy, it needs to be admitted that it failed. It’s especially unfortunate considering that they had another model to go off of. Lilo and Stitch was a movie about family and sisters and managed to maintain several different relationships between several different characters at the same time. What Frozen did was sacrifice what could have been a complex, realistic relationship between two sisters with underlying themes of trust, acceptance and individuality in favor of a love triangle and a singing snowman.

It’s not wrong to like Frozen. It’s not wrong to dislike Brave, or any other similar film. The problem is that with all the praise surrounding the movie, people are becoming content with leaving the bar there and that will be “good enough.” It’s not. People are too willing to accept Disney for what it is, for what it produces when really, we should be the most critical of Disney and other household names because they have the potential to do so much more. And, if we settle for “good enough” we’re never going to get “better.”

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