Frozen
Summary: Princess Elsa can’t seem to control her ice powers and in an effort to both protect her sister and to stop hiding, she retreats to the mountains. However, she accidentally froze her kingdom before leaving and when Anna, her sister asks her to return and fix it, she accidentally hurts Anna too. Only an act of true love can free both Anna and Elsa.
Warnings: There is a brief LGBTQ+ moment in this film. A couple potty-humor jokes.
Opinion: Let’s get the LGBTQ thing out of the way first. Generally, I wouldn’t recommend anything with any alphabet-soup sexual content at all, however, let me relate to you my personal experience with this movie. First, I watched this originally not being aware that it contained any LGBTQ+ content at all. When I got to the scene with the store sauna, where the movie shows the shop owner’s “family”, there is another adult man in the sauna with the children. In the 10 seconds or so that this scene is shown, I noticed the adult man, but it didn’t cross my mind that this was a gay couple. My first thought was that the other man was some other adult family member (a brother, adult son, cousin, etc.). The movie went on and I didn’t think twice about it. Then there’s my second experience with this scene. This time I was aware of this scene, but was watching this movie with another couple who had never seen it before. They had been warned about the fact that this film contained a gay couple scene, but still wanted to see it. After watching it all the way through, they turned to me and said “Where was the gay scene? We never saw it.” They too missed it even after being warned.
So, after these two experiences, I feel that unless someone points it out ahead of time or explicitly makes an issue out of it, children simply won’t ever notice the gay situation. They will see two adult men who are ‘family’ and relate it to their own families which also contain multiple adult men (grandpas, uncles, etc.) and not immediately think that the men are married.
Given those thoughts, I still might not have recommended this film if it wasn’t soooo very popular. It became such a huge cultural phenomenon that it tipped the scales for me into feeling that this is a movie that even families that are conservative Christians (like my own) might want to consider showing their kids just so they know what the fuss is about with other children their own ages.
Okay, now that that’s out of the way, thoughts on the rest of the film. Frankly, I liked the theme of family love between the two sisters. Elsa spends the film trying to protect both herself and her sister, while Anna feels rejected and unloved by Elsa, but still reaches out and tries to connect anyway. Anna acts unselfishly several times, including making the ultimate loving sacrifice at the climax of the film. Despite the red herring of ‘true love’ being romantic love, the film shows that family love is just as strong, courageous, powerful, and amazing (if not more so than romantic love). That, I found was a beautiful message.
There were definitely things I didn’t love. For example, Kristoff didn’t exactly come off as a desirable romantic partner in a scene where the trolls try to get Anna and Kristoff to marry (it was a pretty off-putting scene). But overall, it was a fun adventure with a sweet ending and beautiful music. I do recommend it.
Sequels/Remakes: A sequel “Frozen 2” isn’t as good and isn’t popular enough to end up on this recommendation list.
Educational Value: 1 out of 3 stars.
Cultural value: 5 out of 5 stars. Almost every child (and probably adult) has seen this at least once and the song “Let it Go” seemed to be everywhere for a while.
Age rating: This show is appropriate for ages 6 and older.
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