The Disneyfication of Climate Crisis: Negotiating Responsibility and Climate Action in Frozen, Moana, and Frozen 2

Singing princesses have been primary marketing vehicles and cultural mainstays since Disney launched its animated feature-length film empire with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937. Disney's reach is so expansive that after the release of Frozen in 2013, Admiral Robert Papp, the State Department's Special Representative on the Arctic, approached Disney to collaborate on a film about global warming. No official collaborative global warming film ever emerged, but the most recent animated Disney princess musical films Frozen (2013), Moana (2016), and Frozen 2 (2019) cast climate change as the primary antagonist. The climate destruction in these films may be magical, but it is caused and resolved by humans as a lesson on real climate change.

In this essay, we offer a reading of Frozen, Moana, and Frozen 2 as a trilogy of climate crisis parables. Grounding our analysis in a broad reading of ecocriticism in children's literature and culture, as well as Disney's marketing of the films and their toys and material culture, we argue that these princess films can offer young viewers an introduction to issues of global warming, but do not always follow through on their green promise. In the interest of focus and space, we limit ourselves to examining the narratives and not looking at the medium of animation through which these narratives are told. The princesses' quests to right their environments offer viewers narratives of ecological salvation as heroic pursuit. The films encourage young activists to imagine a role in advocating change, but simultaneously support the environmentally destructive practices of merchandising central to neoliberal capitalism. These three films therefore act as case studies for the larger question of ecopedagogy's uneasy relationship with contemporary commercialization of children's culture. Below, we give a broad overview of ecocriticisim and children's culture, discuss the ecological aspects of these films, connect them to ecofeminist criticism, and discuss how Disney's marketing practices undermine the films' ecological messages.

EcoCriticism and Children's Culture

Nature is prevalent in children's literature and culture, since Romantic childhood is often associated with the natural world. Scholars such as Karen Kilcup, Gweneth Evans, Carolyn Sigler, Sidney Dobrin, and Kenneth Kidd have all discussed the overlap between Victorian childhood ideals and ecological awareness. In the introduction to Wild Things: Children's Culture and Ecocriticism, Dobrin and Kidd state, "Children are still presumed to have a privileged relationship with nature, thanks largely to the legacy of Romantic and Victorian literature, which emphasized—to the point of absurdity—the child's proximity to the natural world and consequent purity" (6). Ambika Bhalla argues that children's culture and environmental writing have a "mutual history" (3). This mutual history is visible in the explosion of ecological themes in children's literature immediately following American environmental policy change such as the passing of the Antiquities Act of 1906, the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1970, and the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol in 2005. Yet Noël Sturgeon notes that children's environmental products ultimately reinforce cultural hegemony; she extends the use of tropes in animation to ecoliterature—or literature about the environment—including the absences of White mothers in favor of brown or Indigenous "Earth Mothers" and the coding of polluting villains as upper-class gay men (109).

Taken together, this scholarship suggests that children's literature often invests in nature writing as a method of naturalizing childhood innocence along with specific economic and cultural practices, while also claiming to invest children with individual responsibility for global environmental well-being. This is certainly true of colonial Victorian novels such as The Secret Garden (1912) and the founding of overtly religious and nationalist scouting movements in Britain (1910), Canada (1907), and the United States (1910). Sturgeon brings these discussions into the late twentieth century by presenting Captain Planet as an example. She explains that the tagline "the power is yours" suggests that this power is natural to the presumed White middle-class viewers and can be wielded over other child subjects, and...