The news that Disney is making additional sequels to Frozen, Toy Story, and Zootopia put me back in mind of Frozen II, which I saw in the theater when it came out in late 2019. Its plot perfectly captured the trouble with woke virtue-signaling. It is, in fact, a fascinating document not only of the woke impulse at work in the world of Disney, but also of how trying give an audience of young, female humans what they want collides with that impulse.
Apologies for plot spoilers if by some chance you wish to see this film or the first Frozen and have not yet done so.
A brief recap of the 2013 original, which was inspired in a vague sense by Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen: It is set in Arendelle, a picturesque (basically Norwegian) village kingdom on a fjord, full of humble, industrious burghers, clean cobblestone streets, and quaint shoppes. The kingdom’s two princesses, Elsa and Anna, are left orphaned by a shipwreck. Disney helpfully made Elsa blonde and Anna brunette, for ease of telling them apart. The older sister, Elsa, will become Queen of Arendelle upon turning 21, but she has a terrible secret: She has magic powers to make snow and ice that she cannot control, and she has previously injured Anna with them. (Commentary on the film has sometimes dwelled on these powers as a metaphor for Elsa’s sexual coming-of-age, a common subtext for stories of young teens suddenly discovering terrifying supernatural powers.) They are aided by Olaf, a talking snowman. Anna has two love interests: Hans, a handsome prince who woos her to get to Elsa but turns out to be the villain, and Kristoff, a simple, broad-shouldered ice harvester.
Frozen II opens with Elsa reigning as Queen of Arendelle. Of the, er, artistic merits of the film I won’t speak, except to note that Kristoff has a song in the middle of the movie that turns into essentially a mid-’80s Chicago video that really should have been cut. Anyway, Elsa starts hearing voices and, having learned nothing from the first film, heads north alone to a neighboring kingdom that has been frozen in time by spirits since an expedition from Arendelle three decades earlier. The northern kingdom is behind a huge dam that holds back the waters from flooding Arendelle out of existence. We are first given to believe that the magic stopped a pointless war between the two kingdoms, leaving Arendelle’s soldiers and their adversaries trapped.
Arendelle’s army is led by a noble, loyal commander, who is black for no apparent reason. Given that all the characters are early-modern Norwegians, this makes about as much sense as putting a white guy at the head of the army of Wakanda and never explaining where he came from, but such are the demands of modern moviemaking. The real problem is with the plot.
What the voices want Elsa to learn is that Elsa and Anna’s paternal grandfather King Runeard, your archetypical barrel-chested mustachioed European imperialist, double-crossed the northern folk and that the dam is actually just a ploy to exploit them. This is where the anti-colonialist theme of the film kicks into high gear: In order to Make Everything Better, the sisters must destroy the dam and unleash a deluge that destroys Arendelle entirely. Elsa and Olaf sacrifice themselves to bring this about, and Anna causes the dam to be destroyed, after first evacuating the people of Arendelle. But, this being Disney, Elsa returns and uses magic to redirect the flood. Arendelle is not actually destroyed, and its innocent population is not actually impoverished, immiserated, and stripped of everything they have known and labored for by the unilateral decisions of its royal family, in which the burghers had no say — an outcome that the plot framed as the only just way for the royals to expiate their collective, inherited sins at the expense of their subjects.
No matter: Arendelle is now Virtuous because the royal family was willing to destroy the hearths, homes, and livelihoods of their people. By not showing the town destroyed and what would follow that, the writers saved the audience from seeing the logical consequences of actually meaning their message. This is the textbook definition of virtue-signaling: Moral worth is gained without any actual cost, simply by the gesture of Good Intentions.
Lest I do nothing but focus on the negative, let me add one final side note in the film’s favor: It doesn’t let woke gender politics ruin the one significant male character, Kristoff. He doesn’t have a particularly large role and exists mainly to be Anna’s love interest, but that’s fine; the movie is about the sisters, and we already have Olaf for comic relief. Kristoff spends the movie trying to figure out how to propose marriage to Anna, but for once we are spared a male character questioning whether he wants to get married; his only issue is coming up with the words and the timing. There’s also a good scene at the destruction of the dam — blink and you’ll miss it. Kristoff arrives just in time to assist in its destruction, and Anna tells him to help her do it. Do we get a debate? A moral stand one way or another, or an instant of self-doubt? No, his woman has told him that this must be done, and being a Man of Action, he does it. No questions asked. Yes, this is girl-power fantasy, but it’s girl-power fantasy where the man is not some limp, posturing, male-feminist whiner; it’s one where the male character is loyal, brave, vigorous, manly, and not flawed by his total lack of self-reflectiveness or self-doubt. Which in the end is what the female audience for these movies wants, rather than what they’re supposed to want.