New Movie Trailer for Disney's Frozen

The Snow Queen? No.

This new trailer for Frozen is more entertaining and gives hope for some general entertainment. But it has no resemblance whatsoever to HCA's The Snow Queen. I'm grateful they changed the title on this one. So unless more news shows a greater relationship to the fairy tale, I won't be covering the movie here on the blog.

Tangled, at least, resembled the fairy tale and had recognizable elements. I'm not seeing that here.

Forbes has a great article about the movie by Scott Mendelson:

As you may recall, Disney infamously changed the title of 2010′s Rapunzel to Tangled and also altered the marketing campaign to highlight not its lead female would-be princess character but the wise-cracking male lead who would be her love interest and would-be rescuer. And, having successfully marketed Tangled as the merry adventure of rogue Flynn with Rapunzel seemingly playing a supporting role in her own story, Disney then went and announced that Tangled would be the last such fairy tale adaptation they would be producing. Because obviously The Princess and the Frog “only” made $267 million worldwide in 2009 primarily because it had the word “princess” in the title.

$600 million in worldwide box office later (more than any other non-Pixar cartoon outside of The Lion King), they secretly changed their tune, which brings us this loose adaptation of Hans Christian Anderson‘s The Snow Queen. So yes, however small the victory, let us celebrate that Disney is boasting, rather than hiding, the fact that they have made another female-centric animated fable. It is a telling sign of how far gender parity has fallen in the last decade when something like this or Brave is considered noteworthy, especially as the female-driven animated features like Mulan or Anastasia used to come and go without comment in the mid-to-late 1990′s.

But for the moment, kudos to Disney for not only bringing us another animated film co-directed and co-written by a female (Jennifer Lee, who co-wrote Disney’s Wreck It Ralph), but producing one starring a female hero and villain (Idina Menzel). And most importantly, kudos for not being afraid to hide the film’s female-centric bent in the marketing campaign, thus bucking the “girls will see boy movies but boys won’t see girl movies” conventional wisdom. One can only hope that the successes of The Twilight Saga, Tangled, Brave, and The Hunger Games is helping to dispel that myth.

And I still contend that Princess and the Frog just wasn't very entertaining. The Princess title may not have helped but the film itself wasn't making people go back to see it. And it released later than usual that year, too, after Thanksgiving. Voodoo and characters that are animals longer than they are humans isn't appealing to as large an audience. Fine if we have animal characters, but when we know they are enchanted humans, well, frogs aren't that interesting. I'm usually entertained by Disney movies on some levels but I remember sitting with my sister to watch it and we were both thoroughly bored. It was boring. And I didn't want to be bored and I was rooting for a non-white princess, too.