1st Place, Columns/Personal, Society Professional Journalists Top of the Rockies, GI 2/22/20, and New Mexico Jewish Link Spring 2020 2nd Place, NMPW Reviews.

The movie Frozen II is now neck-and-neck with The Lion King for biggest-grossing animated film of all time and one song, Into The Unknown, was Academy-award nominated for Best Original Song.  It also happens to contain a really radical idea for what society needs to save itself and our future. 

The story is influenced by the mythology and music of the reindeer-herding Sámi people of northern Scandinavia, Finland and Russia. It was produced in consultation and cooperation with their representatives, and has been dubbed into the Sámi language in an agreement with Disney. The story resonates with a universal spiritual hunger felt in both the inner world of the individual psyche and in society. 

As the movie starts, Elsa is a queen ruling over the kingdom of Arendelle from a palace. Unlike Cinderella, where the entire goal is to end up living happily ever after in the castle on the hill, this is not Elsa’s idea of ultimate success—instead, she hears a voice calling her. Elsa’s journey is about self-discovery but it is also about something she must tackle that is bigger than herself. It is a journey that will require she leap into the unknown.

Elsa at first refuses the call, this siren voice calling her into the unknown, the Enchanted forest, which is hidden behind a mist. Elsa and her sister Anna were brought up to fear that the angry nature spirits of the shrouded Enchanted forest may rise up and do harm. But, as Elsa sings, she knows deep down, that’s where she’s meant to be.

As Elsa struggles with herself to deny this call, she asks to come into her own power, and her passionate singing actually awakens those angry elemental spirits, who descend on the kingdom and drive the people up onto a plateau. 

Elsa divulges to her sister Anna, “I woke the spirits at the Enchanted forest, because of the voice—I believe whoever calling me is good.” But now that the populace is all stuck on a plateau, what to do? Some direction is needed.

The Troll, a magical creature, shows up. He acts as a mentor, a diagnostician, and spells out the path that must be taken. As his vision unfolds he says gravely, “Let me see what I can see: Angry magical spirits are not for the faint of heart. The past is not what it seems, a wrong demands to be righted. Arendelle is not safe. The truth must be found. Without it, I see no future.” 

Anna says, “No future?”

The Troll continues, “When one can see no future, all one can do is the next right thing.”

Elsa replies, “The next right thing is for me to go to the Enchanted forest and find that voice.” Once in the forest Elsa learns that in addition to earth, air, fire and water, there is a fifth element, that bridges the spiritual and the physical worlds. She also learns there that water has memory. Eventually she finds the truth that sets things right so that Arendelle will have a future.

Psychologist Carl Jung wrote a book after World War II that addressed Hitler’s power, “The Undiscovered Self,” about the danger of repressing the shadow, the parts of ourselves that we don’t like, and how that leads a society to fascism and totalitarianism—that what we deny in ourselves, that what we keep hidden in the unconscious, behind a fog of unknowing, we project onto others, making them the object of fear. 

In Frozen II there is a dark secret, a denial, that is kept hidden behind a mist, a fog, the unconscious. But the thing to be feared was not the Enchanted forest or the nature spirits. The feared thing was the truth: that Elsa and Anna’s grandfather, the King, had deliberately weakened and attacked the forest people; the history of the criminal domination of indigenous peoples by feudal kings. 

Most historians tend to pain a linear picture of societal evolution as tribal cultures superseded by feudal societies and then technological ones. This movie turns that premise on its head, and tells us that our modern society will be doomed unless a hidden wrong is righted, is faced, that we have chosen to hide in an enchanted forest behind a mist. Denial of the genocidal tendencies of modern man cannot stand. A bridge of understanding must be built between the indigenous world and the technological one. This is a message for society at this critical time.

Frozen II presents the mythic journey of the heroine, that to come into one’s own power includes rejoining the lost mother. In order for Elsa to find her true self, and the dark secrets, she must first find her lost parents’ shipwreck and a message left by her mother that hints at where she must go. She learns that the source of her magic powers lies at the mythical mother river, Ahtohollen. Meanwhile her sister Anna follows the more traditional journey of the hero, where she must save the day after Elsa reaches Ahtohollen but becomes trapped.

Fundamentally, this film is telling us that our overly masculine, mechanistic society radically needs what it has rejected if we are to survive: the balance of the feminine, the spiritual, as represented by the sometimes ferocious, sometimes benevolent forces of nature. A must-see movie for today’s children and their parents. And the best part, the kids leave the theater singing. 

#