Walt Disney avoided mixing religion and film, but the company is starting to embrace more Christian undertones
A Southern Baptist university professor in Texas is suggesting that Disney's animated feature Frozen, now doing well at the box office and just nominated for two Academy Awards, "might be the most Christian movie that I have seen this year". In fact, he says, it may be "a better allegory for the Christian gospel than CS Lewis' The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" – borderline blasphemy for many believers.
Collin Garbarino, assistant professor of history at Houston Baptist University, acknowledges that if he were to press his point of view of the film, which is based on the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale The Snow Queen, his faculty colleagues "might run me out of the university on a rail".
The reason his take on Frozen is potentially incendiary, and at least ironic, is that in the 1990s his denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, led an unsuccessful boycott of Disney. Among their complaints was that the studio's animated films were abandoning their "family values" tradition.
Despite its commercial and critical reception to date, the computer-animated Frozen is not likely to be among Disney's strongest cartoon features such as the early, hand-drawn classics like Snow White or modern classics like The Lion King. It does, however, bring forward an evolving, religious element in Disney's story-telling, something that founder Walt Disney studiously avoided for fear of alienating viewers. Where there was once a non-sectarian "Disney gospel" of universal values, newer studio stewards may be subtly courting Christian audiences they once offended.
Garbarino sees Anna, the younger of the two sisters at the center of Frozen, as a Christ-like figure, persistent in trying to redeem her bewitched older sister despite rejection and disappointment. As Garbarino told me:
Our children need to hear that sometimes the act of love has to come from the person who has been wronged. Christ comes to us, and he's wounded for our transgressions, even though mankind has turned its back on him. God hasn't given up on us.
Just like Anna doesn't give up on her older sister, Elsa.
Frozen, Garbarino argues, also echoes images of hell in both Dante's Inferno and Milton's Paradise Lost. In Dante's hell, instead of the expected vision of a fiery pit, lies a frozen wasteland. Garbarino notes that Elsa, like Satan, yearns for complete freedom when she sings the Oscar-nominated song, Let It Go.
"No right, no wrong, no rules for me. I'm free!" she croons. "Disney depicts Elsa's fall in a manner consistent with the western literary tradition's picture of humanity's descent into sin," wrote Garbarino on his blog. "We call license 'freedom,' and it enslaves us. Luckily for Elsa, a redeemer is coming to rescue her instead of leaving her trapped in her frozen hell."
Longtime Disney animator Mark Henn, who worked on Frozen, agrees that the film has a Christian message, but not a blatant one. The film even contains a brief glimpse of what looks like a flowered cross and a coronation service. Referring to the film, Henn told the evangelical Christian Broadcasting Network:
Christian families can use [Frozen] to talk to their kids ultimately [about] honest, sacrificial love … [T]hey can just peel back the layers a little bit and … just have conversations about that.
When Walt Disney (a self-professed but non-church going Christian) led the studio, Judeo-Christian values were implicit in his cartoons. Yet his work largely eschewed religion itself, considering any explicit portrayal of Christianity bad for business in North Africa and Asia, where Walt hoped to market his animated films. Instead, magic was the chosen, non-sectarian agent of supernatural intervention, Disney's Deus ex machina, as it is in Frozen.
In a way, the implicit theme of Christianity Garbarino and Henn perceive in Frozen is not surprising. Since the 1990s, when the studio passed to the leadership of Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg (both Jews, as it happens), Disney's animated features have become more explicitly religious, beginning with the Hunchback of Notre Dame, an anti-clerical novel turned on its head to be inspiringly faith-positive. The films were also more diverse in their portrayal of non-Christian faiths – Confucianism in Mulan; animism and shamanism in Pocahontas and Brother Bear; and Voodoo in The Princess and the Frog, which also featured Disney's first black princess. (Ironically, Jeffrey Katzenberg waited until he left Disney and co-founded DreamWorks SKG to do his animated feature about Jews, Prince of Egypt.)
In Frozen, the primary tenets of the more generalized and inclusive "Disney Gospel" that date from Walt's time remain constant. Here again, good always triumphs over evil. Faith in something larger than yourself will always prevail; in this case, it's faith in true love. Still, the studio isn't doing much to dissuade those who see Biblical love as well.
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