Kierkegaard’s Three Spheres and Cinematic Fairy Tale Pedagogy inFrozen,Moana, andTangled

Abstract

Although Disney films are sometimes denigrated as popular or “low” art forms, this article argues that they often engage deeply with, and thereby communicate, significant moral truths. The capitalistic enterprise of contemporary modern cinema demands that cinematic moral pedagogy be sublimated into non-partisan forms, often by substituting secular proxies for otherwise divine or spiritual components. By adapting Søren Kierkegaard’s tripartite existential anthropology of the self, I analyze the subjective experiences of the protagonists in three recent animated fairy tales—Disney’s Frozen, Moana, and Tangled—to demonstrate how these princess movies bridge the imaginative gap between the mundane and the divine.