Disney and Frozen

What is your relationship to Disney and animated children’s culture? What role did these texts play in your life as a child, if any? In that of any children you share time with? How do your memories challenge or reflect Christensen’s claims? How does Frozen meet or challenge your memories of princess culture?

It’s funny to be asked what my relationship to Disney is because rather than it being “positive” or “influential,” there was actually a giant, uncrossable pit between Disney and me. Having been born in 1992, one would think that Disney was a staple in my family’s household. But as I mentioned in my last blog post, my father is a pastor: a strict, conservative, Southern Baptist pastor. Disney was absolutely not allowed because it was “fantasy,” “witchcraft,” and “sinful.” I did watch The Lion King in 3rd grade at school on field-day (the only movie I watched in school that I can actually recall, most likely due to the fact that it was forbidden in my home!). But actually independently watching something related to Disney in my free time? Not until I was 15 and had my own laptop, giving me my first access to Disney; I watched Beauty and the Beast.

Because I grew up most of my life without the influence of Disney, I don’t think that I was as susceptible to the implications of the ideologies presented in Disney movies since I was 15 by the time I started watching so I’m not sure as to whether my memories either challenge or reflect Christensen’s claims in Unlearning the Myths that Bind Us. I never noticed for myself or critiqued the ideologies presented in Disney films, though they are certainly there. Perhaps I should categorize myself amongst the students that don’t know how to critique the media they consume, as mentioned by Christensen when she writes “Young people, unprotected by any intellectual armor, hear or watch these stories again and again…” (p. 176). Whoops. Guess I answered that question after all… And through my parents’ censorship of what I consumed, they inadvertently created a “generation living by rules and attitudes they never question” (p. 178), I never learned to critique because anything that truly deserved critiquing was censored for me.

Frozen met some of my memories of princess culture. There was still a damsel in distress (Anna), a man to save her and both Elsa and Anna are slim, hour-glass figures with white skin, wear dresses and live in castles. However, there are some key contrasts to the typical princess in older Disney movies. Elsa never needed a man to save her. Instead she saved herself with only a little bit of help from Anna, her sister. Even Anna’s “knight in shining armor,” was different in that he wasn’t royalty and he was actually quite a humorous and independent fellow who was by no means looking to save anyone (quite the contrary, Anna had to assert her authority in order to get him to help her). The villain, Hans, was not the obvious villain until the very end unlike other movies where we know instantly whom we should hate (Gaston, Ursula, witches). Rather, Hans was handsome and one is led to believe throughout the movie that he is the knight in shining armor. Watching Frozen with a critical lens really opened up my eyes to the ideologies society holds valuable and although it starts to move away from several of them, such as the damsel in distress, there is still lots of work to be done.



Reference:

Christensen, L. (n.d.) Unlearning the myths that bind us. In E.M. Editor & O.S. Editor (Eds), Rethinking popular culture and media (p. 175-186) (2nd Ed.) Milwaukee, WI: Rethinking Schools, Ltd.