In Which I Dissect a Perfectly Good Children's Movie

We went down South this past weekend to visit my family. Dave couldn't come with us, so I took five kids and a dog on the longest trip I've ever attempted by myself, much less with all that crew. We had our difficult moments along the way, but I kept telling the kids (and myself), "I know it's hard, but just keep thinking about how it's going to be totally worth it!" And it was. Lots of family, lots of food, lots of noise, lots of fun... All my parents' grandchildren were there, and the ten of them had more fun together than sometimes the adults could stand - like when they made a fort out of the hall closet doors that had somehow detached, or when they tried to see how high they could stack bean bags against the pool table. There was also gleeful running, for no apparent reason, in circles, round and round and round and round and round my parents' house, accompanied by squeals of delight. But it was delight, so that made it just fine. We also saw my youngest sister and her very soon husband-to-be, and that was truly wonderful, as we hadn't seen them in two years.

So a good visit all the way around. One day we took all the kids to the theater to see Frozen, and that was fun, too. My three-year old niece's running commentary throughout the movie was truly the best thing ever, incidentally. It was even more enjoyable than the movie itself, which I did enjoy, but Aimee and I talked it over afterwards and worked out all the ways it could have been even better. Because of course it was very Disney - fairly predictable characters, slapstick comic relief, and a tidy, happy ending, which wasn't bad at all (the snowman really was quite funny), but as a supposed retelling of the Snow Queen, it could have been so much better.

 I don't want to spoil it for anyone, so I won't rehash the whole movie. But I think Aimee and I agreed that the divide between the characters should have been sharper, and Elsa, the older sister, should have been made to descend even deeper into the dark side (or the cold side, if you rather). Instead, one thing I saw in the story - in the characters and even in the visuals - was that warm, sunny and extroverted equals good; while cold, reserved, and introverted equals, while not "bad" exactly, certainly not-as-good. Granted, Elsa had to be reserved and restrained, so perhaps hers was not a completely natural introversion, but even so, sometimes there are instances in which a person must stay reserved to stay on top of personal struggles.

So I rolled my eyes once or twice during the song in which the girls are both anticipating the same event, and yet Anna sings warmly and freely about opening doors, and Elsa anxiously sings about closing them. The idea of people and events swarming into an environment certainly does seem wonderful to some people, and it would be hard to be cut off from that. But that Elsa didn't want that, that she found it stressful and a strain on her careful protection of her unwanted ice skills, wasn't, to me, as sad as the movie wanted it to be. As an introvert, often that's precisely how I feel, so I certainly sympathized with her character. Now, some may point out that she didn't want to feel that way, because she was desperately trying to hide her skills/curse. As I said, though, sometimes it IS necessary to exercise restraint, and that means you can't just open up to everyone and be happy. I have OCD, and I think I have mentioned this before, but it is not at all what is commonly portrayed. It isn't simply the desire to have things in order, to be meticulous, or to have an aversion to germs. In fact, in more than half the cases of OCD, the compulsions aren't obvious to outsiders. Look up "Pure O," and you'll have a pretty good view of my struggle since childhood. It's one I've had a great deal of victory in, and I am not at all trying to get a pity party together for myself. But it takes work, it drains energy, and it is something that prevents me from being able to "just relax," or "just let things go." If I didn't direct effort toward staying on top of things, in fact, it would overwhelm me. Often, it hinders my ability to be spontaneous and to seem relaxed and free. So I could completely identify with Elsa in the scene in which her sister is trying to talk to her, to share with her, and Elsa is sitting on the other side of the wall, in her room, surrounded by the ice she was trying to desperately to control and hide - but which she couldn't.

Obviously, the fact that Elsa was unhappy and unable to interact with her sister at all wasn't a desirable state. But I thought the eventual treatment her character received robbed her of her essence. I would have preferred a true Snow Queen - whose colder, more reserved qualities were actually validated, even if it mean that it set her apart from others. I think she could have had a story in which she found a level of freedom, but that also acknowledged that she could never have been as carefree as her sister, just as many of us in the real world are never, for various reasons, going to be as warm, cheerful , and carefree as some others. And it's okay.

But it IS a children's movie, of course, and as such, it was cute.