Frozen rewrote the Disney princess narrative — and 12 years later, it's still relevant
In Frozen, the Snow Queen is not a villain: she's a beautiful and anxious young woman with powers she hasn't learned to control. (Walt Disney)
In the final week of November 2013, Disney released a little film set in a fictional kingdom in Norway in the 1840s.
Inspired by Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen, it told the tale of two sisters who are close as children but become estranged as adults.
You might have heard of it — Frozen, a film that transcended typical box office success to become a cultural touchstone for children around the world.
The sisters are, of course, the imperious Elsa, voiced by Tony Award-winning actor Idina Menzel, and the ebullient Anna, voiced by Kristen Bell, both princesses of Arendelle.
Directed by Chris Buck (Tarzan, Surf's Up) and Jennifer Lee (the co-writer of Wreck-It Ralph), Frozen earned more than $US1.2 billion ($AU1.9 billion) at the box office.
Released in Australia on Boxing Day, it was the highest-grossing film of 2013 and the highest-grossing animated film until the live-action remake of The Lion King surpassed it in 2019.
Buck told ABC TV's One on One that he and Lee "embraced the flaws of these characters. We like flawed characters". (Supplied: Disney)
The film was groundbreaking in other ways.
Lee, initially brought on as a writer, was the first woman to direct a full-length Disney animated film and the first female director of a feature film to gross more than US$1 billion (AUD$1.5 billion).
Frozen also won a raft of awards, including Academy Awards for Best Animated Feature and Best Original Song, and a Grammy for its soundtrack.
Its cultural power can be felt closer to home. Fossick through any child's dress-up box and you will find a replica of Elsa's dress in ice-blue polyester.
Just why Frozen captured the zeitgeist, when Disney films with strong female protagonists such as Brave or Mulan didn't, has been the subject of much discussion — and at least one academic conference — in the 12 years since the film was released.
So, what made Frozen different?
Buck says the film's creators were driven by the question: "How can we portray a new idea of real love?" (Supplied: Disney)
Not your typical Disney princess
Frozen didn't just break box office records.
It also broke the mould of the typical Disney narrative, placing two sisters rather than a heterosexual romance as the film's central relationship.
"[Unlike] Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty-type fairy tales … it didn't end with a marriage; it did end with a rescue, but it wasn't a prince or a man saving the day, it was two sisters saving each other," Samantha Turnbull, author of The Anti-Princess Club, told ABC Radio National's Earshot in 2015.
"It was a story about sisterhood, about strong young women saving themselves and putting their relationship with each other first."
Frozen subverted the Disney stereotype in other ways.
For one, Elsa was not like other Disney princesses, who generally did not possess magical powers.
As a character, Elsa's "not exactly personable", Turnbull says. "She's nervous and afraid and guarded." (Supplied: Disney)
Their raison d'être tended to be love and marriage, two things for which Elsa holds zero interest.
"Characters like Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, they have no interests or passions or even real flaws; they're just perfect one-dimensional characters," Turnbull said.
Elsa was different: multi-layered, flawed and relatable.
"She can't control her ice powers, and as a way of dealing with that, she isolates herself from the rest of the world … almost at the expense of her relationship with her sister."
The smash-hit Let It Go
And then there's the song.
Let It Go, a chart-topping power ballad, was composed by husband-and-wife team Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez.
With its emotive refrain — "let it go, let it go, can't hold it back any more" — and persuasive message of self-affirmation, Let It Go quickly took on a life of its own.
The character of Anna is inspired by Gerda in Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale. "Gerda's all about love," Buck said. (Supplied: Disney)
The song has soundtracked countless children's birthday parties and accumulated more than 940 million streams on Spotify to date.
Journalist and critic Dorian Lynskey told Earshot that Let It Go was "an incredibly positive song for children to be embracing" in its rejection of shame and guilt.
"As girls grow up, they are often invited to feel shame and guilt about how they look or how they behave,"he said.
"[Let It Go is] a rejection of all the things that people expect from [Elsa] and this ownership of who she is and what she can do and how thrilling that is."
The song was embraced by some in the LGBTQI community, who viewed it as a coming-out-of-the-closet anthem.
For others who saw Elsa as a neurodivergent heroine, Let It Go was an expression of her refusal to continue pretending to be neurotypical and masking her true self.
"It had all these different meanings for different groups," Lynskey said.
"That could only happen because the central message is so powerful and is about asserting your individuality and not bowing to people who want to make you feel shame about it."
The Frozen franchise continues
The Frozen juggernaut generated an enthusiastic fan culture with an apparently insatiable appetite for merchandise.
At last count, my children's toy box contained at least seven Elsa and Anna dolls in various iterations. We have the Lego, the dress (of course), as well as the detachable white-blonde plait. We've had Elsa birthday parties and bought Elsa's wand at Disney on Ice.
And it's not just girls who fell for Elsa's icy reserve. At my daughter's 5th birthday, a little boy was very excited to turn up in his favourite costume, an Elsa dress.
Frozen's cultural influence shows no signs of waning. Frozen 2 eclipsed the first film's box office success, earning more than $1.4 billion, and, inevitably, the franchise is set to continue with Frozen 3 slated for release in 2027 and Frozen 4 in the works, too.
As Stephen Langston, a senior lecturer at the University of the West of Scotland, noted in The Conversation, it cleared the way for a new crop of Disney films that featured strong female heroines and storylines unrelated to romance, including Moana, Encanto, Turning Red — and, of course, Frozen 2, released in 2019.
"The legacy of these trailblazing productions is testament to the power of inclusive storytelling, proving that there is immense value in narratives that look beyond traditional norms and celebrate the diversity of the human experience," he wrote.