#chibisaru70

COMMISSION FROM @chibisaru70

Okay, so this became more of an analysis of Disney’s attempt of representing that Sami culture and what the Trolls really don’t-have-much-of-anything-to-do-with-anything rather than a simple agree-disagree answer.

I’ll do the best I can to provide my two bits, but be prepared for a bunch of text ahead!

Disclaimer: As a whole, I find the Trolls unnecessary to keeping the story progressive and cohesive, and that they could have been left out or replaced with a different concept of “magical” beings entirely. It’s a shame because they’re designs are really appealing and creative, but they cause more problems in the story than they solve:

They create a rather weak premise for Anna growing up not knowing her sister’s powers. I understand that to some degree they wanted to remove magic from her mind in order to keep her cold from progressing, but they never state a law about what would happen if Anna were to learn about Elsa’s curse.

Did her parents only leave her out of the situation to make things easier? Were they afraid that if she learned about it, would it cause Elsa’s freezing of her to progress? Obviously not, because when Anna learns about it as an adult,it doesn’t affect her magically.

And when Anna and Kristoff go in search of the Trolls to help un-freeze’s Anna’s heart, all they do is push the “subtext” romantic relationship. The one lady Troll does state the BIG LESSON to Anna by telling her, “We’re not asking you to change him, because people don’t really change… People make bad choices if they’re mad or scared of stressed.” But that’s bad story telling. Movies about SHOWING, not telling. And even then, if there WERE to be a character to convince Anna hat she has to forgive her sister, or help her remember how much her sister has sacrificed for her, it should be Olaf, not the trolls.

So, as a whole, they are one but fat plothole.

But getting back to your main point. As far as Kristoff’s Sami heritage and how it is not portrayed accurately, I suppose you could be right? We don’t see much insight into the Sami culture from him, save for the movie’s introduction. We don’t really get much insight into the Sami culture at all, save for the two introductory songs:

Vuelie, the cultural chanting we hear as the snowflakes fall around Arendelle, leading to the movie’s title card. According to the Disney Wiki, the song is inspired by indigenous Sami and Norwegian culture, and was written and composed by Norwegian composer Frode Fjellheim. The song is a combination of Sami y[j]oiking, a form of folk chanting and one of the oldest forms of traditional music know to man, and the Danish Christmas hymn “Dejlig er Jorden”/”Fairest Lord Jesus”. Composed by Frode Fjellheim. The original hymn is composed by the Danish composer B.S. Ingemann. Vuelie functions a lot like The Circle of Life from The Lion King, in that it sets the tone and mystic surrounding the film. Unfortunately, we don’t see much of Vuelie until the end of the film, working more as book ends than a tone.

Frozen Heart, the song which is sung by the Sami ice-harvesting men shortly after Vuelie. It serves the purpose of introducing Kristoff and to establish the overall theme, while Vuelie was meant to establish the look and feel. Frozen Heart is especially vocal in what to aspect from Elsa’s powers, stating that Ice is both dangerous and beautiful, and significant to the Sami livelihood. It works similarly to Fathoms Below from The Little Mermaid, establishing both what to expect from the story and the style of the orchestral score.

Now, as far as indigenous cultures go, I will try not to put my foot in my mouth on the subject because I’ve seen quite a lot of flack rise up recently about how the Sami was depicted accurately as far as Kristoff’s appearance goes. People were upset because, despite being indigenous, he was not a person of color as most people were hoping. But looking up the Sami culture, quite a few of them are not people of color, but light-skinned and blond like Kristoff. They have a wide range of appearances.

But I cannot help but feel like their culture was not represented adequately enough. For a few reasons:

We don’t really see much of his heritage because the story’s precedence is over Elsa and Anna’s character development. The strongest points of seeing the Sami are at the beginning…. nope, that’s about it.

Kristoff’s personality, I find, is very American-ized in the film. Like you said Chibi, this might be because he was raised by trolls and not his actual parents. But I’m still confused on that subject, because we see that Ksitoff is still employed as an ice-harvester. And it’s not really established whether he does this independently or if he still works with the other ice harvesters. I suppose from his personality we are to assume he does this independently, seeing as he loathes the company of people so much, but it still looks like a lot of work to cut ice apart on your own. I suppose the audience is led to take what they will of Kristoff and his ice-harvesting. But we don’t really see enough of him doing it to know how, where, and with/without whom he does it with.

Either way, he could have been an interesting insight on an old culture, but it feels like the story team missed their marks on that. Whether that was on purpose or not, it’s hard to say.

And the biggest, biggest reason I feel that their culture was not represented adequately enough is…

I did not put together that the men singing Frozen Heart were Sami. I thought that they were simply Norwegian Townsmen working in an ice-related profession. I didn’t understand what a Sami person was from their representation.

This could possibly be from my own ignorance of the Sami culture, and I apologize profusely if it is, but there didn’t feel like there was any key aspects of the working men from the rest of the people from Arendelle, save for their warm clothes. And that could have been easily excused as simply a difference in types of clothing rather than cultures: the beginning of the movie takes place during winter, the Arendelle coronation takes place during summer.

I suppose the story team was walking on thin ice [forgive the pun] when interpreting this indigenous culture. With only one main character as a Sami, Kristoff would become the representation of that specific group of people, just as is the case with a lot of media where there is only one person of color surrounded by non-POC. With Kristoff as the one representative, Disney ran the risk of misinterpreting or stereotyping their culture and coming off as racist.

But they didn’t really solve that problem. They only went in the exact opposite direction, and seemingly took away that part of Kristoff’s character, those roots, thus not really representing the culture at all.

TL;DR: I suppose it could be interpreted that living with Trolls took that away from Kristoff’s character, but that sounds more fanon than canon. If the fandom has to come up with excuses for why an indigenous culture, the only indigenous people of Scandinavia recognized and protected under the international conventions of indigenous peoples I might add, was not understood more or made more apparent to the audience outside of concept art, then that’s just one more strike against Frozen.

Granted, all of this is based on opinion. I’m sorry that this sort of turned into a rant. I do kind of agree with your idea to a certain extent, and I hope you don’t mind the extensive analysis too much chibisarua70. It just sounds more like an excuse than a headcanon. Thank you for asking though! ^^;

Okay, I know I pretty much just reblog stuff, but this guy is a irl friend of mine that has been dealing with severe medical and emotional pain before I even met him. You can read his own words in the link. I don’t have any money to help him, but if anybody who happens to follow me has something to spare or could just spread this around to anyone who does, it would mean a whole hell of a lot.