I have always been a fan of animated film, ever since I was a kid.  Like the single-panel cartoon and the sequential comic strip (and like dreaming itself) animated film is a form that invites tremendous artistic, expressive, emotional and intellectual freedom.  For this reason, film animation also has a great potential for touching viewers deeply, at both conscious and unconscious levels.

The recently released Disney film Frozen has been evoking unusually intense responses from children - particularly small children.  Several parents, and grandparents, have told me their children and grandchildren have been demanding to see the film multiple times, in what at least some of the adults describe as an "obsessive" fashion.  The children have been memorizing and reciting large pieces of dialogue and singing many of the songs from the movie.   

The Disney Studios have always set the global bench-mark for highly focused, clean, flowing, musically synchronized animation.  Frozen is no exception.  However, the superb technical quality of the animation itself is not all that different from previous Disney films so why is Frozen special?  It's worth taking a look at the deeper symbolic implications of the story itself.

One of the underlying archetypal symbolic meta-message of the film has to do with global climate change, and the frightening inability of the current adult generation to face, let alone deal with the problem. Little kids pick this up and internalize the menacing futility of the situation.

In the film, the problem is not named as "global warming" - rather, it's evoked as "endless winter." From where I sit, the endless winter in Frozen is an ancient, archetypal, (Northern European) symbolic stand-in for cataclysmic climate change generally. It is also a reflection of the current increasingly violent meteorological consequences of global warming, (regularly reported on the TV news, to which the children are listening - whether they appear to be or not). This film appears to be one of the only places where their own secret anxieties (i.e. deep unconscious fears), are actually given concrete, recognizable symbolic form - together with characters who do something about it.

The Disney filmmakers gently kill off the two girls' parents, via an unseen and casually reported shipwreck early in the film, and doing that makes it symbolically clear that this is going to be a movie about problems that eventually will have to be solved by the children themselves - a potentially overwhelming dilemma, but one their deep unconscious knows it is essential to solve.

Another emotionally gripping sub-plot of the film is focused on the archetypal theme of how to heal interior splits created by the need to satisfy both the parents, and the expectations of society as a whole, by pretending to be nothing but a good girl or boy. Just as in a dream, the two young, orphaned Princesses represent divided aspects of a single "character" - the divided psyche of the viewer.  

A third archetypal theme in Frozen is a remarkable shift in how the love paradigm is presented. Disney films since the beginning of film animation have presented old, unquestioned, sentimental, and sexist archetypes of love paradigms. In Frozen these old models are shed in favor of a much more emotionally complicated and difficult view of emotion itself. In a distinctly "post-modern" plot detail, which grabs the attention of even the youngest viewers, Frozen turns the old romantic paradigm on its head with the character of the "youngest Prince," who first appears accompanied by the absolutely charming, comically intelligent horse he rides. Before Frozen any Disney character accompanied by such a magical, comically charming, loyal, and intelligently persistent animal could rightly be assumed to be a positive character, but as the plot unfolds, the Prince reveals himself to be a shockingly evil and duplicitous character, totally unworthy of the love one half of the young heroine team has initially bestowed on him, (and with these revelations, the horse quietly switches loyalties away from the Prince to the two Princesses...)

At that important level, the film focuses symbolically and literally on the difficult task of achieving greater emotional maturity and self-understanding, at earlier and earlier ages and stages of development.

In Frozen, like all Disney films, the experience of having complex, predominantly unconscious emotions captured, symbolically "named," and given compelling shape in art (particularly song) - is a very moving, and compelling event. No wonder the kids are drawn to exploring and re-exploring its messages via repeated viewings and re-enactments.

-Jeremy