What Frozen Got Right!

Although when I first heard the Frozen story line I was a little rocked... thinking healing trolls and princesses with other than romantic love... did they grab the story that I was working on a while back?  I guess it's a good thing we went back and started rewriting it.  But the reason we had been incorporating the theme of other forms of love was because it had been sorely missing in the realm of Fantasy films.  Historically it had been about romantic love, and that's not the end all, be all, only way to love someone.  In Greek there are multiple words for love.

"There are 7 Greek words for love and they are all slightly different. Agape love is love without any payment in return. This refers to love in the purest sense of the word. Philos refers to the love of a friendship. Eunoia is love out of kindness, while eros is a sexual love. Hetairos is a brotherhood type of love and aphrodisios refers to the goddess of love. Storgy is the love a mother has for her kids, or in more general terms, the love one has for their dependents."

Unfortunately our modern terminology leaves us lacking, where love can mean anything from liking an ice cream cone to matrimony, with little differentiating factors in language while there's a full unexpressed spectrum emotionally. It's no wonder that so many young people have come to confuse love and sex as the same thing. This is a component of many poor decisions based on an un-evolved perception of love formed through modern media and lack of experience.

This was one of the things that I loved about the movie, Frozen, and that it got right where Disney had failed so often in the past. Anna having little socialization was starved for love and affection, made worse by the loss of her parents and the abandonment by her sister.  When Hans appears on the scene and gives her attention she had not received in such a long time, she forgot herself and clung to what seemed like true love, because he was being nice to her. It was different, so it had to be love...  But Hans was playing her all along, in an excellent depiction of a sociopath.  Disney got that right too.

Abusers don't start off abusive, and sociopaths are actually quite charming and often popular, because they do just what Hans did... they tell people what they want to hear in order to get what they want.  The fact that he did it so flawlessly, uncomplicated by guilt, is also a cue of the sociopath or psychopath, because they in fact don't care and are truly unaffected by guilt.  This lack of social complication often soars them past the radars of most people and has them often being very likable to the average joe. Sociopaths are the most likely of real life bad guys. They are rarely overt and obvious but more likely to sneak past defenses and destroy from within.  It's a good lesson for girls to learn... even if it might take them a few years to learn it.

On top of that, Disney went for the fairy tale act of "true love", which is one of those elements required for a good fairy tale. When it came down to it, they didn't cop out for the easy answer of true love's kiss.  Instead they went for something just as real or maybe moreso, it was about the sacrifice of love as sisters.  This was beautifully done and didn't leave out a little eros for Anna after all.  However its truly special quality was that it showed that love was more than just boy meets girl, it's about caring for others and sacrifice, even if sometimes it's just your pride.  Disney got that right too, and even the comedic relief, Olaf was there to help Anna understand love, by demonstration, which covers philial love between friends.  Elsa finds love for herself by exploring her own talents and decides to be herself instead of hiding who she is.  The emotional development of all the characters leaves them all in a better place than they started... except maybe Olaf who is a self proclaimed love expert.

So Kudos to Disney on Frozen.  Even Queen Elizabeth would have been pleased enough to melt her heart, should she have made a bet that no movie had ever shown true love.  Romeo and Juliet only has one form of love. And although Frozen is not a work of Shakespeare, it takes us deeper than Disney has gone before. It truly gets to the heart of love.