Frozen 2 is Disney’s first non-direct-to-DVD princess movie sequel and completely different from the first. The film is the gradual unveiling of a backstory that young princesses Anna and Elsa are told by their father as children at the start of the film: the indigenous “Northaldra” people, who live in an enchanted forest, use magic. Unlike Elsa, who possesses the explicit and controllable ability to shoot ice out of her hands, they use magic passively, letting magically moving rocks carry them across rivers and valleys. Elsa and Anna’s grandfather, king of Arendelle, constructs a dam publicly to fortify the alliance between the two people. For some reason, a fight breaks out between the Arendellians and the Northaldrans shortly after. Elsa and Anna’s father barely escapes with his life, and the entire forest is shrouded in a mist for decades.
What becomes clear throughout the movie is there’s more to this story. Elsa and Anna venture inside the mist and discover that many of the Arendellians from then are still alive, as are the Northaldra. Through interactions with them and fragments of information given by the elemental gods of the forest to Elsa, they uncover that the dam is actually hurting the lands of the indigenous Northaldra and their grandfather knew this would happen. He believed the Northaldra were too self-sufficient with magic and so intentionally constructed the dam to hurt them so that the Northaldra would be more reliant on his kingdom for support. When the Northaldra leader confronted him, he tried to kill him, and that caused the fight. Furthermore, Elsa and Anna’s father was actually rescued by their mother, who was Northaldra herself, and rescued her enemy. Elsa’s ability to control her magic is a gift from the gods because of her mother’s good deed and meant to allow her to right the wrong of her grandfather with the help of her sister. They do. Elsa heads to the far north to a mysterious glacier sung about in a folk song of the indigenous people and uncovers all of this truth and Anna receives the information from her and guides earth giants to destroy the dam. The rush of water from the destroyed dam will destroy the city of Arendelle (the still-standing fulcrum of the power that built the dam to oppress the Northaldra) but at the last second Elsa returns to freeze the wave and protect the city. She explains to Anna that the gods believe Arendelle deserves a second chance, but things need to be different. Elsa becomes the indigenous half of the sister pair, ruling in the north in the enchanted forest while Anna takes on the colonial half and becomes queen of the city of Arendelle.
So Frozen 2 seems pretty clearly to be a conscious postcolonial story. Elsa and Anna, white characters in positions of power, confront the reality that their own relatives did evil to indigenous people with that power, and they have to right the wrongs of the past. I was a little disappointed at the end of the movie when they didn’t actually flood Arendelle like they had built up to but I guess it was probably unreasonable to expect a literal and metaphorical cleansing flood of the seat of colonial power from a Disney movie when kids would see it and get sad that the castle was being flooded.
The answer that they give as an alternative ties to Elsa and Anna being half-indigenous Northaldra. Apparently the Northaldra are based on the Sámi from Norway who look pretty white from my Wikipedia research but like:
Elsa and Anna each take a seat of power that represent either half of their ancestry. Elsa “takes care of the forest” with the Northaldra and Anna rules in Arendelle. In Arendelle, in the final montage of the film, Anna erects a statue of their indigenous mother and white father in the town square to symbolize the relationship the two groups have again.
You could cancel this movie in a lot of ways, but to me one is most interesting: the story jumps through to make none of the characters personally culpable for the mostly metaphorical oppression of the Northaldra by the Arendellian dam. The evil grandfather himself never appears outside of the ghostly apparitions of Elsa’s interactions with the gods of the enchanted forest and never interacts with the other character. Elsa’s father didn’t know the dam was built for evil, the surviving Arendellians don’t know. The movie does call for righting the deeds of the past but it doesn’t call for any culpability for anyone still living. The evils of the past were waiting in the mist for a few decades until they were ready to be resolved and resolving them was purely good and entailed no tradeoffs for the former oppressors’ descendants.
But I guess when I write this the corollary question is can Disney really do anything better than this and do I want them to? They’ve obviously come a really long way from Pocahontas type portrayals of imperialism. Disney movies will of course continue to have subtle problems and gross aspects in all of their movies, because everyone does. Disney has to make movies for children and their thematic threads will sometimes get knotted or not tied properly: it’s not Disney didn’t think of flooding Arendelle because they don’t see that destroying legacy structures in the real world involves some sort of pain they just didn’t want to flood the castle and destroy homes in a kid’s movie.
Whether you like it or not Disney does listen to you. Frozen 1 was a clear reaction against criticisms that Disney princesses got married too fast, and that sisterly love is more powerful and valid for most children than romantic love. Frozen 2 is clear reaction to criticisms that the first one was too white. It also quite clearly tries to tackle bigger issues than any Disney movie before it has, which people do ask for just by virtue of writing a piece like this. But these “themes” are a proactive defense against the criticisms lobbied against the previous Disney princess movies: “see, we’re listening, we’re making these movies right now” and just like in Frozen 2 the culpability for the past is assigned to the past. Disney didn’t feel a need to make a postcolonial Frozen sequel to challenge imperial power structures. They felt the need because people would be writing articles or complaining on YouTube if they did nothing.
So it feels kind of futile to try to critique Disney. But it is fun, or else I would have stopped. The themes and plot are simple so it’s basically criticism on easy mode. I can do this in an hour and a half after seeing the movie once and be correct in what I’m saying. The question I have to answer now is if it’s good that I’m having fun with this.
