Frozen: Good, could have been better

Frozen is, in my memory, the first movie I have been agitating to see for an entire month. This began when I saw the Let It Go clip on YouTube via Love, Joy, Feminism. Like Libby Anne I was deeply moved by the way Elsa felt free to break away and express everything about herself she had been forced to repress all her life. Watching it, I tasted again the lonely exhilaration of that moment when you forget about being good and dutiful and give yourself permission to be your own self, a necessary if not final step to healing.

This began my hankering to see the movie, which to my disappointment would not open in Korea for another month. I all but marked the day on my calendar and pestered the husband about it every few days, until the long-suffering man took me to see it yesterday on opening night.

( Here be many spoilers )

For all its flaws and limitations Frozen has come further than just about any Disney movie since Lilo and Stitch, and shows that feminist storytelling is good storytelling, period. That's only natural, since stories are about human concerns and feminist themes are issues that affect people in their relation to gender and sex. Feminism, in other words, is about huge swathes of life. Leave those out and you can't tell the full truth of human experience. Frozen goes in the right direction. My only complaint is that it doesn't go far enough.