“Love Thyself“: A Comparison between the English and the Japanese Versions of the Title Song in Frozen (Walt Disney Pictures, 2013)
“Love Thyself“: A Comparison between the English and the Japanese Versions of the Title Song in Frozen (Walt Disney Pictures, 2013)

Summary/Abstract: This paper will focus on the animated movie Frozen (directed by Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee) and its title song “Let It Go”, translated into Japanese as “Ari no mama de” (literally “The Way I Am”), and will explore its role in the redefinition of femininity as a site of acceptance and compassion, instead of an active interplay of competition and power, as presented by the historical reality modeled by the 60-year-long feminist movement. Released in the year 2013 and highly acclaimed in Japan, Frozen (translated as Anna to yuki no joō, literally: Anna and the Snow-Queen) became the second in terms of total earnings, after USA, with 247,6 USD, the third-highest grossing film of all times (after Spirited Away, 2001, and Titanic, 1997), the second-highest grossing imported film (following Titanic) and the highest-grossing Disney film. Taking into account two other animation movies released in the same year by Studio Ghibli –The Wind Rises (Kaze tachinu, director: Miyazaki Hayao) and The Tale of Princess Kaguya (Kaguya-hime no monogatari, director: Takahata Isao) –this paper analyzes the structural and semantic transformations in Frozen’s title song from its English version into the Japanese adaptation, refering to the three levels of significance emerging in thetranslation-adaptation process: emotional ambivalence, the dynamic reconsideration of legends and myths, the subtle highlighting of the spiral-like dialectics of cause and effect.

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