Melt for Me: Communicating Ice Empathy Through the Plasticity of Disney

The melting of the polar ice shields that protect our planet and stabilise vast parts of the Earth’s biosphere has been widely recognised across the planet. This ice crisis has triggered a cryo-critical awareness for the retreat of ice bergs, shelves and glaciers as a direct result of human action. It is a looming apocalypse that has seen increased calls by climate scientists and social activists for a change in societal attitudes towards ice to avoid environmental disaster. But with abstracted and unemotive language seemingly unable to produce immediate, large-scale action by simply laying bare the truth and loss of future life on earth without our ice, this chapter suggests an alternative to promote understanding. By building on concepts of animation and the plasticity of feeling, it presents a case study of ice in Walt Disney’s 2013 feature film Frozen as a popular plasmo-affective feel-view language. With ice animates such as Olaf the snowman, we are emotionally reshaped, bent and stretched, as we move closer to imagining and intuiting the enormous importance of the ice in our world—and the need for humans to develop a new emotional relationality with it.