Columns, Opinion

RUTH: Ice Age: Disney Edition

When I was a junior in high school, seeing “MO” written in big red letters by my English teacher on my essays was a common sight. This was her short way of indicating a section where we had missed an opportunity to make a concise point and seize the attention of the reader.

 

Not to sound abominable, but Disney’s Frozen was one colossal MO to me.

 

I guess it’s my naiveté that leads me to think that all Disney movies these days should have a story of love served with an underlying environmental theme. The movie itself was a cute way of dancing around the idea of an ice age, but that just wasn’t enough. Disney is capable of more than this.

 

I found the trailer to be a bit misleading, but maybe it’s just me. The whole winter in July storyboard got me thinking that the movie was going to be an epic journey of unlikely characters to fight some Yeti-like climate change monster and return their beloved Norwegian village of Arendelle from a doomed ice age to it’s norm.

 

Sound appealing? Well, this is probably why I don’t work for Disney.

 

Instead of focusing on the climate change aspect, they focused on the importance of family love. There wasn’t even a climate change monster either; it was a pageant queen look-a-like that had incredible vocals. How boring.

 

However, Frozen does a fantastic job of showing the doom and gloom of an impending Ice Age. Time Magazine noted that Frozen is the first climate-change movie to warn an impending Ice Age since the movie, The Day After Tomorrow. Of course, there was the typical comic relief character, a snowman named Olaf, that didn’t quite grasp the concept of the impending disaster of the Ice Age and dreamed of a fantastic life frolicking in the summer breeze.

 

So here’s the scoop. On her 18th birthday, Norwegian blonde bombshell Elsa becomes queen of Arendelle, but in her intense flurry of fear, she accidentally freezes her beloved city.

 

Basically, Elsa has magical powers and can transform things into ice. Then there was an epic journey to bring back summer. Evidentially, everyone got their happy ending — even Olaf the snowman who finally got to experience the wonders of summer.

 

I suppose Olaf teaches us a thing or two about why snowman and summer don’t coexist, but (spoiler alert) Elsa makes him his own personal snow cloud in the end of the movie, so that doesn’t solve any of these climate issues.

 

Well you know how Ariel wanted more in life than just flipping around with her mermaid tail? Well I wanted more out of this movie.

 

Of course, I was mildly entertained by the comical snowman, boy-crazy Anna and endeared by Kristoff’s love and Elsa’s maturity. However, the only lesson learned is that true love, sisterly love to be exact, is what turns the climate back to normal.

 

So, basically what Frozen tell us is if siblings could just get along these days, all of the ice caps would regenerate and our climate would be saved.

 

 

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