Between Queenship and Sovereignty: South Korean Box-office Fervor for Frozen

• In Event: Queen's Labyrinth: Single Life and Passion of Fascism

Abstract

This paper examines the record-breaking box-office success of Disney’s animated-film, Frozen (2013) in South Korea, which sold more than ten million tickets at the turn of 2013 and 2014. While its protagonist, Elsa is regarded as a main impetus for the huge success of the film due to her beauty, sex appeal, and ambivalent character-traits, some South Korean news outlets and internet users have identified President Park Geun-hye within the fictional princess-turned-queen. Their logic is based on Elsa and Park’s commonalities, namely their orphanhood as adolescents, their feuds and reconciliations with their own sisters, and the passions and tribulations in their paths to power. Refuting this romanticized logic for both Park and Elsa, this paper locates South Koreans’ passionate reception of Frozen in their identification of Elsa with themselves in terms of lost and regained sovereignty. The democratization of South Korea is riddled with the citizens’ deprivation of sovereignty. During the three decades it spent under military dictatorship, Park Geun-hye’s father, Park Chung-hee, conducted massive witch-hunts against democratic activists in the name of eradication of communist traitors. Similarly, Elsa is not only stigmatized as a monster for her cryokinetic powers but she is also witch-hunted for a non-committed treason by foreign male emissaries. Just as South Koreans have restored their lost sovereignty by overcoming the witch-hunt through fraternal solidarity between intellectual activists and blue-collar workers, Elsa does hers through sisterhood. Examining the concepts of “monstrosity,” “witch-hunt,” and “sovereignty,” this film-analysis attempts to read the queenship of Frozen as an allegory of South Korean sovereignty.

Author

• Yun-Jong Lee, Sungkyunkwan University