The problem with false feminism — Disney, Pixar, DreamWorks and Western Animation — Medium
▻https://medium.com/disney-and-animation/7c0bbc7252ef
(or why “Frozen” left me cold)
Dani Colman in Disney, Pixar, DreamWorks and Western Animation
I have made absolutely no secret of how much I disliked Disney’s Frozen. I hated it. I spent most of the movie alternately facepalming, groaning, and checking my watch, and when people asked me how I liked it, I made this face:
I’m sorry you had to see this.
As far as I could see, the problems were obvious. Just like The Princess and the Frog, I felt like Disney had started with some admirable intentions, but lost their gumption halfway through and covered up with cheap storytelling tricks and a lot of audience pandering. And when I told people how I felt about The Princess and the Frog (and Brave, for that matter — but we’ll get to that), they mostly agreed with me. I don’t make a habit of dogmatically disliking something just because I feel like it: usually if I have a viscerally negative reaction to a film, there’s a healthy contingent of people out there who have the same reaction for much the same reasons.
It was, therefore, a huge surprise to me just how many people loved Frozen. Not just loved, but slavered over it. Critics have been downright competitive in their effusiveness, calling it “the best Disney film since The Lion King”, and “a new Disney classic”. Bloggers and reviewers alike are lauding it as “feminist”, “revolutionary”, “subversive” and a hundred other buzzwords that make it sound as though Frozen has done for female characters what Brokeback Mountain did for gay cowboys. And after reading glowing review after glowing review, taking careful assessment of all the points made, and some very deep navel-gazing about my own thoughts on the subject, I find one question persists:
Were we even watching the same film?
Everyone’s entitled to their opinion. I certainly love some movies other people loathed; I’ll even be referring to one of them in a few paragraphs. If your reason for liking Frozen is that it’s fun, or the songs are catchy, or the animation is beautiful, or Olaf the Snowman is funny, then more power to you. But if you like Frozen because you think it is some revolutionary step forward in the way animated films portray women, then I think you’re wrong. And unfortunately, when it comes to film’s historically awful track record for portraying, hiring and being remotely fair to women, celebrating the wrong film — particularly in the sheer numbers that people are celebrating Frozen — has some very troublesome implications.
My friends have asked for it and I feel like the internet needs it, so I’m going to go through, point-by-point and in no particular order, the top handful of reasons people have given for thinking Frozen is a feminist triumph, and I’m going to debunk them all.
#frozen #la_reine_des_neiges #disney #féminisme #animation #films
