Top 10 Life Lessons from Frozen

As a long-time cinephile, I have always believed that many films reveal themselves on repeat viewings to have hidden depths. Having sat through Frozen so many, many times, not even counting just playing the songs in the car, I feel that there are a certain amount of important messages that you can learn from that film. It is not just about a singing snowman, oh no. I now present to you the top 10 life lessons that I have learned from Anna and Elsa, Sven and Kristoff, Olaf and Hans, and the Duke of Weaseltown and his two goons (spoilers abound, just in case you are in the extreme minority that have not seen the film yet. I do not think knowing the plot will make much difference to you, but hey, do not say I did not warn you):

1.     All men are bastards

Not maybe the message you were expecting from a Disney totem film, but nonetheless it is a key plot driver. Possibly this explains little girls’ devotion to the cause – the sisters love each other above everything else, but in the end the main male lead, Prince Hans, having been a beacon of respectability and prince-ness for much of the film turns out to be a lying, duplicitous cad who never loved Anna after all. And then he tried to cut off Elsa’s head with a sword! Whilst Kristoff comes to the fore later in the film, his starting point is from being a country himbo and a literal back-seat driver.

2.     Your parents could die the next time they go out

Familial deaths in Disney films have been a staple since Bambi’s mother, so to have Anna and Elsa’s parents pass on is not such a shock. What is a shock is that they die when their ship capsizes no more than ten minutes into the film, leaving both girls orphaned, and without much care (see number six). What message is this to little girls, that next time your parents take the car to go down the shops, they might not come back?

3.     Never eat yellow snow

Well it is a good message for children to learn. Better they learn from Olaf the Snowman than from personal experience. And the point is further endorsed on in a song when it is revealed that Kristoff “only likes to tinkle in the woods.” He does not deny this.

4.     Mixed saunas are perfectly acceptable

I know this is a more common thing in the relaxed environs of Scandinavia, but being a true British prude I was a bit surprised to see Wandering Oaken’s Trading Post and Sauna have all the family in together. Yes, they had towels on, but even those get dispensed with (albeit tastefully) in Olaf’s Christmas Adventure. Which is a separate cartoon spin-off to the main film, that, of course, you have to watch as well.

5.     Homo-reindeer love is also perfectly acceptable

Of course all Disney films need a comedy animal sidekick. Look back over the years at characters such as Jiminy Cricket, Timon and Pumba, Eddie Murphy’s talking dragon Mushu in Mulan, or Abu the kleptomaniac monkey in Aladdin. What none of these had, as far as I remember, is a line in a song that refers to its relationship between said animal sidekick and the key male lead as being ‘a little outside of nature’s laws’. Which Frozen does, specifically being sung about Kristoff who has grown up with Sven the reindeer, in replacement of any siblings or birth family (again see no.6). Still in these pan-sexual, multi-gender, woke times, who am I to judge what Kristoff gets up to? Although I just worry it leads to worrying train of thought, such as now that they are a couple, does Anna get jealous of Sven? Or is this whole thing a complex ménage-a-trois? Somewhere on the internet, somebody has probably answered these questions, however these are corners of the web I do not want to go to, even for Frozen.

6.     Child Services in Arendelle are shoddy

Kristoff spends the first ten minutes of the film as a child collecting ice with ice-collectors who seem entirely oblivious to having an unsupervised toddler and reindeer on a glacier with them. Health and Safety, HELLO? Kristoff then gets abandoned on the road, before being found by trolls who decide to adopt him. No-one seems worried by any of this. And then after the King and Queen die, Anna and Elsa, surely the most famous children in the kingdom, are left alone locked in an empty castle until they grow up enough to actually be allowed to meet other people. Unsurprisingly then, when they eventually do, it does not go well.

7.     If you have a rhyme that works, work it.

In the song Love Is An Open Door, the chorus rhymes “…feel it any more” with “Love is an open door”

In the song For The First Time In Forever, the second line is “…so’s that door”, next is “I didn’t know they did that anymore”

Second line of Do You Want To Build a Snowman: “I never see you anymore, Come out the door”

In Let It Go, the first chorus has the lines “Let it go, let it go! Can't hold it back any more. Let it go, let it go! Turn away and slam the door.”

Then there’s the reprise of First Time In Forever, where they rhyme “Please don’t slam the door” with, you guessed it, “You don’t have to keep your distance ANYMORE”

That is five songs out of the nine in the whole film. And the songwriters won an Oscar!

8.     There is a thin line between homage and copying.

The scriptwriters also relied heavily on ‘inspiration’. As I mentioned, the underlying story is based on the story The Snow Queen by Hans Christian Anderson. The leads in Frozen (Elsa excepted) are Hans, Kristoff, Anna, and Sven. Say their names quickly.

9.     Clearly the cold DOES bother her, anyway.

In the film Elsa is all “I don’t need this” as she sings that song, reaching a crescendo with the final, dramatic line “the cold never bothers me anyway!” and a whirl away from the camera with an attitude and a look in her eyes that I am not sure belongs in a children’s film, and again may well be explored in depth in some dark corners of the internet. But in Frozen Fever – Frozen Fever is an additional spin-off short film to the main one, oh and not Olaf’s Frozen Adventure, which is a different additional spin-off, do keep up – Elsa catches a cold. How is this possible? Ok it is mined for amusement, as rather than snot, she expunges cute little mini-snowmen that manage to put on a birthday party for Anna, and knock Hans into a pile of horse manure (he had it coming, see no.1), but I felt short-changed that she had succumbed to a cold-based illness. And if it is possible for her to catch cold, then I fear for her future, especially if she keeps flouncing around the mountains wearing only a diaphanous blue-green ball-gown, with her shoulders bare and no socks on, as she does in the first main film. I tell you she will have pneumonia in an hour.

10. Love saves the day

I will give them some credit for this one – being a Disney film, of course love is the answer. But the writers subvert the expectation that either of the heroines is going to find a man, and instead it is the love between the sisters that saves everyone, and then magically thaws all of the snow and ice within seconds. Which is lovely, but somehow also a little outside of nature’s laws. I mean somehow this instant thawing of waist-high snow does not cause massive floods, or even that horrible black sludge-y snow that you often get lying on the ground a week after it has snowed and all the powder has melted but the underlying ice is still hanging around. But then that is the power of Disney.