Episode 141 - Frozen (Chris Buck & Jennifer Lee, 2013) (with Eve Benhamou)
Frozen (Chris Buck & Jennifer Lee, 2013).
The Fantasy/Animation podcast takes listeners on a journey through the intersection between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. Available via Apple Podcasts, Spotify and many of your favourite podcast hosting platforms!
Episode 141 returns to the contemporary era of Disney Feature Animation with this discussion of the computer-animated musical blockbuster Frozen (Chris Buck & Jennifer Lee, 2013), a fairytale film of female empowerment that is widely credited with ushering in Disney’s Third Golden Age of animated features after the ‘Classic’ Disney period and earlier Disney Renaissance. The special guest for this instalment is Dr Eve Benhamou, teaching fellow in Film Studies at the University Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, France who has previously taught at the Bristol School of Animation and Swansea University. Eve’s research concerns the intersection of Disney, Hollywood, and gender - ideas central to her first monograph Contemporary Disney Animation: Genre, Gender and Hollywood (EUP, 2022) which examines the “multifaceted interactions between animated films, Disney properties such as Pixar and Marvel, and popular genres including the romantic comedy, the superhero film and the cop buddy film.” Topics for this episode include Frozen’s negotiation of the longstanding Disney formula and how such a blueprint impacts the film’s identity as both ‘classic’ and ‘typical’ Disney; gender, genre, and the portrayal of girl power and sisterhood through the Anna/Elsa relationship; recent turns towards Baroque aesthetics in Disney’s post-Frozen computer-animated features; stylistic overlaps with the musical performances of Wicked; and what the sustained cultural power of Frozen has to say about the Disney corporation in twenty-first-century America.
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**
Suggested Readings
Benhamou, Eve. 2014. “Freezing versus wrecking: Reworking the superhero genre in Disney’s Frozen (2013) and Wreck-It Ralph (2012).” Animation Practice, Process & Production 4, no. 1 (December): 13-26.
Holliday, Christopher. 2023. “Walt’s Art History: Late Style, Digital Aesthetics and the ‘Disney Baroque’,” animation: an interdisciplinary journal 18, no. 1 (March): 78-95.
Lester, Catherine. 2019. “Frozen hearts and fixer uppers: villainy, gender, and female companionship in Disney’s Frozen.” In Discussing Disney, edited by Amy M. Davis, 193-216. Indiana: John Libbey & Company.
Projansky, Sarah. 2014. Spectacular Girls: Media Fascination and Celebrity Culture. New York and London: New York University Press.
Stover, Cassandra. 2013. “Damsels and Heroines: The Conundrum of the Post-Feminist Disney Princess.” LUX: A Journal of Transdisciplinary Writing and Research 2, no. 1, available at: https://scholarship.claremont.edu/lux/vol2/iss1/29/.