For my birthday this year I took my kids to the cinema to see Frozen II. This was a noble gesture on my part – the hook from Let It Go, from the original movie, has been playing in my head on repeat for four years – but my girls were so excited that I sucked up the insane cost of cinema tickets in New York (almost $80 for three people!) and settled in for a long evening. As the movie got under way, my kids ploughed through huge vats of frozen blue drinks while I wondered vaguely at the single middle-aged men in the audience. And then something odd happened.
December can be a charmless time of year in New York, characterised by freezing rain and 4.30pm sunsets. It’s the only time of year that I long to live in the suburbs, where you can drive a car to the shops – not return your embarrassingly large children to their old double buggy so you can load up the back with shopping to push home through the cold.
It’s not just that, of course. There were signs, going into the movie, that all was not right. We recently rewatched Mary Poppins Returns – not a film I had any affection for when we saw it in the cinema last year, but in this cold, dark season I found myself responding to its blameless exertions. “We haven’t lost Mother, not really,” piped up the youngest child, expertly cast for his inability to sing, and when he went into a cracked reprise of The Place Where Lost Things Go, I had to turn sharply to look out of the window.
There were other warning signs. During turbulence over the Great Lakes on a recent cross-country flight, I clung with undignified terror to the bicep of the man sitting next to me while he tried to go on reading his book about business analytics, and said soothing things like “my cousin is an aerospace engineer, it’s basically impossible for us to fall out of the sky”.
The second Frozen movie – unlike the original, in which Elsa’s moment of self-actualisation is symbolised by the emergence of a hitherto concealed and thumping great cleavage – seemed, in its opening scenes, to be less weirdly sexualised, although the sisters’ eyes were still as huge as anime porn stars’.
But then here came Elsa, roused from her bed in the middle of the night by ghostly voices emanating from the fjord. It’s almost tax season in the United States again; you can’t get in to see a good doctor until March because everyone has used up the annual excess on their health insurance and is on the medical equivalent of a trolley dash.
In the eye of the storm, Idina Menzel as Elsa shout-sang Into the Unknown, ice bolts shooting out of each palm while shouldering a tremendous burden from above – a forcefield that threatened to crush her and the whole town in a 360-degree vortex of terror. Yes, I thought, that’s how it is. I identify wholly, this movie is practically a documentary and – goddammit – I’m going to cry.
• Emma Brocke is a Guardian columnist
