I get that everyone is like "but hey lilo and stitch.. there is a movie about sisters by disney" but tbh i get where the people praising frozen for that come from. its a disney /princess/ movie so its in a different category than lilo and her sis. personally, i only watch disney princess movies. from the little i saw about lilo and stich in media and this website i always thought that woman was her mother xD so it might not actually be racism but indifference to the movie..?
To be clear, I'm not saying absolutely that I think Lilo and Nani being WOC is definitely the reason people ignore the movie--it's something that came up in a post on here a couple weeks ago that made me think, and I think that could definitely be part of it, sadly.
(Before I go further, let me say that I've only seen Frozen once, back in January, so whatever I say on that front could be a little muddled.)
I just really think Lilo and Stitch is a better movie when it comes to handling both the relationship of the sisters and, honestly, bullying. The thing that strikes me about Frozen is that Anna and Elsa's parents reinforced the culture of fear surrounding Elsa. When I watched it, I actually thought they dealt with it sensitively, but then I read meta on here and realized how wrong their actions were. Were they trying to protect Elsa, yes, but they react to her powers by being afraid of what they could do, just like they think the outer world will. They keep her away from society. They teach her that something is different, and wrong, with her.
Lilo and Stitch is different. Lilo is bullied because she's a little unusual and because young girls can be jerks that way. Lilo doesn't seem to let it get to her at first, but she finally admits quietly to Nani that "People treat me different." Nani's response is "They just don't know what to say." She doesn't blame Lilo for being herself. She blames society for not being more accepting, better equipped to handle someone like Lilo who does things a little differently. When she's fired from her job because of Lilo's antics, she doesn't blame Lilo; she jokes about it (telling her the manager was a vampire who wanted her to join his legion of the undead) in a way that Lilo will relate to. You see that Nani is very much unprepared for some aspects of guardianship, but she does the absolute best she can by understanding and relating to Lilo.
You just... don't really get that with Anna and Elsa, to me, because of the isolation forced on Elsa by her fear. A while back there were some very legitimate comparisons of Frozen to Sense and Sensibility, my favorite Austen, which also involves a conflict between sisters over a man the younger sister has only just met and becomes infatuated with. Emma Thompson's screenplay for the 1995 movie resolves that conflict between them nicely; when Elinor tells Marianne not to be too hard on herself about her conduct, when her suitor was the one who was more in the wrong, Marianne replies, "I compare [my conduct] with what it ought to have been. I compare it with yours." Because Elsa was isolated for their entire childhood, she and Anna just don't have any sort of bond that allows them to talk about their separate viewpoints and reconcile them somehow, like Lilo and Nani. That really bothers me. I'm a younger sister. I had a lot of conflict with my older sister growing up, because it took until we were mature enough to see past our vastly different personalities for us to become close. The movie really glossed over them building a relationship in favor of an eleventh-hour, forced-by-circumstances realization of... how much they love each other. Which should sort of be a given.
I also think Lilo and Stitch is a better movie because it reinforces a nontraditional definition of family. Nani parenting Lilo is shown to be every bit as legitimate as a traditional nuclear family. Family, the movie tells us, is what you make it, and you don't give up on each other. (Simplistic in that, yes, it is absolutely okay to give up on toxic family members, but that's not a place the movie would be expected to go.) A pretty stark contrast to Anna and Elsa's parents pretty much giving up on Elsa and deciding she's a hopeless case and not worth introducing into society to find acceptance, forcing her into isolation, no matter the reason.
I do understand some people only like watching the princess movies. That's fine. But I think it's really sad to tout Frozen as the first great Disney movie about sisters when there was another wonderful one barely more than ten years ago that's now been all but erased by Frozen's success.
