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In:Emotion in Texts for Children and Young Adults: Moving stories
Edited by Karen Coats and Gretchen Papazian
[Children’s Literature, Culture, and Cognition 13] 2023
► pp. 83–103

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Chapter 4
Literalizing emotions in Disney and Pixar

Frozen and Inside Out challenge emotional hierarchies

 | Nichols College
Published online: 6 January 2023
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/clcc.13.04dey
Abstract
Frozen and Inside Out warn of the dangers of suppressing emotions. As the films literalize emotions into physical entities to emphasize that emotions exist and that we must address them, they challenge the ideas that emotions solely reside within us. Moreover, as they respond to the combined binaries of reason/emotion and male/female, which taken together label females as inferiorly emotional, the films dismantle the cultural delineation of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ girls, seen in many earlier Disney films. This chapter contrasts Disney’s portrayal of female emotions in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Cinderella with the depictions of young female characters’ emotional lives in Frozen and Inside Out. The latter films encourage their audiences to address and express their own emotional states, importantly legitimizing girls’ pain, and given the role that Disney and its films play in our culture, potentially impacting broader understanding and acceptance of culturally denigrated emotions.
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • ‘With a smile and a song’: Disney’s treatment of female emotion in early films
  • Frozen: Challenging emotional interiority
  • Inside out: Challenging ‘bad’ emotions
  • Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
References (26)
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