I Rewatched Ice Princess In Honor Of Hayden Panettiere & Michelle Trachtenberg

Some celebrity deaths just hit harder than others. For me — and I’d imagine many other millennials who were teenagers in the 2000s — the last couple years have felt particularly tragic after the loss of two women who felt like mainstays in the pop culture that helped form me. Michelle Trachtenberg had this specific trait to always flip my favorite shows upside-down in the most exciting ways, whether it was as a cosmically concocted sister on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the ultimate conniving interloper on Gossip Girl, or an eye-rolling pop diva on Six Feet Under. And Hayden Panettiere basically grew up with me; we were both just kids learning life’s big lessons when Remember the Titans came out, finding our groove in high school with (the highly underrated) Bring It On: All or Nothing, and fully realizing our powers with Heroes.

I obsessively watched and rewatched pretty much all of their projects from this era, and that included the one time they shared the screen in the 2005 figure-skating drama Ice Princess. So, in the immediate aftermath of Panettiere’s death (and over a year since Trachtenberg’s death in 2025), I decided to pour salt in the wound by watching it once again, for the first time in over two decades. As you can probably guess, this rewatch was a totally different experience than the one I had as a little kid.

Before I dive into some specific thoughts, a basic story overview for those of you who either aren’t familiar or may have forgotten some aspects of Ice Princess.

A Story Of Girlhood (With Noticeably Few Men)

In Ice Princess, Trachtenberg plays the bookish science nerd Casey, whose obsession with watching ice skating competition videos leads her to study her popular figure skater classmate Gen (Panettiere) to break down the physics of the sport for a Harvard scholarship project. However, as Casey dives deeper into her experiment, she discovers her own passion and natural talent for skating, eventually realizing that she wants to pursue the sport over the academic ambitions her mom had forced upon her.

At the same time, Casey’s newfound friendship with Gen encourages the overworked teen queen to stand up to her controlling mom/coach and hang up the skates to instead live the normal life she’s craved for so long.

What’s especially striking about this story that I noticed a lot more upon rewatch is how women-focused it is. I didn’t even realize until the final scene — of Casey’s mom (Joan Cusack) and Gen’s mom (Kim Cattrall) bickering like an old married couple over Casey’s future obligations — that it was never explained why Casey and Gen seemingly don’t have fathers. The only male character that appears in more than one scene and speaks more than a line or two is Gen’s brother Teddy, who is Casey’s love interest throughout the movie.

Clearly, the focus is squarely on these two not-as-opposite-as-they-seem girls, as well as their toxically overbearing single mothers — which is part of what called to mind another major mother-daughter dramedy of the early 2000s.

The Gilmore Girls Connection Is Hard To Ignore

Another show I was obsessively watching back in the 2000s was Gilmore Girls, the series about a bookish brunette teenager in small-town Connecticut who shares her quirky single mother’s dream of going to Harvard. Once I realized Ice Princess was also set in a close-knit Connecticut town, the comparisons just kept popping up.

Like, Casey’s first skate recital performing to Bjork’s “It’s Oh So Quiet” with a group of six-year-olds felt like a Miss Patty production (maybe because Amy Sherman-Palladino’s follow-up series Bunheads also staged a dance to this same song). Or, the fact that the surly and taciturn handyman Teddy’s grand romantic gesture for Casey was to Zamboni the ice on the frozen lake by her home, calling to mind Luke surprising Lorelai with an ice rink in a GG episode that aired just a couple months prior to Ice Princess’ release.

Maybe the Stars Hollow vibes I didn’t realize this movie was tapping so deeply into was part of why I gravitated towards it so much during my peak Gilmore Girls years. But even with this shared DNA, there are a lot of very 2005 pratfalls that Ice Princess decidedly does not stick the landing on.

Plot Holes, Cringe, & Clunky Feminism

Once I noticed Ice Princess was penned in part by The Princess Diaries author Meg Cabot, I could see a lot of the similarities, but this story is definitely not as tight as Mia Thermopolis’. The most obvious plot hole involves Casey’s skating ability. At the start of the movie, she’s shown skating beautifully in the frozen pond by her house and is obsessed with watching skating videos, but Gen’s mom Coach Tina initially has her training with children since Casey apparently had no training before this, and keeps failing simple tricks. Despite that, Olympic legend Michelle Kwan herself says Casey has a shot at the Olympics by the end of the movie (implied to only take place over one school-year).

The movie asserts that Casey becomes a skating expert at an unbelievably accelerated rate thanks to her physics project... even though the bulk of this “research” seems to be that if a skater brings her limbs in closer to her body, she can spin faster. I feel like most skaters already know this. Even worse, the glimpses we get of this apparently Harvard-level research presentation are just basic formulas scrawled over clips of skaters in a hot-pink Comic Sans font.

But OK, fine. This is just a fun Disney movie; I shouldn’t take it so seriously. The real issues I had when rewatching this movie as an adult were with Casey’s mom, Joan. First, she’s seemingly a feminist theory professor who never went to college herself (which is revealed to be a big reason why she’s so set on Casey’s collegiate future). But her grasp on feminism is frustratingly shallow — it basically boils down to the very Y2K notion that any girl who cares about their looks, clothes, or makeup is inherently setting all women back. She probably loved the P!nk song “Stupid Girls,” which came out a year after this movie.

Joan’s main issue with Casey pursuing a figure skating career is that she doesn’t want her daughter wearing the “skimpy” outfits most skaters wear. Of course, the movie rejects this backwards “feminism” in the end as Casey declares that it’s not a crime for her to want to feel pretty, but in the big year 2026, this whole issue just felt so basic and trivial.

I’m not even going to get into the weird relationship the movie has with food — laughing off little jokes about “pigging out” by putting cheese on a salad or treating pancakes made with white flour as a rare, special treat — since this also feels incredibly 2005, and I’d rather focus on the reason Ice Princess does stand the test of time despite these trappings. Or rather, the two reasons.

Michelle & Hayden’s Bond Shines Through It All

Although Ice Princess was the only time Panettiere and Trachtenberg worked together, they actually had a friendship before this, growing up near each other in Brooklyn and attending neighborhood events like block parties together as kids. This connection is very clear in the movie, which I was surprised to find only pits Casey and Gen against one another for a relatively short among of time before they become fierce allies and friends. Obviously, the movie was marketed as more of a rivals-to-friends tale, but it refreshingly doesn’t take much for the two girls to realize they’re both struggling with similar mommy issues.

Apart from this unexpectedly easy friendship, Ice Princess really highlights the character archetypes that both Trachtenberg and Panettiere would come to be so beloved for nailing. As the tongue-tied Casey, Trachtenberg proves just how at home she is in stammering awkwardness. She thrives at turning potentially embarrassing moments into winsome charm and authenticity.

At the other lunch table, Panettiere’s Gen is only the popular mean girl at first glance, hiding an emotional vulnerability that isn’t hard to see beneath the surface after just spending a bit of time with her. This is a chord Panettiere strikes often throughout her career — as forced-to-grow-up-fast cheerleaders in Heroes and Bring It On: All or Nothing, or the bubbly country singer hiding her personal strife in Nashville. And there’s a reason she was cast in this part so often — she nails the emotional realism of this character every time.

I don’t know if I could really articulate why I was so drawn to Trachtenberg and Panettiere’s performances the first time I watched Ice Princess two decades ago, but after reflecting on that special magic they both had after their recent deaths, this movie has become a much more poignant and emotionally affecting artifact that I’m so glad fans can return to whenever they need it.