Megan Stanton

Have you ever watched a movie that was so poorly made it was insulting to the cause it was made to support? Well if for some reason you want to watch one I would recommend Noelle. Noelle starring Anna Kendrick as Noelle, is one of the latest Disney Christmas movies that is exclusively available on Disney+, it is the story of Santa’s daughter and the lineage of the Santa legacy, you see when Santa dies the title is passed down to his son, Nick, who neither wants the job or is even good at the job, he possesses no magical powers that a good Santa should have. Under mountains of stress Nick runs away to Phoenix, Arizona and becomes a yogi. Noelle is blamed for Nick’s disappearance as she suggested to him to take a weekend away to relax and pull himself together, but when Christmas is a week away and Nick still hasn't returned Noelle goes to Phoenix to try and bring him back, meeting new characters along the way, making lifelong friendships, and discovering things about herself she hadn't known before, like maybe the fact that she could be the next Santa. The idea of Noelle is fantastic, the first female Santa, challenging gender roles and changing the game, but the execution of that idea leaves so much to be desired. In the first 20 minutes I could already tell you the entire plot of the movie, and by the end I could affirm that every guess was correct. I was super excited for a female Santa, but when she is posed like a stuck up, idiot, princess, that quite frankly is one of the rich popular girls that bullied you in high school, for over half of the movie, I don’t think anyone was impressed. She does change into a “good person”, but only because she realizes the good in Christmas by using her magic powers to bond with children over what they want for Christmas. If I were to rate Noelle, I would rate it 0.5 out of 5 stars, it was utterly disappointing, and came across as extremely rushed with the plot of about 50 other children’s movies. If Disney wants to be progressive and seem as though they actually care about equal rights they need to spend some time and come up with something more original and something that will actually support women everywhere instead of just insulting over half of the population. -Megan Stanton