It wasn't until the credits started rolling that I fully realized what I had just experienced. It was a revolutionary film, one that defied everything its predecessors valued.
I grew up in an age where young girls expected to sit around and wait for their charming princes to show up at the most opportune moment and rescue them from their lackluster lives, like Rapunzel being rescued from her tower and evil maternal impersonator, or Ariel abandoning her underwater kingdom at 16 to follow the first male biped she saw.
I started to think Disney movies would always portray its female protagonists as helpless damsels in distress who could only find happiness and true love by being rescued by the first man they laid eyes on, who also happened to be a dapper, young prince. However, Frozen opened my eyes to an entirely new kind of Disney movie on the rise, where women are able to take care of themselves.
Gasp. I know. What a notion! A young princess whose search for true love ends with her love for her sister and not for a studly young prince.
Who would have thought Disney would stray so far from what Walt started back in 1937 with Snow White and the Seven Dwarves and end up with movies such as The Princess and the Frog, which not only starred Disney's first African American protagonist, but also embraced the importance of hard work to make your own dreams come true instead of wishing on stars; Brave, in which a young princess who refuses to give in to the pressure of getting married at a young age just to appease an outdated tradition and whose quest for true love and understanding ends up being a perilous adventure to mend her relationship with her mother; and, lastly, Tangled, a fairy tale of Rapunzel being locked away in a tower not to be rescued by a prince, but by a thief who turns good as a result of his love for the young maiden changing his outlook on life.
Frozen explored an entirely new kind of true love and even poked fun at the idea of a princess getting engaged to a man after knowing him for virtually no time at all. It was modern and realistic, at least as realistic as Disney movies can be.
Sure, there's no way a snowman named Olaf aching for life in the sun could be real, or an innocent princess could be plagued by an icy gift disguised as a curse that feeds on fear, but it is realistic for two young sisters to fight for their love for one another and focus on that relationship above all else.
This set a precedent for future Disney fairy tale films. We've outgrown the stories of teenage princesses being swept off their feet by the first man each of them came across, and we've entered a genre of Disney where the princesses can rescue themselves and having a handsome prince on their arms is just an added bonus.
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