It’s always hard to escape the new Disney craze, but Frozen is a whole different beast. You know every lyric to Elsa’s power anthem Let it Go (whether or not you want to) and everyone around you is saying “Yoo-hoo, big summer blowout” in high pitched voices, all because of the latest, greatest Disney princess movie.
I personally loved Frozen. It features a pair of complex women growing and changing and eventually realizing that all they need to fix their problems is love. However, there are some legitimate criticisms of the film. For example, there are some concerns about how Disney continues to plug out white princesses. There is a complicated racial dialogue surrounding this film, especially considering a lot of the opinions we’re getting from this racial dialogue have come from American feminists instead of from the Sami people, whose myth Frozen is loosely based off of.
At first glance, Frozen is a feminist’s dream (even if its animators aren’t). Anna is energetic and has a charmingly Jennifer-Lawrence-esque authenticity that gets her in trouble throughout the movie. Elsa, her older sister, is quite the opposite; born with uncontrollable ice powers, Elsa becomes a shy, closed-off young woman as her parents beat the mantra “conceal, don’t feel” into her. When Elsa accidentally sets off an eternal winter and runs away, Anna and the dopey-but-loveable ice picker Kristoff journey to find her and bring her back to the kingdom. Like any kids’ movie, it’s got a pretty decent amount of plot holes (and can anyone really explain why the trolls were necessary?), but it’s worth noting that Elsa and Anna are somewhat new characters to Disney. While they’re both traditionally beautiful women, they have personalities that extend beyond stereotypes associated with their gender. Even though Anna’s determination to marry Hans, the prince she just met, is grossly similar to the classic princess narrative, she has a conversation with Kristoff about how ridiculous this is, and we’re never supposed to believe it’s actually going to happen. (Disney’s learning!)
In addition, Elsa eventually breaks out of the shame she was forced to feel through a powerful song about self love—yes, Let it Go—in which she literally transforms herself into everything she’s always wanted to be, as opposed to other Disney narratives in which the woman undergoes emotional growth for the sake of someone else, or doesn’t even have a character arc at all. Plus, it features a cute part in the beginning where she figures out exactly “what she can do” with her powers, which she had never been allowed to try before, and she builds a freaking castle. How often do we see kids movies in which female characters have entire songs dedicated to realizing how strong, how magical, and how all-around generally awesome they are? That’s right: Never.
And, of course, Frozen is a princess film without a prince. Anna does eventually fall in love with Kristoff, but that comes as an aftereffect, and the focal relationship in the story is that of the sisters. In fact, Disney plays with our expectations again when we are made to believe that the final “act of true love” that will save the kingdom is a kiss between Anna and Kristoff, but when Anna sacrifices herself to save her sister’s life we return to the kind of woman-to-woman love that is rarely seen in movies. This is what makes Frozen stand out; while it continues the common theme of love prevailing over all else, it sets this moral within the storyline of two women instead of between a damsel and a brave, handsome, rugged prince. In fact, Elsa doesn’t even interact romantically with anyone at all, in contrast to Anna, who actively wants to find love. It’s almost like Disney figured out that women don’t HAVE to be with a man to achieve a happy ending, but CAN if they elect to do so on their own. (Also, was anyone else delighted when Kristoff asked before he kissed Anna? CONSENT IS SO IMPORTANT AND SOMEONE AT DISNEY KNOWS IT.)
Okay, okay, so we all know I liked the movie, but there are plenty of other takes on it too. I read stories about gay youth coming out to their parents after seeing themselves in Elsa. Women and girls my age talked incessantly about how much better that kind of representation made them feel about their own lives. But there was also overwhelming backlash at the fact that Disney had once again given us a film featuring white characters. There is so much good in Frozen that it can be hard to talk about the bad, but if we want to call ourselves good feminists, we need to.
The overarching problem with the Disney princess franchise is that there are (now) eight white Disney princesses and only four Disney princesses of color. Disney hasn’t been completely respectful in their portrayal of those princesses of color, either: Pocahontas should have been a short-haired fifteen year old girl, not a 5’10’’ supermodel; Mulan probably shouldn’t have tried to squish 400 years of Chinese history into one movie; Jasmine relied on faux-feminist sexualized stereotypes; and Tiana, the only Black princess, spent most of her own movie as a frog. This isn’t a very compelling anti-racist résumé on Disney’s part, and adding two more white princesses feels like they’re completely ignoring the criticisms.
The people getting upset about this have every right to get upset about this. I’ll say it again for you: We have four Disney princesses of color and eight who are white. That gap should be appalling, especially given what we know about representation: about how children of color continue to grow up with self-esteem problems because they’re not white, about how this leads to a widespread idea of whiteness as the “norm,” about how racism and internalized racism use this as a foundation. The lack of representation on Disney’s part says that the stories and feelings of people of color are not worth telling, and when they are, Disney is willing to bend and change them so that they fit a white ideal instead of staying true to the culture they’re based off of.
However, most of this backlash is framed and discussed within the American context. It is largely American feminists gathering momentum by calling Disney out, which is fine—Disney is an American company, and we’ve got to educate our own and whatnot. It’s true that Disney adapting a fairytale like this one (of which versions can be found all over the world) and presenting white faces to racially diverse American children feels pretty lazy on their part. The discussion of how it lands to Americans is a crucial one, as it was made for an American audience, but too often we have these discussions without considering and hearing from the people it was actually made about.
Frozen is based off of Scandinavian culture, especially the culture of Norway. The filmmakers took particular inspiration from the Sami people, who make up indigenous tribes that have lived all over Scandinavia and northern Europe for centuries. The Sami have been historically underrepresented and marginalized; they have been stripped of their culture and religion more than once. The Sami are an ethnically diverse group of people, as they have existed over thousands of years and have mixed with Vikings and other ethnic groups that have landed in, settled in, or traveled through the Nordic countries. They are not considered “white” in their own countries even though some of them can often “pass” for white in countries like America.
When Frozen presents us with an all-white cast of characters supposedly based on tribes wherein people of color definitely existed (let’s not forget that colonialism was a thing, and European countries were bringing back all sorts of ethnicities from the lands they colonized), it feels a little uncomfortable to watch a bunch of blondes running around wearing indigenous clothing. However, the claims of cultural appropriation and misrepresentation coming from American feminists don’t quite replicate the dialogue happening in the Sami community.
Frozen features the “joik,” which is a traditional Sami folk song, in the opening and closing numbers of the film. This inclusion has been called appropriative, but this part of the score was actually written by Sami composer Frode Fjellheim. He appeared on a Sami news station saying optimistically that he hoped this movie would “lift the status of the joik and the Sami culture” and that it was “exciting to see how the parts of Norwegian and Sami cultures are shown in the film.”
Similarly, many Sami people are ecstatic about having representation given that so much of their history is shrouded in oppression. The Sami president, Aili Keskitalo, is reported to have loved the movie. There was even a showing of it held at the Sami music festival in Finland, Skábmagovat, to celebrate it. Overall, the movie seems to have been received fairly well by the Sami community.
To say that this means there is no reason to criticize it would just be untrue. There are still other Sami individuals who were dissatisfied with the representation that they have gotten from Disney. The discussion is ongoing, because it really is a complicated issue that has a lot of steam right now, and few Sami voices are actually being heard. As Americans, we’re going to have opinions about a movie like Frozen, but we should be careful not to make assumptions about a group of people with a complicated past that we do not understand. It’s very easy, especially as members of our country, to leap to some other poor, oppressed person’s defense when we really end up using their pain as a citation on our “Why Disney Is Racist” research papers. Disney is racist, and Frozen can be looked at through that lens, but the Sami, like all marginalized groups, have voices. Disney (and its critics) could benefit from having a better understanding of how we might be unintentionally silencing the people from other cultures when we try to talk about them.
Rachelle is a WLP major from California. She likes coffee but also naps, which means she makes tough decisions on a daily basis, and should not be underestimated. You can find Rachelle on Twitter.
Images: Coupongeek.net, thiscouldhavebeenFrozen.tumblr.com