Frozen

It's hard to say what's great about Frozen without giving away parts of the ending, and while the ending is pretty well telegraphed from the first, um, ten minutes?...it's probably the polite thing to avoid giving it away while the film is still in theaters. What is great about Frozen, to put it in the vaguest terms possible, is that it questions/subverts a bunch of fairy tale traditions that Disney has mostly promoted over the years. Also pretty great: Idina Menzel singing, Kristin Bell being funny, the song "In Summer."

What is weird about Frozen is easier to talk about, and that is the Disney traditions it fails to subvert, in particular a few very boring ideas about what is pretty and what people (or girls, or princesses) look like. Princesses are pale pink and very tiny in the waist and very big in the eyes. Yawn. I'm not mad about it, but it is a little boring. I've been defending Disney (mostly in imaginary conversations with people I don't actually know) against the charge that their recent movies about marginalized (non-white, non-European, etc.) characters were a kind of PC box-checking. Native American? Check. African? Check. African American? Check. My theory is that maybe there's a more generous interpretation, in which someone noticed that there are vast stores of characters and narratives to be mined outside the Grimm/Anderson cannon they had explored (but not nearly exhausted) in the first 50 years of the Disney Princess franchise. (It's probably not exactly fair to retrospectively label it a franchise, but I think it was Disney Marketing that did that, not me.) So they made a movie about a little Black girl in Louisiana in the twenties not because of idealism about diversity, and not because little African American girls are an untapped (or, um, undertapped) market for Princess merchandise,* but because they noticed that it would be a fresher, newer kind of character, and because 1920s New Orleans (jazz! voodoo! parades!) is a cool setting for a story.

But it seems we're back to Grimm and Anderson now.

Linda Holmes on NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour pointed out that if you look closely at the two princesses in Frozen, you'll quickly see that their eyes are the same width as their waists. Here is a quick illustration:

One more bit of cut-and-pasting further illustrates the weirdness of gender portrayals in this movie:

Doesn't Princess Anna look pretty cute with the eyes of Hans? 

*Obviously this is the real reason for diverse characters. I remember standing at the fabric cutting counter at Joann's the year The Princess and the Frog came out, and talking to the clerks about how ALL their Tiana fabric had sold out before the movie even started playing in theaters.