Frozen

Having recently resumed getting DVDs from Netflix after a hiatus of several months, last night I finally watched Disney's Frozen, the movie that created such a stir last year, particularly among young girls. Frozen has been widely praised as the best Disney film since the 1989-92 "Renaissance," and while I might still prefer The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996), as far as anything since then is concerned I would have to agree. What is striking for a monarchist is the way that even in the second decade of the 21st century, it is stories about royalty, in this case a princess/queen learning to accept her duties and trying to find a balance between repressing her abilities entirely and failing to control them at all, that remain the most appealing, and thankfully Disney (despite everything that's changed there since Walt's time) still understands that. And Frozen would not be as enchanting as it is without the intrinsic aesthetic beauty of monarchy and monarchical civilizations, including the ice palace that Queen Elsa builds with her magical powers, for even without magical powers, it is the architecture of Monarchy that along with that of religion surpasses all else in its glory. Fortunately, unlike most of the modern real world, the country on which the world of Frozen appears to have been substantially based, Norway, still has its monarchy today. As I wrote in 2010, children are natural monarchists; only adults who have lost any sense of childlike wonder could invent something as pedestrian as republicanism.