SchadenFrozen: (n, Ger): the taking of delight in the suffering of those who have realized against their will that Frozen, the Disney megahit about princesses, a comedy snowman and the need to let things go … isn’t awful. In fact, it’s a really quite wonderful film.
I’ve indulged in this, of course. I’ve sniggered inwardly at the wide-eyed idiocy of mothers buying hers-and-hers Elsa dresses to wear with their daughters on Halloween. I’ve rolled my eyes at hipster dads earnestly discussing – through their stupid beards – Anna’s feminism and the post-ironic phallocentric dialectic of Olaf the snowman’s carrot nose.
But then, as the New Yorker editor David Remnick once wrote, the English are the only people who feel Schadenfreude towards themselves. And, as I am nothing if not irredeemably English – and as I have already taken delight in my own public suffering over my love for rugby, Bono and Sir Roger Moore – I am really rather enjoying my new plight. I have seen Frozen, and I liked it. Enough to write this piece.
Idiot.
It happened at the close of a week’s holiday at home with my wife and two daughters. At ages three and one, said daughters are unfortunately the kind of little plague-carriers that any playgroup (or passing contact with any other small, mucus-flecked biped) will make of any otherwise wonderful child.
And so, the little darlings were duly ill, sporting a potent concoction of cold, cough, ear infection and pink eye – the last affliction making the younger, balder one look and act like Ren, John Kricfalusi’s splenetic cartoon chihuahua. The older one, rounder and more relentlessly cheerful, cavorted (as usual) like Stimpy.
That description alone speaks to my usual taste in cartoons – but just as if I were Mr Horse and two rubber-nipple salesmen called round, the situation quickly deteriorated. We were stuck indoors. There was urine on the couch and vomit on the duvet; there were boogers smeared behind the radiator. A hundred snacks lay half-eaten; a thousand bottles littered the floor. And that was just Saturday morning. In despair, my wife and I cracked.
We obtained something hitherto only available to my daughters (like Hello Kitty and tolerance) as a treat if they visit the twins next door. We downloaded Frozen.
My wife made her excuses and went for a nap. And so – not without a certain delight in my own suffering, of course – I sat on the couch, a sniffling bacillus tucked cosily on either side. As I did so, I remembered that the piece in which Remnick made his famous observation was about Tony Blair’s second re-election, and was titled The Masochism Campaign. Perhaps, like proctology and holidays in Wales, this would be good for me in the long run.
It turned out it was good for me – but more immediately and not quite in the way I’d expected.
You see, I don’t like Disney. I don’t like the drawings, I don’t like the syrupy, insipid songs that slide down like a spoonful of sick, and I don’t like the incessant drivel about love and being true to yourself and others and finding the hero within. I don’t like the way the female characters are always princesses, or dream of being princesses, and seem to find fulfilment only in the arms of a man.
I don’t like the whitewashing of American history in stuff like Pochahontas; I don’t like the appropriation of black culture in dreck like The Princess and the Frog, or African culture in clichéd, simpering dung like The Lion King. And it’s not just modern Disney: Bambi doesn’t make me cry and I really don’t like Mickey Mouse, the relentless, disc-eared little prick.
And so, as I sat down to watch Frozen, I was convinced I was about to endure a miserable hour leavened only by the grateful silence of my sniffling offspring. And at first, as Anna and Elsa cavorted in the palace, as Elsa’s powers were revealed to be beyond her control, as the king and queen went to their watery grave and the songs came and went – and as Anna fell for the damned, predictable prince – I was entirely unmoved.
And then, I wasn’t. I began to follow the plot. I cared. The damned thing started to move me – to cast its spell, if you really must. Obviously, my kids were enjoying it, wide-eyed and rapt. But so was I.
I was engrossed.
Anna’s quest to find her sister and release her from her curse was … affecting. Kristoff’s mutually dependent relationship with his reindeer was … endearing. The snowman-golem-thing was … pleasantly frightening. Even Olaf, despite or perhaps because of looking disturbingly like a chap I know, was … amusing.
The script was excellent, the voice casting on point, the knowing lines for the adults well-spaced. The animation was sharp and remarkably expressive, the story moved along at a clip and the inevitably English-accented bad guy was pleasingly informative about the intricacies of 19th-century trade negotiations.
I’m not sure my daughters took that in, or indeed how much they took in at all. But they were silent and happy and not one droplet of snot was sneezed or wiped onto my clothes, face or mortal soul. For an hour and a half, they simply forgot to be ill.
And, at the end, Anna fell for the proletarian, not the prince. And the prince turned out to be a bit of a bad guy. And Elsa learned that her sister was there for her and that, yes, she should simply be herself.
If my girls got all that, great. And if, instead, they come to get it over the next 2,000 sittings, that will be great too. I won’t particularly mind. I’ll watch with them, sometimes.
I’ll still plug my ears during the songs, though. Christ. Enough already. Let them go.
