If you’re like me and you live with a young uber-fan of Frozen you will have noticed the huge success of that film and all the merchandising around it. You may in fact kick the cat if you overhear L*t It G* just one more time.
What you may not have noticed, if you’re anything like me, is that in 2012 — the year before the release of Pixar’s Frozen – Disney released a lesser-budget movie called Secret of the Wings.
Whereas Frozen scores 7.7 on IMDb, Secret of the Wings scores a solid 7.1 and is well worth checking out if you’re looking around for something like Frozen but not goddam Frozen again.
The similarities are many:
- A story for children that focuses first and foremost on relationship building
- The main relationship is between two sisters
- The freezing landscape is the main enemy, with other characters working together against it.
This film isn’t my ideal production, but what is?
- The characters range between looking like Barbies and looking like Bratz dolls. (In case you’re wondering how else females can possibly be animated, here.)
- The All-Knowing sage-like characters are still mostly male, which means the girls take advice, as usual from, ahem, mansplainers. (Yes, I’m starting to hate that word and am probably using it too broadly, but it’s A Thing.)
- The younger male characters are divided into what I shall call ‘hunks’ and ‘geeks’, similar to those on Brave (which was short on ‘hunks’) — a newish division in children’s stories which is kind of no better than dividing female characters into ‘pretty’ and ‘ugly’, Cinderella style.
Although the animation looks cheaper than that of Frozen, it’s still very high quality and, let’s face it, still better than anything we were seeing 15 years ago.
A huge positive from my point of view: The songs aren’t as catchy. In fact, they’re those pretty shitty songs that you hear on any made-for-TV movie marketed at little girls. The kind that might have been sung by a Taylor Swift robot. If I’d just watched Frozen I’d be annoyed at myself for busting out with Frozen lyrics.
While Secret of the Wings lacks a comical character in the vein of Olaf (though LOLed at The Keeper one time), and therefore probably doesn’t have quite the dual audience (age wise or gender-wise) that Frozen has achieved, Secret of the Wings is no better or worse in any other respect than Frozen, and my six year old daughter likes this one just as much. In fact, she wouldn’t quit pestering me until I’d watched it.
