I never realized...

[Crim the Cold]

How good Frozen is. The story works even if you swap the genders of all the main cast. You could change Princess Anna to Prince Arthur, Princess Elsa to Prince Xavier, Prince Hans to Princess Hannah, and Christoph to Krystal (Ice is her life damnit, I'm sorry for the pun) and run the story like that exactly as it was before with the only exceptions being changing the gender references in dialogue and song where appropriate and it would still be as good.

[Kyberwulf]

I think that makes it generic, not good.

[Maat Mons]

The actions of characters stem from their personalities and motivations. Changing gender doesn't change personality or motivation. Why would you ever not be able to arbitrarily swap the genders of the characters?

[Rynjin]

The actions of characters stem from their personalities and motivations. Changing gender doesn't change personality or motivation. Why would you ever not be able to arbitrarily swap the genders of the characters?

There are a lot of stories where someone's gender plays a strong role in their personal identity, just like in real life. Changing that changes the narrative; even if you leave everything as is down to the dialogue and change nothing but the genders of characters. For as innocuous of an example as I can think of, a story like Disney's Bambi conveys a very different tone and message in general where all genders are flipped, as do most coming of age tales.

[snowblizz]

I never realised how overblown the praise of this movie was until I caught it on tv.

And how ludicrously overplayed that "oh but Let it be is such a good song". No. No it isn't. It has like 3 good lines and scores (which is naturally the only part you hear played), but the rest of the song is utter garbage.

It was some time ago since I was last so disappointed by something.

I feel genuinely and deeply sorry for all the parents stuck in the Frozen swamp.

I genuinely cannot fathom where all the praise comes from. Frankly I'm even surprised it's a Disney movie. Seems more like a second rate studio hackjob by someone trying to cash in on the market Disney dominates.

[Maat Mons]

I feel genuinely and deeply sorry for all the parents stuck in the Frozen swamp.

They ain't got nuthin' one me. I was forced to watch it on a constant loop for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, for months straight.

And I'm being quite literal about all of that. I had to stand at a particular counter to do my job. The counter was surrounded on all sides by TVs. My choices were basically to watch Frozen, or to quit.

And yet, you seem to hold even more resentment for the movie than I do.

[Fyraltari]

And how ludicrously overplayed that "oh but Let it be is such a good song". No. No it isn't. It has like 3 good lines and scores (which is naturally the only part you hear played), but the rest of the song is utter garbage.

Lies!

[Wraith]

I feel genuinely and deeply sorry for all the parents stuck in the Frozen swamp.

Speaking as one of those parents....

Frozen is okay. Just okay. The animation is pretty, the songs are catchy, and I genuinely like the characters; Elsa is complex and vulnerable with a deliberate arc, Anna is fun and perky, and Kristoph is an unusually sensible and slightly cynical "Disney Prince" and I like his sense of humour and interaction with his friend/pet Sven.

The problem is that it's just a weak story. Nobody really wants anything or aspires to anything as they do with most Disney films, so the characters spend a lot of time reacting to random events - most of the time there's no sense of motivation beyond "try not to die" and it leaves everything kind of lacklustre. Compare Anna's cheerful boredom with Jasmine or Ariel's lonely wanderlust, or Elsa's desire to keep herself hidden with Quasimodo's tormented isolation? They just miss a lot of the key beats that make me invested.

It could all be worse, of course. It's gentle and inoffensive, and it's also 90+ minutes long which is WAY better than having to explain to my 3 year old why Dumbo's Mummy had to be taken away on a 60 minute loop, 9 times per day..... She can wait until she's a bit older for Bambi, I think

[Brother Oni]

The actions of characters stem from their personalities and motivations. Changing gender doesn't change personality or motivation. Why would you ever not be able to arbitrarily swap the genders of the characters?

In this particular story, there's no effect.

In stories with a more developed background and gender based societal/cultural restrictions or expectations, gender may very well play a more important part - off the top of my head, order of succession for example. The Kingdom of Arendale apparently has absolute primogeniture (eldest child inherits regardless of gender), or changed the law to permit it after the death of the king. Absolute primogeniture is not the norm - primogeniture (eldest male heir) was the default for most monarchies.*
Suppose the regent and the supporting nobles of Arendale refused or were unable to change inheritance to absolute primogeniture and it remained as primogeniture. Queue the massive scramble to look through the genealogy books to find a male heir, or a suitable prince (ie easily manipulated) to marry Elsa off to, so that he will be king and rule Arendale instead.

*The precedent set by the inheritance of the English crown by the Queens Mary and Elizabeth are a special case involving religion, politics and lots of bloodshed, so can't go into detail on this board.

It could all be worse, of course. It's gentle and inoffensive, and it's also 90+ minutes long which is WAY better than having to explain to my 3 year old why Dumbo's Mummy had to be taken away on a 60 minute loop, 9 times per day..... She can wait until she's a bit older for Bambi, I think

You could show her the old bunnies movie...

[Kato]

To be honest, I think it would feel at least a little bit off if the genders were swapped. Anna and Elsa both have very feminine attributes that would seem weird. You can keep the general story intact but it would need some changes. Which I feel is true for most recent(ish) kids movies, more so for some (e.g. Inside Out or Moana) So, yeah, I wouldn't say it's much different.


That said, I only saw it once but I liked it well enough. It's perfectly serviceable as a kids film, and I think any movie would get annoying if you were as overexposed to it as parents or such are to Frozen.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

How good Frozen is. The story works even if you swap the genders of all the main cast. You could change Princess Anna to Prince Arthur, Princess Elsa to Prince Xavier, Prince Hans to Princess Hannah, and Christoph to Krystal (Ice is her life damnit, I'm sorry for the pun) and run the story like that exactly as it was before with the only exceptions being changing the gender references in dialogue and song where appropriate and it would still be as good.

I kind of go with Kato here. I think one of the reasons Frozen works so well is because it also doesn't really work with the genders swapped. Sorry in advance, this is going to be a pretty long one.

The reason I say this is tied into the times and culture that produced Frozen. Our time and culture. I don't know if you could call it a third feminist wave, but there's definitely something civil rightsy going on right now, we're figuring out yet again what we want our society to look like. One of the symptoms of this has been that through means like the Bechdel test we've made ourselves aware of how dominant male roles are in our fiction. It's not a modern thing, it's not even a thing tied to male artists, J.K. Rowling mostly writes about guys too, and it's not a thing tied to certain settings, judging from the Hospital shows I know off.

Since this inequality became more known people have tried to fix it, and the core of the effort was always the idea of having more strong female characters. Hollywood listened, and instead of damsels like princess Leia we got characters like Lara Croft, misses Smith and that woman from Twister. Sarah Connor grew into the role as well between the first and second Terminator movie. They were competent, adventurous, strong willed, would one up every man who thought he was better than them at anything, and the people who has cried out the hardest for strong female characters hated them. "Men with boobs", they were called. They didn't even pull each others hairs when they fought.

Back in the sixties there was an idea, maybe even a dream of men and women being entirely the same, it was society that had formed our genders, rather than anything biological. I think today we are realizing that like many ideas from the past this one is simply not the whole truth. There are some differences between men and women, at the very least differences between averages, and one of them is that men are to a much greater degree obsessed by fictional violence. While almost any guy will feel represented in a movie as long as there is at least one human male whose prime attribute is "kicks ass", the same is not true for women. I'm not saying "you go girl" characters are bad characters or that they should disappear, but they for many women do not fix the representation issue. Whether a character looked like them was not the problem, or not all of it. We needed characters that acted more like them.

This turned out to be a problem, because it turns out a lot of our fiction is violence based. This again is not a modern problem. Most mythological stories feature heavy violence, sea battles were one of the favorite subjects of early modern master painters and chess is a strategy game. But it did leave us having to figure out how to fit characters who were not idealized asskickers into this media landscape. And I think that's where Frozen succeeded. It starts with two characters who are princesses, and it ends with two characters who are still princesses. They don't out-outdoorsman the outdoorsman, they don't outfight the soldiers, they don't beat the ice monster in a macho drinking game, yet they are the ones driving the story. They are the ones solving the main obstacles, by talking, thinking, socializing, and now and then running away. A lot of stories drop the ball on one of these two points. Either the woman needs to outman the men, man with boobs, or she loses control of the plot, damsel. Bella is not the one driving the story in Twilight, at best she's the force making the other characters drive the story. Frozen gets them right. They even call attention to it when Anna tries to climb the icy slope that the more experienced mountaineer says can't be climbed. She is embarrassed and has to eat her words, and any writer/director/producer less sure of what they're doing would have cut that scene, because they wouldn't want people to say they think women are weak and incompetent. But, you know, that's what being a princess growing up alone inside a castle would be like, you don't get a ton of experience climbing mountains, you can fail at that.

Frozen is not a better movie than Moana because a teenage girl shouldn't be dreaming of solo sailing the ocean, far from it, people should all have their own dreams and not accept no for an answer. Except like if their dream is like, you know, practicing pedophilia or something. (Sailing the seven seas as a whaler is still on the table right?) But while both of these movies are great and tell good stories featuring good characters I think it's the ones from Frozen that will help us develop our media to feel more inclusive to people. One of the reasons Frozen is good is because the character's genders are not that just swappable like that. Or maybe it's closer to the other way around actually: one of the reasons Frozen is good is because it wasn't written featuring two royal boys who were then switched out for girls. If we want to be more representative, do we eventually need a few male characters that can be awesome and lead a story without being supreme asskickers? We do. But we'll figure out how to do that some other day. For now, Frozen is the victory we can get.

[Crim the Cold]

Wow. I did not realize that my post would turn into a big discussion. I just had a thought and felt the need to share it. I lack the capacity for debate to defend my thought point by point to all those who responded in the negative but I would like to flesh my thought out a bit more.

The reason I felt it worked is that it has become more okay in today's society for men to be vulnerable and flawed. I never meant for my words to be interpreted as a gender swap with the story ran exactly the same way would result in the story having the same implications as it did before the swap. That would be silly. What I meant was that it would still be good both mechanically and narratively. It would work. I would still enjoy the story. The characters would still feel real and believable. I would be able to suspend my disbelief. It would be okay for the theoretical princes to be flawed and vulnerable and not react to the situations they are put in in a strong 'manly' way. Previously in fiction it has been kind of rare to have a Male character be overwhelmed, panic, and run from a situation unless it was to run toward a vice such as alcohol.

I guess my point is that when I was growing up such a thing would not have been okay and though ideologues on both sides of the gender equality issues will likely never be satisfied no matter how things turn out this realization helped me gain a better understanding of how society has drifted toward equality and for the better in my lifetime. It's okay for all the variants of characters mentioned in this thread to exist. It is okay for men to have what used to be feminine character traits and it's okay for women to have what used to be masculine character traits and everything in between. They are just character traits now.

Something a bit lighter and funnier to conclude the post with. I came to this realization while singing Do You Want Build a Snowman and Let It Go when I thought I was alone (my wife was peeking around a doorway with her phone recording grinning like a maniac).

[Maat Mons]

There are a lot of stories where someone's gender plays a strong role in their personal identity, just like in real life. Changing that changes the narrative; even if you leave everything as is down to the dialogue and change nothing but the genders of characters.

I'm not saying the same actions wouldn't be perceived differently coming from a man or a woman. And I'm not saying that certain personality traits aren't more typical of one gender than the other.

I am saying it's fine when a character doesn't conform to expectations. In fact, characters who completely conform to expectations are boring. Gender-based expectations are one way a character may not conform, though by no means the only way.

It's fine for a character's gender to inform their personality. But I maintain it is ultimately the personality that dictates actions. And gender only influences character actions insofar as it influences personality.

In stories with a more developed background and gender based societal/cultural restrictions or expectations, gender may very well play a more important part

A culture's social restrictions may necessitate that a story be tweaked if genders are changed, yes. For example, if Mulan were going to be remade into a boy, some other pretext would need to be established for why he was ineligible to serve in the army. But the story of a boy concealing some secret in order to be permitted into the military could work.

It is okay for men to have what used to be feminine character traits and it's okay for women to have what used to be masculine character traits and everything in between.

Completely agreed. As is to be expected of a man who spent his boyhood in a pink bedroom, with pink window treatments, and a light fixture shaped like flowers.

Something a bit lighter and funnier to conclude the post with.

No dice. This thread will continue forever!

[Anonymouswizard]

I never realised how overblown the praise of this movie was until I caught it on tv.

I've watched about three other adaptations of The Snow Queen (I remember an amazing animated one, not the Russian version, it's likely the 1995 British one and massive nostalgia), and in all honesty Frozen is probably the worst. I've even got the original story as the next on my reading list, because it is a great story.

As a film itself it's okay, even if I hate the art style Disney uses for it's 3D animated films (I really like 2D). But it doesn't have most of the bits I love about the story. I remember the mirror being taken to reflect the heavens (for various reasons depending on the exact version), the melting of the shards in Kai, even the Snow Queen herself as a villain. All of that was removed and replaced with standard Disney, and I'd much rather have The Snow Queen. I'm fact there's so much changed that I'd hesitate to call it The Snow Queen.

In many ways their original ideas feel like a better film to me. Have the Snow Queen be a close relation to one of the characters, explore the reasons for her to be like she is, I can even see how Kristoff might have begun life as a replacement for Kai. I really want to see that film, but more importantly I want to see the original Russian adaptation. Well that changes tomorrow, it's public domain.

TLDR; Frozen is mediocre and I don't like the art style, The Snow Queen is an amazing story and didn't deserve to be treated the way it was.

[Brother Oni]

A culture's social restrictions may necessitate that a story be tweaked if genders are changed, yes. For example, if Mulan were going to be remade into a boy, some other pretext would need to be established for why he was ineligible to serve in the army. But the story of a boy concealing some secret in order to be permitted into the military could work.

While I agree with your points, some restrictions basically make the story outright impossible. It's interesting that you mention Mulan as she's an excellent example of this.

Spoiler: Historical setting for Mulan

Show

Some background information first: within the usual time frame and location that the Mulan story is set in (Northern Wei Dynasty, approx 4th to 6th Century AD), the bureaucracy and military conscription was organised such that national service was administered at the village level.
Villages were organised into a blocks of 110 households called a li, subdivided further into blocks of 10 households called a jia. One jia (normally one of the richest) would take on the administrative duties of the li, while the other 10 jia would take turns discharging the national service of the li for a year each.
I use the term 'national service' as that's the closest analogy to current day - the serving jia would be called up for whatever the government would need them for, not just soldiers; jailers, messengers, stable grooms, warehouse receiving men, canal watergate operators, clerical assistants, etc.

Since the administrative jia would be local, this means that the 'official' calling everybody up, would have been a neighbouring family or someone who would otherwise know the men of the serving jia, including the fact that Father Hua had no male heirs and a dodgy leg, and would have found him a more suitable job than soldier.

The TL:DR is that there's no reason why Mulan would disguise herself to go fight unless she wanted to go kill some people, which significantly changes the tone of the story and her character's motivations, especially the historical mess that's the (unfortunately) best known Disney version*.

Changing Mulan to a male also completely changes the story as a male Mulan would have been called up for national service himself - he can't save his father from anything, least of all a death on the front lines (probably more like a cushy job guarding low risk prisoners or helping an official push paper around).


*The most anti-Disney version I know of the Mulan story is the 17th Century The Sui Tang Romance by Chu Renhou, which moves Mulan to the Tang overthrow of the Sui, ~618 AD.

Spoiler: The Sui Tang Romance

Show

The basic gist is the same, except Mulan as a man is recruited by another warrior princess, Dou Xianniang, to fight the Tang. Xianniang finds out that Mulan is female and they end up swearing a bond of sisterhood.
Unfortunately Xianniang's father, Emperor Dou Jiangde, is captured and the women surrender to suffer his fate instead and spare him. The soon-to-be Tang Emperor commutes Jiangde's death penalty in recognition of the women's filial piety (in reality he was executed) and Mulan is sent home to be with her parents.

Mulan arrives home, only to discover that her father has died and her mother has re-married. To add to her misery, the Khan of the Tang's Gokturk allies summons Mulan to his capital to be his concubine. Rather than submit to the humiliation, Mulan instead commits suicide.

[Kato]

TLDR; Frozen is mediocre and I don't like the art style, The Snow Queen is an amazing story and didn't deserve to be treated the way it was.

I think comparing Frozen to the Snow Queen story isn't fair towards either. At some point it might have been an inspiration but at some point it diverged and now it's hard to make the connection. Lion King has hardly anything to do with Hamlet, Tangled only superficially resembles Rapunzel.. It's not a new thing. I'm not making any claims that Frozen is perfect but it not resembling Ice Queen enough feels unfair to me.

[Wraith]

You could show her the old bunnies movie...

Don't get me started. My Other Half adores it and already has that on DVD, has favourited it on Netflix, has bought two versions of the book (one with pictures!) and is eagerly awaiting the remake so that it can be introduced to our daughter at the earliest appropriate opportunity.

Which, in my opinion, is in about 14 years' time, but we'll see. Maybe I can break it to her gently with Bambi and then work our way up to The Animals of Farthing Wood or something....

[Anonymouswizard]

I think comparing Frozen to the Snow Queen story isn't fair towards either. At some point it might have been an inspiration but at some point it diverged and now it's hard to make the connection. Lion King has hardly anything to do with Hamlet, Tangled only superficially resembles Rapunzel.. It's not a new thing. I'm not making any claims that Frozen is perfect but it not resembling Ice Queen enough feels unfair to me.

Eh, to me 'it would have been better if they just used the original story more' is a valid criticism. As it is, my main problems with Frozen are how it's so much like every other modern Disney movie, just with two Princesses, slightly more active female characters, same changing of the source material until it's barely recognisable. They had a great story there, and they felt the need to change it so much that you can barely recognise it.

Anyway, I'm off to find the old Russian version of The Snow Queen.

EDIT: Watership Down to me is a mid teens story. You don't need to be an adult to deal with it, but it's definitely outside of the 'little kid' range of scary and shocking.

[The Patterner]

Eh, to me 'it would have been better if they just used the original story more' is a valid criticism. As it is, my main problems with Frozen are how it's so much like every other modern Disney movie, just with two Princesses, slightly more active female characters, same changing of the source material until it's barely recognisable. They had a great story there, and they felt the need to change it so much that you can barely recognise it.

Anyway, I'm off to find the old Russian version of The Snow Queen.

How does the Russian version hold up against the original by H.C Andersen?

[Cap'm Bubbles]

How does the Russian version hold up against the original by H.C Andersen?

Fairly well, though it also lacks a bit of the framing involving the mirrors origin (what with the religious flavor and the communist government, board rules, you know the drill). Side characters such as the robbers and animals are fleshed out, the music usually matches tonally without being obnoxiously catchy or overplayed, and just about all the emotional notes are hit right. Some of the dialogue can be cringy, but much of it is children's speech from writers in the 1950's, so cut it a little slack (as we are expected to for Anna or Kristoff on the more awkward conversation that are certainly not in the time period portrayed).

One special thing you can do with it though...
The dialogue in the English dub of it is altered, some even added. Some of it interferes with the stoic portrayal of the Snow Queen herself, but other parts of it shows a little bit of remorse and emotive reflection. She seems very interested in suppressing emotions entirely, both in herself and the company she keeps...
I watched this before I saw Frozen, knowing that it was "loosely based" on the Snow Queen.
So...

Spoiler

Show

Imagine that Frozen simply cuts to black when Elsa sobs over Anna's frozen body on the fjord.
You've now got a rare tragedy for Disney, and a plausible origin story for the Snow Queen: an emotionally and developmentally stunted monarch with a martyr complex who has to respond to her absolute failure and loss of all she loves instead of escaping through vicarious suicide.
The carnage and forced apathy follows, leaving the uncaring force-of-nature character in The Snow Queen as a constant suppressor of pain and loss while inflicting the same on others.

I'm a sucker for reading into things, but the little details and Elsa's arc are what really sell me on this movie.

[Present 2.0]

That's an extremely weird qualifier for "good".

Frankly I'm even surprised it's a Disney movie. Seems more like a second rate studio hackjob by someone trying to cash in on the market Disney dominates.

Also weird. How is it surprising, that a bad(in your opinion) movie is from disney. Bad Disney Movies aren't exactly something no one has heard of.

[The Patterner]

Fairly well, though it also lacks a bit of the framing involving the mirrors origin (what with the religious flavor and the communist government, board rules, you know the drill). Side characters such as the robbers and animals are fleshed out, the music usually matches tonally without being obnoxiously catchy or overplayed, and just about all the emotional notes are hit right. Some of the dialogue can be cringy, but much of it is children's speech from writers in the 1950's, so cut it a little slack (as we are expected to for Anna or Kristoff on the more awkward conversation that are certainly not in the time period portrayed).

One special thing you can do with it though...
The dialogue in the English dub of it is altered, some even added. Some of it interferes with the stoic portrayal of the Snow Queen herself, but other parts of it shows a little bit of remorse and emotive reflection. She seems very interested in suppressing emotions entirely, both in herself and the company she keeps...
I watched this before I saw Frozen, knowing that it was "loosely based" on the Snow Queen.
So...

Spoiler

Show

Imagine that Frozen simply cuts to black when Elsa sobs over Anna's frozen body on the fjord.
You've now got a rare tragedy for Disney, and a plausible origin story for the Snow Queen: an emotionally and developmentally stunted monarch with a martyr complex who has to respond to her absolute failure and loss of all she loves instead of escaping through vicarious suicide.
The carnage and forced apathy follows, leaving the uncaring force-of-nature character in The Snow Queen as a constant suppressor of pain and loss while inflicting the same on others.

I'm a sucker for reading into things, but the little details and Elsa's arc are what really sell me on this movie.

Sounds like something worth watching. Thanks for bringing it to my attention, I really loved the original story as a child

EDIT:
I should add that i still kinda enjoy the disney movie, but just as with the Little mermaid it should be seen as a feel good story that is in no way related to the original.

[Tyndmyr]

While you make many good points, I have a few nits to pick.

Hollywood listened, and instead of damsels like princess Leia we got characters like Lara Croft, misses Smith and that woman from Twister.

Leia is not particularly a damsel. Yes, there are times when she needs rescue/assistance, but this is true of her male co-stars as well. She does do a fair amount of stuff herself.

I agree with the general point that old-era Hollywood had a lot of damsels in distress, particularly in action films, but I don't think Leia's a good example of the failings found there.

This turned out to be a problem, because it turns out a lot of our fiction is violence based. This again is not a modern problem. Most mythological stories feature heavy violence, sea battles were one of the favorite subjects of early modern master painters and chess is a strategy game.

Fiction matters because of conflict. Much of the same is true of gaming. If there isn't a tension between different potential outcomes, and the same thing will happen regardless of the protaganist's/player's actions, it's not much of a story/game.

Conflict isn't just violence, of course, but conflict and violence are pretty close cousins, and violence is often the fastest way to portray conflict. Someone kicks in the door, and you immediately know that conflict exists.

Either the woman needs to outman the men, man with boobs, or she loses control of the plot, damsel.

While a damsel does lack control, such a description is wildly overbroad. Driving the plot is what the protagonist does. Sometimes a good antagonist contributes, but generally, the protagonist is the driving force, regardless of gender, and most other characters do not control the plot. Describing all secondary characters as damsels is incorrect, though.

A character is a damsel only if their role is limited to requiring rescue by the protaganist. Depending on Superman rendition, Lois Lane is sometimes this, or she can be written as a decent secondary character. Depends on author.

Anyways, I don't particularly love or hate Frozen. It's a perfectly serviceable disney movie, I suppose, but I'm not sure I'd want to watch it on loop for forever from a retail counter. If I could change one thing about it, it wouldn't actually be the princesses, it'd be the trolls, who seem...odd. Almost out of place, really.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

While you make many good points, I have a few nits to pick.

Fair enough, I am overgeneralizing after all.

If I could change one thing about it, it wouldn't actually be the princesses, it'd be the trolls, who seem...odd. Almost out of place, really.

Agreed, they do. They're like comedic side characters who had no actual role in the plot, so they were given a connection to the princesses and a completely coincidental one to Kristoff, and then the makers tried to tie those two connections into a single connection but the characters never give recognition to that, and then they still have a comedic side song that has no connection to all the stuff that was tacked on to give them a place in the story, they're pretty weird. In Brave kind of the same combination worked pretty well, but that character seems to come from a more thought out concept, and it seems to have had its story function before it had its comedic function. Plus she makes the serious look work better. She also looked out of place, but managed to make it work. Although it may have helped that that whole world felt a bit more cartoony and comedic to begin with, between the brothers and the clan leaders and the suitors and such.

[Rogar Demonblud]

The trolls serve three main purposes. 1. setting the stakes 2. infodump on the hazards of Elsa's powers 3. comic relief (mainly by mocking slightly Disney's habit of pairing off male and female leads). They're probably a necessary precursor to Zootopia and Moana, where said leads do not end up dating at the end.

[Weimann]

I'm not going to die on this hill, but Frozen was definitely a good movie when it came out. Sure, it's very much a Disney movie in that it has the moral every Disney movie ever has: you're good as you are. But it also managed to twist the formula and play with its own expectations quite a bit.

Particularly, I enjoyed the way Elsa dealt with her problem. Usually, the way a Disney movie goes is that someone is special, is excluded from the community, returns to the community to save it after a journey and is accepted back into the community. And that... is exactly what happens in this movie as well, but it's not what Elsa's trying to do. She's not looking to get accepted by her old community anymore, and it's made very clear that spending some time alone up on the mountain getting to know her power, and thus herself, would be good for her. It's the first time I've seen that twist on it from Disney, the idea that exclusion from community was the best thing that could happen to her.

Also, the twist with Hans really did get me. Some might have seen it coming, but I genuinely didn't. So that was cool too.

Every movie gets bland after watching it hundred times. That's not the intention, and I think it's unfair to judge it based on that criterion. Watching Frozen once or twice, it totally holds up. It's not the best thing ever, but I think it's better than, say, Moana.

[Mightymosy]

I kind of go with Kato here. I think one of the reasons Frozen works so well is because it also doesn't really work with the genders swapped. Sorry in advance, this is going to be a pretty long one.

The reason I say this is tied into the times and culture that produced Frozen. Our time and culture. I don't know if you could call it a third feminist wave, but there's definitely something civil rightsy going on right now, we're figuring out yet again what we want our society to look like. One of the symptoms of this has been that through means like the Bechdel test we've made ourselves aware of how dominant male roles are in our fiction. It's not a modern thing, it's not even a thing tied to male artists, J.K. Rowling mostly writes about guys too, and it's not a thing tied to certain settings, judging from the Hospital shows I know off.

Since this inequality became more known people have tried to fix it, and the core of the effort was always the idea of having more strong female characters. Hollywood listened, and instead of damsels like princess Leia we got characters like Lara Croft, misses Smith and that woman from Twister. Sarah Connor grew into the role as well between the first and second Terminator movie. They were competent, adventurous, strong willed, would one up every man who thought he was better than them at anything, and the people who has cried out the hardest for strong female characters hated them. "Men with boobs", they were called. They didn't even pull each others hairs when they fought.

Back in the sixties there was an idea, maybe even a dream of men and women being entirely the same, it was society that had formed our genders, rather than anything biological. I think today we are realizing that like many ideas from the past this one is simply not the whole truth. There are some differences between men and women, at the very least differences between averages, and one of them is that men are to a much greater degree obsessed by fictional violence. While almost any guy will feel represented in a movie as long as there is at least one human male whose prime attribute is "kicks ass", the same is not true for women. I'm not saying "you go girl" characters are bad characters or that they should disappear, but they for many women do not fix the representation issue. Whether a character looked like them was not the problem, or not all of it. We needed characters that acted more like them.

This turned out to be a problem, because it turns out a lot of our fiction is violence based. This again is not a modern problem. Most mythological stories feature heavy violence, sea battles were one of the favorite subjects of early modern master painters and chess is a strategy game. But it did leave us having to figure out how to fit characters who were not idealized asskickers into this media landscape. And I think that's where Frozen succeeded. It starts with two characters who are princesses, and it ends with two characters who are still princesses. They don't out-outdoorsman the outdoorsman, they don't outfight the soldiers, they don't beat the ice monster in a macho drinking game, yet they are the ones driving the story. They are the ones solving the main obstacles, by talking, thinking, socializing, and now and then running away. A lot of stories drop the ball on one of these two points. Either the woman needs to outman the men, man with boobs, or she loses control of the plot, damsel. Bella is not the one driving the story in Twilight, at best she's the force making the other characters drive the story. Frozen gets them right. They even call attention to it when Anna tries to climb the icy slope that the more experienced mountaineer says can't be climbed. She is embarrassed and has to eat her words, and any writer/director/producer less sure of what they're doing would have cut that scene, because they wouldn't want people to say they think women are weak and incompetent. But, you know, that's what being a princess growing up alone inside a castle would be like, you don't get a ton of experience climbing mountains, you can fail at that.

Frozen is not a better movie than Moana because a teenage girl shouldn't be dreaming of solo sailing the ocean, far from it, people should all have their own dreams and not accept no for an answer. Except like if their dream is like, you know, practicing pedophilia or something. (Sailing the seven seas as a whaler is still on the table right?) But while both of these movies are great and tell good stories featuring good characters I think it's the ones from Frozen that will help us develop our media to feel more inclusive to people. One of the reasons Frozen is good is because the character's genders are not that just swappable like that. Or maybe it's closer to the other way around actually: one of the reasons Frozen is good is because it wasn't written featuring two royal boys who were then switched out for girls. If we want to be more representative, do we eventually need a few male characters that can be awesome and lead a story without being supreme asskickers? We do. But we'll figure out how to do that some other day. For now, Frozen is the victory we can get.

Late to the party, but I must say I disagree with you a little, here.

I think you are right that we need more movies where violence isn't the answer, and talking is. We have had, but recent years Hollywood has forgotten that, as it seems.

But I disagree that female characters have to be written that way, and I also disagree that characters like that would need to be female.

You mention examples, but I draw different conclusions than you did.

For me, the problem is not that women are so fundamentally different, so that's why the concept of "warrior girls" failed.
For me, it's the failing of the movie makers that caused the concept to "fail".
What I mean by that is fairly simple:
We have almost no quality action movie with a straightup-female lead.
It's always "female, but...."
Additionally, and this is VERY important, the female heroes tend to be ALONE in their respective stories:

Leia is the sole female character
Padme is
Rey is
Heck, even Jyn Orso is
Sarah Connor is
Ripley is
(don't talk about side characters, people. You know very well what I mean).

All these female heroes were well beloved by both men and women (my girlfriend loves both Sarah Connor and Ripley more than I do).
But the movie industry just did not pull through with this. They would have needed to produce more movies with female action heroes, OF SIMILAR QUALITY, AND WITH MORE WOMEN.

Why are more women important?
Because action movies are, at their very core, revenge fantasies. They work because, as an escapist fantasy, you can imagine for the duration of the movie, that one's problems are best solved by beating something or someone to crap.
And for women, this needs to be women a significant number of times, because women are women's best foes.
Think about it: The core story of A LOT of male action movies is that the male villain wants to rape the female damsel, and the male hero gets to be a hero by beating him with barefists and then gets sex with his prize.
That's how the appeal of the movies works. Basic instinct. Heh.
If ýou want "female action" to work, you need to appeal to female point of view. And to that belongs interactions BETWEEN FEMALES, both positive and negative. Especially negative. Consider all the soap opera shows. These work, and are largely popular among MANY female viewers, because in them, female characters fight against each other (socially) all the time. They betray each other, and then everyone waits for when the betrayed character will get their sweet revenge.


There's one more thing, and it's a pet peeve of mine (sorry!).
The sweet prize.

Male heroes got to bump the damsel for decades now.
This has just not been properly realised for female heroes at all, as far as I know.
Leia got closest by getting Han, but Sarah, Ripley, Amidala, all led sexually unsatisfying lives, even after they managed their heroic deeds.

Consider James Bond. He is male fantasy because he can do everything boys dream of: hit the male competition in the face and screw with any hot girl he wants. Basically: get rewarded for what you want to do anyway.

Has this ever been realised with a female hero in mainstream cinema?
Even the most progressive fem heroes did not go that far. Lara Croft almost did it (Angelina could pull of the female protagonist who used sex just for fun), but even she did not get the sweet end.

Women who just have sex for fun seems to be utterly unthinkable for movie producers, even to this day.

And that is the sad part of our reality.
Not only for the female audience. I love such characters, and would very much like to watch them. But alas, they simply won't get produced.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

I noticed another weird thing recently, which may kind of build on stuff everybody posted above, but is also kind of weird. The gist of it is this:

Female fantasies, in comparison to male ones, tend to be more about enjoying success, less about earning it.

That probably doesn't sound recognizable, but hear me out. What's the biggest stereotypical girly dreamjob? Being a princess, right? It's full of all sorts of girly goodness, but it was all earned by virtue of having been born and not screwed up in the mean time. A princess has no real responsibilities, and no hard path leading to becoming one. Boys don't dream of being a prince. If anything they dream of being a knight, then they slay the dragon and rescue the princess, and by the time they make prince the story ends. It's more about the journey to success.

But that's both abstract and outdated. The reason I even started out on this line of thinking was that I noticed that a lot of modern female heroes aimed at least partially at a female audience are involved in a love triangle. Of course there's Twilight, but The Hunger Games does it too. There's a werewolf series named Bitten that does it, and I stumbled across perhaps the ultimate girly girl series, "Find me in Paris", which does it too. And let's not forget Frozen. Even Harry Potter makes Hermione choose between Harry and Ron in the last book. These love triangles all (well, Harry Potter is a bit of an exception) have a few things in common: both men are complete superhunks, both men are in love with the heroine to a point of obsession, and a lot of emphasis is put on how hard our heroine has it having to choose between them. Compare and contrast something like Starship Troopers (movie) which features a love triangle with one man and two women. There the triangle is more complex. (Or well, less symmetrical anyway.) The main love interest is hard to get, she has to be chased. Our hero has to earn his ticket to sexytown (and only kind of succeeds because this is a parody and the point is to be messed up but that's beside the point). And most movies and series written as a male fantasy don't feature a love triangle at all, one girl worth chasing is enough. Now, genetic and historical evidence suggests that a single man having long relationships and/or siring kids with multiple women, either parallel (harem) or in series (remarrying), is more common than a woman scoring like that with multiple guys. That's probably one of the reasons risky jobs like sailing around the world are associated with men, go big or go home, if you don't risk it you don't get a relationship at all and some rich widower wins your girl over instead. So why is this reversed in media?

Another thing I noticed about these love triangles is that they often still kind of tell the traditional male fantasy story of a guy working hard to rescue or otherwise help or win over his love. The best example here is the Find me in Paris series I namedropped earlier. It's about a ballet dancer from the early 20th century who accidentally travels through time and ends up joining the one place in the modern world where she fits in: the ballet school. There is a storyline in the series about time travel and bad guys and science fiction technology and the time police and all that awesomeness, but it's all squarely dropped on the girl's 1905 boyfriend, one of the men she has to choose from. (She will absolutely not choose him because he has barely any screentime, let alone together with her, but that's beside the point.) Her story, by far the main focus of the episodes, is about enjoying life in the modern world. Her problems consist of dancing competitions, gossip and this modern total hunk with a conflicted air about him who she fell for before she knew he was the heir to pretty much the king of ballet so she's totally not shallow for liking him. The thing is: I'm not writing this to ridicule an obscure TV-series aimed at young girls for being weird. I think it's very well made, and I think these elements are well placed based on good insight into human psychology and will actually make this a success. I just don't know how that works and why.

But to get back to my point at the start of this post: getting to choose between two quality mates is a pretty big sign of success. And it doesn't end there. For all the insecurities and flaws attached to these women to make them more relatable to the audience: they tend to be pretty well off. The female werewolf in Bitten is the only female werewolf ever, the best tracker of the pack, one of the strongest fighters, respected and loved by all. The girl from The Hunger Games gets spontaneous compliments from the father of the other competitor that she is much better suited for this than the guy's own son. Anna from Frozen is of course a princess. And these are well written stories. I'm not claiming they're all Mary Sues that should be ignored here. But they do all seem to be enjoying quite some success at the starting point of the story. Male main characters are often huge badasses and asskickers, sure, but they often start out unknows and disrespected (80's style action movies excepted). They are awesome but are not treated yet at the level they deserve. These women tend to already have quite some status. That's where I was coming from with enjoying success VS earning it. Often these woman have quite a few troubles, emotional turmoil, love interests dying on them etc. So enjoying succes may really be the wrong term here, as there is not always a lot of enjoyment to be had. But there's something going on. And I'm not just cherry picking obscure examples, I'm basically using all the examples I know of female targeted media here.

I probably will never fully know how things like this work and why, because one thing has become clearer to me over the years: gender roles in general are a much weirder thing than we generally give it credit for. Take a look at the animal kingdom for instance. There's not a single set of gender roles used by all species, far from it. But here and there you see some elements that make you scratch your head. In jackdaws (little crows) it was observed that males and females are pretty much equal. Makes sense for egg layers, there is less of a socio-biological difference to begin with. But there is one main exception. Apparently (assuming that this wasn't just noted down by a scientist who saw what they wanted to see or something) female jackdaws that pair off with a higher ranked male assume a status close to his, similar to how the wife of a sir becomes a lady. But men pairing off with a higher placed female did not gain status, similar to how the husband of a dame does not become anything themselves. That's kind of weird. I'm not saying this to make it sound like the world is unfair to man or something (for all I know male jackdaws on average start out with a slightly higher status and it all balances out perfectly in the end or something), but it's still kind of weird. What does that add to jackdaw social behavior? Where does it come from? Does this mean gender roles have an biological and evolutionary origin at least hundreds of millions of years back? One way or the other, the picture is definitely bigger than the whole thing being "merely" cultural. Note that I'm not saying that below all this there's a way of life that's good by virtue of being natural. Humans have shifted lifestyle so often recently that there is no single natural state for us, and as a chemist of sorts I also don't believe that something being natural means it's good. There are plenty of natural poisonous substances after all, not to mention how natural some of the viler crimes in the human repertoire are. What I am saying it that there are some parts of gender and gender roles that are deeply ingrained in people, much deeper than what I'm personally really comfortable with. And these things have an effect on fiction.

It's quite possible that in my defense of Frozen I still take too much of a "typical male" view at it (or the opposite, as Mightymosy sort of argues above). I guess it's a good thing that the media landscape is better if there's some diversity, and that everyone likes to see different stuff rather than always the exact same movie on repeat.

But it's still weird...

[Tvtyrant]

I wasn't particularly impressed with Frozen, it felt like I was watching Disney Carrie. The only way women can have powers is for them to be terrifying, or someone else providing the power like in Moana.

What I want is a movie where the girl purposefully seeks after and gains powers. Maui in Moana can chase after a magic weapon without feeling guilty about it, Aladin can insert himself into the monarchy and only get a slap on the wrist.

The problem isn't strong women in my mind, it is that movies shy away from overtly ambitious women.

[The New Bruceski]

[...] even the Snow Queen herself as a villain. [...]

Let it Go is totally a Villain's Song set to an upbeat melody. "It's cold, I think everyone hates me, and the world is freezing. I'll be fine without them and live while they die." Also a massive case of denial.

That's the main thing I like about Frozen, they play with the tropes. It's not any sort of full inversion but the "evil queen" isn't evil, the hero pursuing her for true love is familial love, and the only actual bad guy in the movie is tacked on and kinda just doing it because that's how he thinks the story ought to go.