Snow and Secrets: The Monsters of Disney's "Frozen"

Superhero: Elsa shoots ice out of her hands in an attempt to freeze the ocean.

With the arrival of Disney’s Frozen II in theatres this month, and as a mother of two young girls, it seemed only natural to me to write a blog post about the monsters (and metaphors) in the popular animated films. A quick glance at Wikipedia will tell you that the first Frozen film was inspired by Danish writer Hans Christian Anderson’s short story The Snow Queen; as Carolyn Giardina writes in her article “Making of Frozen”,

In Frozen, fear paralyzes Princess Elsa (voiced by Idina Menzel) and her Norwegian kingdom of Arendelle. Elsa was born with the power to control ice and snow, but she's never been able to harness this power. The fear of losing control has caused her to distance herself from everyone, even her sister. And when she does lose that control, her magic dooms her realm to a wintry eternity, and it falls to Elsa's sister, Anna (Kristen Bell), to save her sister and the kingdom. (1)

And indeed, when Elsa distances herself in the first film, she does it by creating an ice palace in the mountains near their kingdom, accompanied by an enormous snow monster who chases away her sister and friends when they come to find her. And here, this monster easily represents the enormity of Elsa’s fear and anger at the secret she’s been forced to keep for years. In the story, as a child Elsa’s magic powers frightened her parents and they taught her to supress them, isolating her with the secret from her sister and her community. As an adult, and reigning queen of Arendelle, Elsa’s anxiety about her powers enable them to control her, and in a moment of distress she reveals her magical abilities to a thoroughly non-magical community. Naturally, her subjects are terrified.

Had Elsa been raised to embrace her powers, it is likely that they could have been moderated by trust, as well as the warmth of close family and friend relationships. It is called Frozen, after all, which hardly applies solely to the snowy landscape. If given this opportunity, Elsa could have been a less angry, anxious adult, and subsequently may not have created a guarded isolation from which even her sister is prohibited. And when the snow monster violently pursues Anna and her companions down the mountain, wreaking havoc on the landscape, we see it as a metaphor for Elsa’s rage, and the damage such enormous secrets can wreak on the lives of an entire family.

To make realistic looking snow, the filmmakers behind Frozen asked mathmaticians for help.

This idea is replicated in Frozen II, when Anna and Elsa discover that a family member betrayed a local indigenous tribe, and the forest which the tribe traditionally inhabited has become filled with angry wind and fire spirits, as well as rock giants. Elsa and Anna’s paternal grandfather, the former King of Arendelle, built an enormous stone dam that he claimed would help the tribe, while knowing it would in fact weaken them and damage their way of life.

Here, the rock giants represent the secret of Elsa and Anna’s grandfather’s deceit; not only did he build the dam out of stone, but the rock giants are, in the end, the ones who destroy it, freeing both the tribe trapped in the forest and the women from a dangerous history that threatens their kingdom. In the end of both films, the message seems to be that knowledge is in fact the way to eliminate a monster (rather than create it, as we’ve seen in the works of Robert Louis Stevenson and Mary Shelley). That deceit, and lack of knowledge creates a monster which cannot be supressed forever, and it is better to open up and “let it go”.

Works Cited

Giardina, Carolyn. “Making of Frozen: Disney Is Gunning for Its First-Ever Best Animated Feature Oscar with This Lush Adaptation of a Classic Hans Christian Andersen Fairy Tale--Which Boasts Kristen Bell and Idina Menzel Voicing the Lead Princesses and Songs from a Book of Mormon Tony Winner.” Hollywood Reporter, no. 43, 2013, p. 70. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edsggo&AN=edsgcl.354086102&site=eds-live.

Wikipedia contributors. "Frozen (2013 film)." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 24 Nov. 2019. Web. 25 Nov. 2019.

Superhero: Elsa shoots ice out of her hands in an attempt to freeze the ocean. Digital Image. DailyMail.co. 11 June 2019. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-7128609/Elsa-sets-action-packed-journey-new-trailer-Frozen-2.html. JPEG File.

To make realistic-looking snow, the filmmakers behind Frozen asked mathematicians for help. Image: © The Walt Disney Co. Digital Image. ScienceNewsForStudents.org. 6 March, 2015. https://www.sciencenewsforstudents.org/article/science-hollywood. JPEG File.

Sexuality Part 2: The Victorians

Victorian Britain Sexuality

      It is impossible to talk about monsters as metaphors without referencing Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; a regular man bringing out his darkest desires in the form of a violent villain is, in itself, clearly a metaphor for repression and inner urges. This is particularly important given the historical time in which Jekyll and Hyde was written, as the Victorian culture was all about presenting an image of control and propriety, particularly in regards to carnal impulses. As Morse Peckham writes in “Victorian Counterculture”:

Thus, if we look at Victorian culture, we see a public culture of sexual restraint, a remissive culture of sexual license, and an emerging culture, eventually to be reasonably successful… of sexual repression. (4)

      This idea ties into an earlier blog post I wrote about monsters and sexuality; Dr. Jekyll is a classic example of a man unable to achieve moderation for his less savoury urges due to the culture he lives in, and thus must create a monster through which those urges can be carried out. And though the monster is himself, unlike Dr. Frankenstein’s creation whose form is separate, perhaps this is what makes Mr. Hyde much more satisfying, or more tempting of a monstrous double than Frankenstein’s ever could be. In the chapter, “Henry Jekyll’s Full Statement on the Case” of Jekyll and Hyde, we hear the doctor describe exactly why he felt as though he had to pursue his repressed urges so catastrophically:

In this case, I was driven to reflect deeply and inveterately on that hard law of life, which lies at the root of religion and is one of the most plentiful springs of distress. Though so profound a double dealer I was in no sense a hypocrite; both sides of me were in dead earnest; I was no more myself when I laid aside restraint and plunged in shame, than when I laboured, in the eye of day, at the furtherance of knowledge… I thus drew steadily nearer to that truth… that man is not truly one, but truly two. (73)

      Had Jekyll been born into a different culture, his repression and pursuit of this knowledge might have been unnecessary; in the same vein, Stevenson’s story may never have been written had the author known a different era. And in this way we can see that, like the Ancient Greeks I wrote about initially, the Victorians were as obsessed with sexuality as those before them, and their repression and shame towards it created a new kind of monster: the duplicitous double, the wolf in sheep's clothing; the Mr. Hyde. 

Works Cited

Peckham, Morse. “Victorian Counterculture.” Victorian Studies, vol. 18, no. 3, Mar. 1975, p. 257. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=30h&AN=6882128&site=eds-live.

Stevenson, Robert Louis. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Stories. United States of America: Barnes & Noble, 1995. Print.

Victorian Britain Sexuality. Digital Image. Victorian-Era.org. February 2, 2017. http://victorian-era.org/sexual-repression-in-the-victorian-era.html/victorians-britain-sexuality. JPEG File.