I got there via this Atlantic article, "Does Prince Charming Really Need to Be Reinvented?," which is partly about the effect of the movie on the minds of young girls — "Does Prince Charming Really Need to Be Reinvented?" — but also says:
Providing girls with this fantasy is arguably important to their psycho-sexual development. ... Indeed, Disney has often appealed to gay boys as much as girls: Pinocchio thinks traditionally masculine activities like drinking, smoking, and swearing will make him a real boy and help him earn his father’s love; in The Little Mermaid, Ariel’s father doesn’t understand her and she wants to be part of another world; and now even Frozen is being credited with a queer subtext with Queen Elsa’s song as a drag anthem.
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I did notice that the song in the movie has different lyrics than the offical Demi Lovato version. Possibly it was thought that without the context of the movie, the whole "no rules for me, I'm free" part wouldn't quite convey the message from the movie?
Homosexuality is fascinating, important, and relevant to everything.
"Disney has often appealed to gay boys as much as girls: Pinocchio thinks traditionally masculine activities like drinking, smoking, and swearing will make him a real boy and help him earn his father’s love;"
You have got to be kidding me. Pinocchio turned into an donkey, a jackass, after falling into bad company and drinking, smoking, and swearing.
The point of that sequence is that smoking, drinking, and swearing does not make you into a man.
I saw the movie with my 9-year-old son and 6-year-old daughter and thought it was pretty appealing to both girls and boys. A good story about the two sisters with some action, humor, and good tunes.
What is the context of this song in the movie?
"This should play at JFK for every small town gay man who arrives in NYC."
It will remind him of his girlfriend in Canada.
"No right, no wrong," seems like an odd line to be in a kids' movie. Or is this supposed to be a character expressing badness?
Freeman,
She's running away, by herself, up a mountain. By the end of the song she's built a Fortress of Solitude. I really don't think it supports the interpretation here.
She's not really "out" in the company of people until the very end of the movie: an epilogue, really. And they're the very people she was hiding from in this scene.
If you were to force the film into the analogy in the headline (which I understand is not Althouse's), the gay guy would get to New York, spend some time alone and desolate in a glittering high-rise...then realize that the people he left behind were all along the ones who really loved him. All the problems would ultimately be resolved when he found it in himself to love them back.
Which, I haven't been a gay man, but I've tried the geographical escape thing from my various other problems and this seems about right to me.
All gay all day.
I watched the original Cinderella with my kids a few years ago and two things really struck me about that movie in comparison to the more recent Disney fairy tales.
First was how much singing was in the movie. The movies now are built around a few signature songs. The movies back then followed the classical musical theater model in which anyone is ready to start singing at any moment.
Second was how Cinderella's musical ability is an explicit reification of her virtue (the wicked stepsisters are musically inept as well as physically uncouth). It is a classical motif that seems akin to the "I gotta be me" vibe of all kids movies these days, but is also utterly foreign to today's plot-burdened heroines and their special superpowers.
And everybody lived happily ever after.
In an open relationship where they both had as many sexual partners as they wanted.
And nobody got AIDS.
The End.
Good grief! If only there were something else... something with the slightest historical and humanistic weight to counteract the Disney effect...
Hmmm... I wonder what that could be?
"This should play at JFK for every small town gay man who arrives in NYC."
I think watching some guy gad about to the theme from "That Girl" would be much more entertaining.
I think it needs a flesh-colored vinyl romper, a long tongue, and more twerking.
bored again
and for the net nazis - just expressing my boredom, not trying to drag the thread down
carry on
So that's the birth of the Narnian witch. Always winter and never Christmas?
Just thought it was an homage to fractals, go figure.
What an awful song. Couldn't make it more than halfway through. Can anyone sing without shouting anymore? Does anyone who sings for a living have an actual sweet or pleasant voice?
Off to have a listen to the kind of musical standards that Disney used to adhere to to clean out my ears.
And you kids: get off my lawn!
"No right, no wrong," seems like an odd line to be in a kids' movie. Or is this supposed to be a character expressing badness?
It's a character whose broken upbringing has left her so isolated and repressed that's she's almost nonfunctional. She loses her shit at her own coronation, freezes half the town, and flees into the wilderness. This song is both a retreat into utter solitude and an expression of having let her burdens drop. The giddiness of total exile from human contact or relations of any sort.
It's basically fey, in both the modern sense of the term, and the archaic, giddily doomed sense.
She's not quite the heroine of the piece, more an endangered sibling of the actual heroine. The movie's interesting in that it's more about sibling relationships than romance, although it's constructed to make you think it *will* be about romance.
When I saw the movie, while I liked it, I did think that the plot was too complicated and subtle to work for an audience of children.
So homosexual men want to appropriate a girl's song from a Disney movie.
Sigmund Freud, call your office.
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