*All reviews contain spoilers*
Disclaimer: This blog is purely recreational and not for profit. Any material, including images and/or video footage, is property of their respective companies, unless stated otherwise. The author claims no ownership of this material. The opinions expressed therein reflect those of the author and are not to be viewed as factual documentation. All screencaps are from Disneyscreencaps.com.
Cast –
Stephen J. Anderson – Kai
Kristen Bell – Anna
Eva Bella – 8-year-old Elsa
Paul Briggs – Marshmallow
Tyree Brown – Young Kristoff
Lewis Cleale – Cliff
Jesse Corti – Spanish Dignitary
Kevin Del Aguila – Troll
Kevin Duda – Troll
Santino Fontana – Hans
Josh Gad – Olaf
Spencer Lacey Ganus – 12-year-old Elsa
Tucker Gilmore – Irish Dignitary
Jonathan Groff – Kristoff
Ciarán Hinds – Pabbie and Grandpa
Maurice LaMarche – King Agnarr
Jennifer Lee – Queen Iduna and additional voices
Annie Lopez – Baby Troll
Katie Lopez – 5-year-old Anna (singing)
Jeffrey Marcus – German Dignitary
Edie McClurg – Gerda
Idina Menzel – Elsa
Agatha Lee Monn – 9-year-old Anna
Robert Pine – Bishop
Benjamin Schrader – Troll
Livvy Stubenrauch – 5-year-old Anna (speaking)
Alan Tudyk – Duke of Weselton
Jack Whitehall – Gothi – Troll Priest (apparently his part got cut, but Gothi still speaks a bit!)
Chris Williams – Oaken
Maia Wilson – Bulda
Tommar Wilson – Singing Troll
Plus many additional voices, as usual
Sources of Inspiration – The Snow Queen, a Danish fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen, 1845
Release Dates –
November 10th, 2013 at the New York International Children’s Film Festival in the USA (early screening)
November 17th, 2013 at the Cork International Film Festival in Ireland (early screening)
November 19th, 2013 in Hollywood, California, USA (premiere)
November 22nd, 2013 in USA (limited release)
November 27th, 2013 in USA (general release)
Run-time – 102 minutes
Directors – Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee (Lee was the first female director of a Disney film)
Composers – Christophe Beck
Worldwide Gross – $1.276 billion
Accolades – 79 wins and 57 nominations, including 2 Oscar wins
2013 in History
More than 100 people are killed by a series of bomb blasts in the Pakistani city of Quetta
North Korea conducts its third underground nuclear test, sparking outrage from the international community
The Chelyabinsk meteor explodes above Russia, injuring over a thousand people; it is the most powerful meteor strike in Earth’s atmosphere since the Tunguska Event of 1908 (which also happened over Russia)
Benedict XVI resigns as pope, becoming the first to do so since Gregory XII in 1415, and the first to do so voluntarily since Celestine V in 1294
He is replaced by Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina (under the name of Francis), who becomes the first Jesuit pope, the first from the Americas and the first from the Southern Hemisphere
Cyprus becomes the latest European nation to experience a financial crisis, getting a 10-billion-euro bailout from the EU which precipitates a banking crisis on the island
Canada becomes the first nation to withdraw from the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, but reverses this decision in 2016
The United Nations General Assembly adopts the Arms Trade Treaty to regulate the international trade of conventional weapons
Five people are killed and hundreds of others injured in the Boston Marathon bombing, perpetrated by a pair of Islamist extremist brothers; both are sentenced to death, but one is currently still alive
A group of scientists led by Shoukhrat Mitalipov publishes the first report of embryonic stem cells created using somatic cell nuclear transfer (i.e. cloning)
The murder of 25-year-old Fusilier Lee Rigby by two British-Nigerian extremists sparks outrage across the UK, including a wave of anti-Muslim backlash
The 2013 El Reno tornado becomes the widest in recorded history when its funnel exceeds two and a half miles; among the eight people killed are four storm chasers, the first ever to be killed directly by weather
Whistle-blower Edward Snowden, a former CIA employee, discloses operations engaged in by a U.S. government mass surveillance program to news publications and flees the country, later being granted temporary asylum in Russia
Over two and a half thousand people are killed by security forces following a military coup in Egypt
The Ghouta chemical attack results in hundreds of deaths during the Syrian Civil War
The Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya, is targeted by al-Shabaab Islamic militants; at least 62 people are killed
Saudi Arabia rejects a seat on the United Nations Security Council, the first nation to do so
One of the strongest typhoons in recorded history, Typhoon Haiyan, causes devastation across the Philippines and Southeast Asia, killing more than six thousand people
A wave of demonstrations and civil rest known as Euromaidan begins in Ukraine, the precursor to that nation’s revolution the following year
Chinese unmanned spacecraft Chang’e 3, carrying the Yutu rover, becomes the first spacecraft to “soft”-land on the Moon since 1976
Clashes between Dinka and Nuer members of the presidential guard lead to the start of the ongoing South Sudanese Civil War
Birth of Prince George of Cambridge
We’re so close to the end, and then we reach this behemoth. Better make yourself comfortable, because this is gonna be a long one!
The idea of doing an adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s Snow Queen was being explored at Disney decades before Frozen was created, all the way back in the late thirties. As I mentioned in my Little Mermaid review, Walt was then considering creating a kind of package film with many Andersen tales sandwiched together as animated vignettes, interspersed with some live-action footage. In March of 1940, he suggested making the film a co-production with Samuel Goldwyn, who would be responsible for producing the live-action parts. However, the creators ran into the same problem as the one faced by the Frozen team – the character of the Snow Queen herself was unworkable and could not easily be made palatable for modern audiences. The entire Disney-Goldwyn collab ground to a halt in 1942 following America’s entry into the war, but Goldwyn did go on to produce his own fully live-action film in 1952 called Hans Christian Andersen. At Disney, though, The Snow Queen was shelved for the time being.
Fast forward to the late 1990s, and Disney were riding high once again following years of success in the Renaissance. The Snow Queen was one of many projects dug up and reconsidered for production around this time, with Glen Keane being attached early on to what would have been a traditionally-animated adaptation (ah, what could have been). Alas, this version of the project fell apart in 2002 when Keane left to work on Tangled – and this wasn’t the first failed attempt to get The Snow Queen off the ground, either. Various other artists like Paul and Gaëtan Brizzi, Dick Zondag, Dave Goetz and even Harvey Fierstein had tried to pitch their own versions of the story to Disney, but got nowhere. With the collapse of Keane’s version in 2002, the project was once again thwarted.
Finally, in 2008, the project resurfaced again. John Lasseter, then chief creative officer at Disney, brought back director Chris Buck from Song Pictures Animation to have him pitch a few ideas for potential films – Buck did so that September, and one of his ideas was an adaptation of The Snow Queen. Lasseter had long been interested in creating a film version of this himself, as he had seen some of the concept work from earlier attempts and was “blown away,” so he readily accepted the proposal. Buck, for his part, was not particularly inspired by the original Andersen tale; he simply wanted to “do something different on the definition of true love.”
So, after a good seventy years trapped in development hell, the production finally began under the title of Anna and the Snow Queen, with the animation intended to be traditional at this point. Josh Gad was apparently already attached to the film at this early stage, while Elsa was going to be played by Megan Mullally from Will & Grace. Then, just when things seemed to be going smoothly, the whole show hit a brick wall again in 2010, when the crew encountered the same problems with adapting Elsa’s character as their counterparts in the forties had. Not until after the success of Tangled did production continue, now under the new, snappier title of Frozen. The animation style became computerised, and songwriters Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez joined the project in early 2012. Around that same time, Buck was officially confirmed as director, with Lasseter and Peter Del Vecho producing the film.
Still grappling with the difficulties posed by Elsa’s character, Buck and Del Vecho pitched some of their storyboards to Lasseter, with the entire production team then going to a conference to hear his thoughts. While Lasseter had enjoyed their “light-hearted” take on the tale, he still wasn’t satisfied with the characters; he felt they weren’t “multi-faceted” enough and that audiences “wouldn’t really be able to connect with them.” Everybody knuckled down to try and solve this persistent problem, and eventually, they had a breakthrough – they would rewrite the character of Gerda into one named Anna, who would be Elsa’s sister, thus establishing a family dynamic between the two. To build on this new idea, the team held a “Sister Summit” at which they interviewed women from all over the studio who had sisters of their own, asking them to describe their relationships with their siblings and exploring the unique dynamics of sisterhood.
However, in spite of this progress, the script continued to challenge and frustrate the team. The songwriters wrote songs for an early draft of it, only to face disappointment when that version was scrapped. Then, in 2012, a writer from Wreck-It Ralph called Jennifer Lee joined the team, and this was the moment when Frozen really began to come into its own. With just seventeen months to completely re-write the script, Lee worked closely with Buck, Anderson-Lopez and Lopez to get the film’s story right, and in August that year, she was rewarded for her commitment with a promotion to co-director alongside Buck. This made her the first female director of a Disney canon film – a great milestone for the studio, although it’s a shame it took them so long to get there!
By November, the team believed they had finally overcome the seemingly-insurmountable story problems, but then in February of 2013 – mere months before the planned release date – disaster struck. According to producer Del Vecho, the team were forced to accept that the story still “wasn’t working,” resulting in yet more re-writes of key scenes and songs which lasted all the way through to June (five months ahead of the release). Apparently, the composition of the song For the First Time in Forever was what really saved the film at this point, as it became, in Lopez’s words, “the linchpin of the whole movie.” That month also saw the first test screenings of the film in Phoenix, Arizona, with the half-finished film presented to two audiences with Lasseter and Ed Catmull present. This was when they first got an inkling of the hit the film would become; as Lee recalled, “the reaction was huge.” Catmull, who had said to her early on that she needed to “earn that ending,” told her after the screenings, “you did it.”
Incredible though it may seem, the film did manage to wrap up on time and met its scheduled November release date. After that, it proceeded to single-handedly take over the world – something about this one really seems to have resonated with a lot of people and they made it into a monster hit, the likes of which Disney hadn’t seen since The Lion King (although Frozen’s profits dwarfed even that film’s). Now, I must admit going into this that I am not one of those people; while I like the film just fine, I never could understand the sheer magnitude of other people’s love for it – to my mind, Disney have produced much better films than this rather middle-of-the-road effort, and you can really feel the effects of all that hasty re-writing. Regardless, let’s break out the snow shovels and see if we can uncover the secret to this beast’s success.
Characters and Vocal Performances
Kristen Bell was cast as the film’s lead, Anna, in March of 2012, with Lee stating that the decision was influenced by a series of vocal tracks Bell had recorded in her youth featuring songs from The Little Mermaid. Bell was pregnant during her recording sessions, which meant that she had to re-record some of her lines later as her voice had deepened. She approached the role with relish, as she had “dreamed of being in a Disney animated film” since she was a little girl. However, she also noted that while she had “always loved Disney animation… there was something about the females that was unattainable to me. Their posture was too good and they were too well-spoken, and I feel like I really made this girl much more relatable and weirder and scrappier and more excitable and awkward. I’m really proud of that.” Hm… well, we’ll get into that.
Eighteen-year-old Anna is a princess of the Norwegian kingdom of Arendelle, and the protagonist of the film. As a child, she and her sister Elsa enjoy a close bond and often sneak out to play together, having fun with Elsa’s cryokinetic gifts, which allow her to conjure a wonderland of ice and snow for them to frolic in. However, after Elsa nearly kills her sister by accident, a visit to some local trolls (?) convinces the girls’ parents to repress and hide Elsa’s abilities in order to protect Anna and everyone else. Thus, the two sisters grow up estranged from one another, despite Anna’s desperation to reconnect with her former playmate, and the deaths of their parents only deepen that turmoil. As a young adult at Elsa’s coronation, Anna finally decides she “can’t live like this anymore” and sets out to fix her relationship with Elsa – that is, when she’s not falling over some guy, of course.
Anna is a frustrating character to me. On the surface, she seems fun and it’s easy to see why audiences, particularly children, responded so positively to her. Anna is the extrovert to Elsa’s introvert; she’s outspoken, energetic (except in the mornings) and adorably klutzy, with a positive attitude and a great deal of confidence in herself, so naturally kids like to imagine she’d be their friend if they lived in the same world. Actually, Anna is remarkably similar to Rapunzel – and not just physically. They are the same age, with similar personalities and living under similar circumstances of isolation… but there’s a big difference between the two which is too important to overlook.
You see, both girls start out with a goal. Rapunzel’s is to see the floating lights outside her window, which represent a wider desire to experience the real world that she has been hidden from for so long. What makes Rapunzel so compelling is her agency – she petitions her “mother” to let her go and, when the request is denied, she takes the first opportunity to go anyway. She disables a grown man by herself, uses her wits to convince him to lead her to her goal, then successfully saves his life multiple times during their journey, using her people skills to convince his would-be captors to leave him be. While the ultimate defeat of Gothel is down to Flynn, Rapunzel still works tirelessly to achieve an admirable goal throughout the film, and this gets the audience firmly on her side from the beginning.
The reason I’ve gone on at such length about her is to contrast her story with that of Anna. I don’t understand why people hold Frozen up as some kind of bastion of feminism, because frankly, I think Anna is the most helpless and uninspiring female lead we’ve seen in decades. Only three times does she make her own decisions – once when she (rather foolishly) rides off to find Elsa, convinced that her sister isn’t dangerous despite all evidence to the contrary, and then when she forces Kristoff to take her up the North Mountain immediately instead of more sensibly waiting until they’ve both rested and eaten (I’ll get to the third below). For the rest of the film, her actions are dictated by the other characters.
When Elsa’s mishap in their childhood leaves her head partially frozen, the trolls manipulate her memories without her consent and advise her parents never to tell her of Elsa’s powers. While I know the initial memory-wipe was done to save her life, this latter piece of advice proves dangerous down the line, as it seriously messes up Anna’s perception of her sister and leads her into further danger when she tries to confront Elsa.
Then there’s the engagement to Hans; while she’s clearly eager to agree to it, the fact is that it is his idea, and we later learn that he was cruelly manipulating her the entire time, sensing her desperation for love. Even then, when she tries to agree to it, she has that decision taken out of her hands by Elsa, who refuses to give the marriage her blessing. Granted, Elsa is in the right here (obviously), but it’s still another instance where Anna isn’t allowed to make her own choices. When Anna turns up to confront Elsa at the ice palace later, her sister forces her out with magic, and then we get that dreadful scene where Kristoff’s troll friends try to force her into marrying the guy and almost get to the “I Do’s”, only stopping when she nearly collapses from Elsa’s ice magic. Kristoff promptly rushes her back to the castle so Hans can save her, and when Hans betrays her it is then down to Olaf to warm her up and get her outside… It just goes on and on, one long game of pass-the-parcel between various male characters.
Only at the last moment, when she spots her sister about to be sliced by Hans, does Anna make her third and final decision – and this is the one that gets her all the love, because it’s a decision usually made by male characters. Despite knowing she is on the verge of death, Anna jumps forward to sacrifice herself, saving her sister’s life at the cost of her own. I will admit, this is a nice change of pace; after seeing so many strong and noble males doing this for their “womenfolk”, it was about time that a female character got to make a similar sacrifice herself – and not for a man, but for another woman! Unfortunately, this one moment is not enough to make up for the presentation of Anna elsewhere in the film.
I’ve already compared Anna to Rapunzel, so in a way, it feels natural to further compare her to Quasimodo. Both Rapunzel and Quasi endured similar situations of isolation and repression, and despite their very different personalities, both ultimately learned that the only way to escape this was to fight for their own freedom. With Anna, I feel like Disney were taking a few steps back in terms of character development; her arc is more similar to Aurora’s, and we all remember how passive she was, barely taking part in her own film. Anna hasn’t even been isolated for as long as Quasi or Rapunzel, yet the first thing on her mind the day the gates open is to find “the one,” her true love.
Yeesh… we haven’t seen a girl solely motivated by love since the fifties, but somehow, this 2013 one managed to sneak under people’s radars. Granted, the events of the film aren’t entirely her fault – after all, Quasi craved love too, but luckily for him he met the kindly Esmeralda and Phoebus rather than a dick like Hans, and through their friendship he was able to blossom in a healthier way. Anna has no such luck and is quickly sucked into a con due to her naïveté, and even when she escapes Hans, she falls for the very next guy she meets, having apparently not learned anything from the experience (yes, Kristoff is a nicer guy, but that’s beside the point).
Anna’s passivity and old-fashioned goal to find a man are not the only problems I had with her, either. As I stated above, the thing which people seemed to love about her was the fact that her “true love” turns out to be for her sister, despite her entanglements with various men. Her sacrifice to save Elsa is indeed the best moment for her character, and it’s always good to see a mainstream film like this championing women’s relationships with each other, instead of having them all end their stories tied to a man. However, I would point to the example of Lilo & Stitch as a much better Disney film celebrating sisterhood – the bond between Nani and Lilo there felt real and was handled with beautiful simplicity, showcasing every side of real sisters’ relationships. They fight, they argue and they get on each other’s last nerves, but when Lilo needs Nani, she’s there in a heartbeat. Their relationship was a big part of what made that film so compelling; faced with the prospect of being torn apart, they do everything in their power to keep it from happening, and the audience roots for them because of the obvious love they have for one another.
Here, the only loving interactions between Anna and Elsa are at the very beginning as children, and at the very end. For most of the film, the two sisters share very little interaction and when they do, it’s usually awkward, uncomfortable and one-sided. By the time the main events of the film get underway, Anna has long since given up on trying to reconcile with Elsa (not that she didn’t try) and her new goal is essentially to replace her with somebody who won’t shut her out – preferably a “beautiful stranger, tall and fair.” Only when it becomes her responsibility to reunite with Elsa for the sake of the kingdom does Anna set out to do so. Elsa, for her part, expresses only the slightest hint of a desire to reconnect with Anna; her fear of her own powers is so overwhelming that she spends most of her time trying to get away from the girl, as she’s terrified of hurting her (we’ll get into this more below). Lilo and Nani get numerous scenes which show their love for one another, but Anna’s declaration of love for her sister in the climax of Frozen just doesn’t ring true because they haven’t really been given enough time together to develop a believable relationship.
Ultimately, after all these comparisons with earlier Disney characters, perhaps the most apt to make is with Ariel. Like Anna, Ariel was another gullible redhead with a penchant for making bad decisions and an impulsive recklessness which nearly spelled her doom. Both girls rush into hasty agreements with dodgy characters and both pay dearly, nearly losing their lives. Ariel’s character arc has caused endless arguments among fans because of the whole “giving up her voice for a man she barely knows” thing, but I find it odd that Anna’s hasn’t really inspired similar debate, since she does much the same thing. The thing is, even Ariel was a better role model than Anna is, because her original goal does not involve finding a man to marry (she simply wants to become a human) and she goes after it with the same tenacity that Rapunzel had when she sought her freedom, unlike the more helpless Anna.
To conclude, I can only surmise that I must be missing something, because I truly don’t see why people fawn over this character so much when we’ve seen so many better female characters in earlier Disney films. When I think that we’ve come from the likes of Esmeralda, Mulan, Kida and Tiana to this, I just feel disappointed. Anna might be pretty and spunky and clumsy and all the rest of it, but when you look below the surface, an awkward relationship with her sister is not enough to make up for the surprising lack of depth you find there.
In the role of Anna’s older sister, the twenty-one-year old Elsa, Broadway superstar Idina Menzel was cast. Originally, Menzel had auditioned to be Rapunzel in Tangled, but while she didn’t land that role, Tangled’s casting director Jamie Sparer Roberts preserved a recording of Menzel’s audition on her iPhone and it was on the strength of this that she asked her to audition for Frozen. Before being officially cast, she and Bell impressed the directors and producers at an early table read of the script – they read the entire thing together and then sang Wind Beneath My Wings as a duet, since there was no music composed yet. According to songwriter Kristen Anderson-Lopez, who was present, “Lasseter was in heaven” after hearing the pair sing together, and from then on, he was adamant that they be in the film.
Elsa is the quieter sister, something I can definitely relate to as a fellow introvert. The incident in her childhood where she nearly kills her sister with her powers deeply scars her, which is largely thanks to those bloody trolls scaring her witless about it. The leader, Grand Pabbie, teaches her that fear will be her “enemy” because her powers are linked to her emotions, but he helpfully neglects to tell her that love is the key to controlling them. Elsa therefore grows up suffering from what could readily be described as borderline personality disorder; she certainly meets all of the criteria. An unstable sense of self, unstable emotions and unstable relationships with other people, with bursts of dangerous behaviour… This has led to a number of people embracing her as an icon of mental health awareness (among other things), but the thing is, this isn’t a condition that developed naturally – it is a direct result of her repressive upbringing, which is itself a direct result of her parents being scared out of their wits by those stupid trolls. Many of the film’s problems can be traced back to these irksome creatures!
Elsa’s story serves as a lesson in the dangers of emotional repression and lack of communication. Her isolation is what leads to Anna being so lonely that she latches onto the first cute guy she stumbles into, as well as rendering the girl unable to fathom how dangerous Elsa can really be. The pent-up emotional pressure also leads to the catastrophe of the coronation, where her powers burst forth in scary spikes of ice which nearly impale several people – I suppose this does at least teach kids not to bottle up their feelings, as it will make it much worse when their anger or hurt finally finds an outlet.
I think the main problem with Elsa is that her part in the film was drastically re-written late on in production, and it really shows. As I discussed in my intro, the issue of adapting the character of the Snow Queen herself had plagued creative teams for decades, but the decision to make her into the protagonist’s sister may have actually done more harm than good. The thing is, by doing this, the writers were obviously trying to avoid turning her into a stereotypical, one-dimensional “villain”, and I applaud them for trying to go in a new direction. However, by connecting her so closely to the main character – who is, of course, defined as “good” – Elsa was robbed of her rightful role as the film’s antagonist, since it was assumed audiences wouldn’t accept an “evil” Snow Queen as Anna’s sister. To humanise her and give her enough complexity to keep her sympathetic, the writers had to shoehorn Hans into the narrative as a replacement “villain,” but because he’s not revealed as such until the end, we’re left with a plot that has no real stakes.
While Elsa does still fill the nominal role of an antagonist by posing obstacles to the protagonist’s goals, the decision to make her a good person at heart backfires, leaving the story plodding along with no real driving force to push it forward. We know that the people of Arendelle aren’t in any real danger because Elsa has no evil intentions towards them; at worst, they will simply have to deal with living in an eternal winter. Unpleasant, certainly, but not exactly life-threatening. Only when Anna’s hasty confrontation with Elsa leaves the girl on death’s door does the tension begin to kick in, but that’s not until more than halfway through the film. The pacing is further disrupted with more time-wasting scenes at the trolls’ lair, before being thrown off entirely by the last-minute reveal that Hans is “evil”. If the writers could have just left Elsa as the antagonist, perhaps having her change her ways at the end thanks to Anna’s faith in her, the film could have been much stronger for it.
On top of this confusion about the role she plays in the story, Elsa also suffers from the same problem of passivity as her sister does. Not once in this whole film does Elsa take responsibility for the things she’s done, which makes it pretty tough to sympathise with her plight. In the prologue, her reaction to injuring Anna is at least understandable; any frightened young child would look to their parents for support, so it’s not a problem there. Unfortunately, her parents instil her with such a powerful fear of herself that she spends the rest of her life running away from the problems she creates. She hides from her sister rather than explain to her why they can’t talk any more; she freezes her kingdom in a fit of rage and then runs away instead of doing her job; she sings an entire song about how great it is to blow off one’s responsibilities; she throws her sister out when the girl turns up to try and reason with her. When a group of guards tries to drag her back to Arendelle by force, she fights them tooth and nail and has to be knocked out and taken back in chains. Even then, she refuses even to try to fix things (“I don’t know how!” she cries) and only stops running when told that she has killed her sister. Anna’s sacrifice then shows her the power of true love, and thus she is finally able to step up and sort herself out.
Elsa might not be the best role model, but one thing I did appreciate about the way her story was handled is that she does not end up on the arm of some bloke at the end (Anna’s already got that covered). It’s great to see that the filmmakers allowed her to have a happy ending that does not involve romance; the whole “heterosexual marriage” thing has been done to death, and it’s good for young girls watching to see that they do not need a man in order to be happy. Romantic subplots are jammed into just about every other Disney heroine’s story one way or another, so the fact that we now have girls like Elsa, Merida and Moana enjoying happy endings as single women is a refreshing change. Mind you, the reaction Elsa got is symptomatic of what’s wrong with women’s representation in kids’ films; apparently, some people were so shocked at seeing a Disney girl not winding up with a boyfriend that they read her as a lesbian (or an asexual) and likened her story to a “coming out” one. Honestly, this is quite a stretch; there’s no real evidence in the film to support the idea that Elsa’s gay, although I can certainly understand the LGBT community’s desire to see such a character in a Disney film.
However you read her, I don’t think there’s any real way to argue that Elsa is a strong role model for children to look up to. While she may not be as foolish or impulsive as Anna, she still displays a terrible, unhealthy attitude towards her life and relationships and only learns her lesson after the near-death of her sister. Teaching children to “let go” of their responsibilities and try to hide from their problems is appalling advice, but the awkward writing in the film makes it seem like we’re supposed to sympathise with Elsa as though she’s some sort of victim, when in reality she just needs to step up and take some responsibility. (Admittedly, the mental health reading of her actually makes the most sense in this regard, because then she really is a victim and her situation becomes more understandable). Sure, she’s pretty, she can sing and she’ll sell lots of dolls, but as far as Disney heroines go, Elsa barely ranks above Anna in terms of agency.
Well, it ain’t a Disney film without a love interest who can’t stand his beloved when he first meets her. That role is filled here by the burly blond Kristoff, a twenty-one-year-old Sámi iceman who was orphaned as a child and has thus been raised by a group of trolls (because why not, right?). We first meet Kristoff in his childhood as he’s tagging along after the local ice harvesters, accompanied by a miniature Sven, his reindeer companion (I should point out that reindeer don’t typically live much over ten years, so the adult Sven should be absolutely decrepit). When the king and queen rush by one night to see the trolls, Kristoff follows them in curiosity and learns about their healing powers, something which becomes a plot point later on. This is also the point at which the trolls adopt / kidnap him, with one – Bulda – saying “I’m gonna keep you!” without so much as asking if that’s alright with him.
Fast-forward to his adulthood and Kristoff has become a successful iceman, although he seems to lack social skills and spends most of his time with Sven. After Elsa’s meltdown (no pun intended), Kristoff meets Anna at Oaken’s Trading Post while he’s trying to get some supplies and winds up being roped into her scheme to track down Elsa and talk some sense into her. As per usual, the two don’t get along at first and do a lot of bickering, with Kristoff understandably flabbergasted at Anna’s recklessness, but as time goes by and he begins to learn more about her, he starts falling for her (of course). This leads to a bit of character development as she draws him out of his shell and melts his icy exterior – by the climax, he’s willing to put her needs before his own happiness, bringing his good nature to the surface at last.
As a character, Kristoff is likeable enough, and I do appreciate that he was made less conventionally attractive than the typical male lead (although that’s probably just to contrast him with the more dashing Hans). His status as an orphan ties him into the long line of Disney orphans who’ve gone before him, and in some ways he reminded me of Aladdin with his only friend being an animal. However, I must admit that I don’t think much of his and Anna’s romance, just because it feels so tired and cliched – how many times have we seen the spunky extroverted girl “wearing down” the grumpy boy with her relentless optimism? Compared to some of the best Disney couples of the past, this just feels lazy. Why did Anna need a love interest, if the main theme of the film is about true love between family members? Would it really have been so terrible to keep things platonic between her and Kristoff? One thing that made a lot of the past Disney couples feel so natural was that they taught one another and helped each other to grow, but Kristoff doesn’t really influence Anna at all – she doesn’t even realise that he loves her until Olaf spells it out for her!
The romantic subplot with Kristoff is only here to provide Anna with a backup-boy when Hans betrays her, because of course she has to have someone to smooch with at the end of the film, right? It’s not enough that she’s got her sister back, which is supposed to be the most important thing. This whole romance dilutes the film’s message about familial closeness; it’s great that they left Elsa single, but why couldn’t they have done the same with Anna? Kristoff is certainly one of the better characters in the film, but that still doesn’t mean there wasn’t room to improve the way he was handled.
Santino Fontana originally auditioned for the part of Kristoff by singing I Feel Pretty from West Side Story (1961), but he wound up being cast as the dastardly Prince Hans of the Southern Isles instead. This twenty-three-year-old redhead is one of the youngest villains we’ve seen in a while, and the first good-looking male villain since Gaston back in 1991. He’s introduced on the day of Elsa’s coronation when Anna blunders into him at the harbour, and at first, he seems to be the classic Disney gentleman, all sweetness and smiles. However, as we see when he proposes to her that same evening, he’s a fast mover, and we later learn that he’s very opportunistic and greedy. Coming as he does from a large family, he has no chance of inheriting the throne in his own kingdom, so he comes to Arendelle seeking to marry one of the sisters, at which point he plans to “stage a little accident” to get rid of them and become Arendelle’s sole ruler.
Hans is the second of the New Revival “twist” villains, a trend that persisted for the next couple of films. In this case, I didn’t feel like it worked very well because Hans is so obviously filling the void left by Elsa, the film’s true antagonist, although plenty of other viewers out there felt he was a well-written villain. There’s actually a decent argument to be made that he is a sociopath, as his cold manipulation of Anna’s vulnerability for his own purposes suggests, but the trouble with pinning down why Hans doesn’t work (at least for me) is that his portrayal is so inconsistent.
There are simply too many moments in the film (like the one above) where Hans displays signs of inner “goodness” when nobody is watching, implying that it is not a façade being maintained for the benefit of onlookers but genuine affection for Anna. Subtle expressions and actions constantly mess with the viewer’s perception of him, making you second-guess whether he’s supposed to be bad through-and-through or whether he simply makes some bad choices as the situation worsens. When he smiles to himself under the boat after Anna leaves, does he really care about her – or is he just imagining the power and riches she could give him access to? When he hands out blankets to the freezing citizens in the absence of both Anna and Elsa, does he really care about them, or is it all just for show, to convince them he would be a good ruler? When he redirects the crossbow that Weselton’s guard aims at Elsa, is he trying to protect her – or does he just not want her killed in such a public way, with all the other guards right behind him to witness his actions?
The thing is, when you first watch the film, you’re not supposed to have any idea that Hans is going to be the bad guy. Unlike Gaston and other earlier villains, the writers seemed to be trying not to make Hans so transparent – he’s meant to appear to be the good guy until the big reveal in the climax. Unfortunately, this creates a consistency problem, because for this to work he must be presented as nothing but pure selfless goodness for almost the entire film, and then suddenly do a heel-face-turn at the last second and reveal a hidden evil that was supposedly there all along. The animators do try to work in a few “clues” with the odd smothered scowl or a double-sided comment about his many older brothers, but I can’t help feeling like they tried so hard to “hide” his villainy that he ends up feeling like too nice of a guy to betray Anna in the end.
One other thing to consider is that with this character, the writers were trying to turn the stereotype of “marrying a man you just met” on its head, as a nod to the outdated princesses of yesteryear who used to do just that. To underline their message about how you can’t truly know someone after so little time, the writers made Hans into the villain – perhaps their way of teaching girls that many men in the real world can have sinister ulterior motives, so it pays to keep your guard up and not rush into commitments with them until you’re sure you can trust them. That is a valuable lesson, but it feels like Hans suffered from being used like this; it’s like he was only made so despicable at the end of the film because he needed to be to prove the writers’ point. Prior to the reveal, he actually shares better chemistry with Anna than Kristoff does, but of course we can’t have her engaging herself to a guy she just met and turning out to have gotten lucky in finding someone genuinely nice, because then the old stereotype wouldn’t be averted.
Ultimately, Hans fails as a Disney villain because he’s only allowed to be one for about ten minutes at the very end. Even King Candy, who also isn’t revealed to be evil until the climax of his film, was still allowed to be more overtly creepy and obnoxious beforehand, making him fun to hate even before we know who he really is. Hans is simply set up as one of the two guys Anna will have to choose between – but then he turns out to be “evil,” and the choice is thus made for her. He’s definitely not iconic Disney villain material, that’s for sure.
The supporting cast is led by one of the most polarising characters in Disney history – Olaf, a magical snowman brought to life accidentally by Elsa. Josh Gad was one of the first actors to be attached to Frozen back in the late 2000s, and apparently, when he took his four-year-old daughter to see Monsters University, they saw a trailer for Frozen before the film. It featured the sound of Olaf’s laugh and his daughter recognised it, saying, “That’s Dada, more Dada.” Gad burst into tears right there in the theatre.
Sweet as that is, and much as I like Gad, I have to say that I really can’t stand Olaf. It’s a matter of personal taste, but I find him incredibly irritating and pointless; he’s like the New Revival’s own Gurgi. Elsa first creates the idea of him in her childhood games with Anna, but at this point she provides his “personality” herself. It is only later, after the disaster at the coronation and the ensuing Let It Go sequence, that she conjures him again, this time as a living entity. Anna and Kristoff run into him on their way to see Elsa, and from that point he accompanies them as their “comical” sidekick. His main shtick is that he longs to experience summer, with the obvious gag being that he doesn’t realise what happens to snowmen in warm weather.
Supposedly, Olaf is meant to represent the childish innocence of the girls when they were young, the last vestige of their infant selves. He is a reflection of one side of Elsa’s personality, symbolising her feelings when she created him – the angry giant known as “Marshmallow” reflects a darker side of her. This explains why Olaf is so utterly oblivious for much of the film, always having fun no matter how dangerous the situation gets. Only in that one scene during the climax does he have any real bearing on the plot, which to me makes him feel superfluous – if you cut Olaf out of the film, all you’d lose is a bad song and some jokes. His inclusion feels like a cold marketing decision; you can practically see the rows and rows of Olaf dolls on the shelves when you look at him.
On top of this, the one scene where he actually has something to do doesn’t make much sense. It’s where he finds Anna, freezing and dying after being locked in the study by Hans. He quickly relights the fire and does his best to warm her, despite nearly sacrificing himself by being so close to the heat. He then has to point out to her that Kristoff loves her, since she apparently hadn’t noticed. Finally, he helps her get out of the castle and out onto the ice, where she’s supposed to reunite with Kristoff. The whole “some people are worth melting for” is a nice sentiment, but if any act of true love could have saved Anna, why did this not count? Olaf nearly dies trying to warm her up – does it not heal her simply because he doesn’t fully melt?
Either way, Olaf was not one of my favourite members of the cast. If you like him, that’s totally fine – hopefully you got more fun out of him than I did.
Mind you, even Olaf doesn’t compare to these jerks. Good lord, do I hate these things. The random troll colony of Arendelle are the root of the whole conflict of the film – you could almost describe them as its true villains. We first meet them in the prologue when they are asked by the king and queen to save Anna after Elsa’s little mishap, and the leader (Grand Pabbie) alters her memories while scaring the hell out of Elsa and her parents, ensuring she’ll be a neurotic mess for the rest of her young life. Pabbie also leaves out the crucial piece of information; that love is the key to controlling Elsa’s powers (of course, had he told her that off the bat, there’d be no story). Then, to wrap up this awkward scene, another troll named Bulda randomly decides to adopt Kristoff and Sven, having no idea that Kristoff is an orphan – for all she knows, the kid has a loving family waiting for him at home. Does Bulda care? Nope!
It gets even worse in their second appearance. With Anna slowly dying due to another outburst from Elsa, Kristoff brings her to the colony to be healed, only to have them try to force him into marrying her against either of their wills. This scene is incredibly uncomfortable, even though it’s played for laughs – seriously, what were the writers thinking? There’s a bizarre kind of mood dissonance with Anna’s life on the line and Kristoff desperate to make them listen long enough to help, and the trolls too busy happily singing about how they plan to get rid of Anna’s fiancée. They seem to have no respect for their adopted son’s autonomy and even less for his “bride,” whose only qualification for being his wife as far as they’re concerned is being female.
The worst thing about this part is that because of the way the film is written, the audience is on the trolls’ side. They have no respect for Anna’s agency at all, but because we know that Anna has rushed into her engagement and barely knows her fiancée (and because convention dictates that she’s bound to end up with Kristoff anyway), we have no respect for it either, and laugh along with the trolls as they try to jam her and Kristoff together. Think about every other instance of an arranged marriage in Disney films – Jasmine, Merida, Pocahontas, to name a few. The one thing they all had in common was that the girls fought hard to get out the marriages, standing up for their independence and their right to be with the man of their choice. Not so in Frozen; this girl is too stupid to know what she wants in the first place, and the trolls end up proven right when she winds up with Kristoff. They know better than she does what will make her happy – how insulting.
The trolls are pushy, self-absorbed, obnoxious filler and I can’t stand them. The only halfway decent one is Pabbie and even he is guilty of mishandling the delicate situation with Elsa, thus sparking the entire conflict of the film. I’m sure I’m not alone in this – these are arguably the weakest aspect of Frozen.
Thankfully, we do also have Sven to balance things out a bit. Sven is Kristoff’s reindeer companion, a northern counterpart to the more typical Disney horse sidekicks, and he’s a lot of fun. Much like Maximus before him, he feels more like a canid than an ungulate, dancing about with excitement all the time with his tongue hanging out and always hungry for treats. It’s implied that he is Kristoff’s only real friend (poor guy, that’s kind of tragic) and the two have been inseparable since their youth (I’ll overlook the reindeer lifespan problem). Like most pack animal characters, Sven’s main function is to serve as transport; during the film, he helps to save Kristoff and Anna from a pack of wolves, and later he also races them back to Arendelle so that Hans can save Anna. Perhaps his most important moment comes after Kristoff has left her there – Sven acts as Kristoff’s “conscience,” demonstrating a good enough understanding of his buddy to realise that he loves Anna and convincing him to return to her. Sven also shares a playful relationship with Olaf with a running gag where he keeps trying to steal his carrot nose, only to return it to him after finally getting it.
The supporting cast in this film might not be up to much overall, but Sven was one of the few bright spots. He’s well-animated and engaging; I would have been happy if he had been the sole sidekick, but what can you do?
With this film’s unusually complicated antagonist situation, we also have the Duke of Weselton thrown into the mix as a red herring to throw us off the scent. Weselton is said to be one of Arendelle’s trade partners and the Duke arrives with the intent of “exploiting” the kingdom’s riches, set up as the stereotypical moustache-twirling bad guy from the start. He’s a cocky, arrogant little man but thanks to another hilariously prissy performance from Alan Tudyk, he’s also very entertaining. After Elsa reveals her powers at the coronation ball, the Duke is quick to whip the other dignitaries into a stew of panic and remains suspicious of both Anna and Elsa for the rest of the film, even sending his own bodyguards after Elsa in order to “put an end” to the winter. He’s a pessimist and possibly a bit of a sexist, since he seems all too willing to trust Hans over Arendelle’s rightful rulers, but as we soon see, he’s not as cruel as the young prince and is really only a secondary antagonist. Still, he was an enjoyable presence and I am glad he was included – it was certainly unusual to see a guy like this not turn out to be the main villain for a change.
There are a few more human characters we need to look at before moving on. Anna and Elsa’s parents are alive and present for the beginning of the film – they’re called King Agnarr and Queen Iduna, and we first meet them on the night that Elsa accidentally freezes Anna’s head. After rushing to the trolls for help, they become convinced that Elsa’s powers are inherently dangerous (nice job reassuring them, Pabbie) and proceed to lock her away like some sort of madwoman in the attic, teaching her to repress her feelings in the mistaken belief that this will lead to control over them. Agnarr seems to take the lead here; it is he who gives Elsa her first pair of gloves and teaches her the whole “conceal, don’t feel, don’t let it show” mantra. I know it’s not his fault that he’s thinking this way, but it still feels like an awfully unhealthy way to raise a child – perhaps this is where all the gay parallels come from, since many LGBT teens are sadly encouraged to try to “hide” their sexuality in the same way. As for Iduna, well, she isn’t given much to do, simply standing by her husband looking beleaguered. She feels like a bit of a wasted character, but then to be fair, they don’t have much screen time.
This is because they’re killed in a storm at sea while the girls are still in their teens. It’s the first time that the deaths of both parents have been used as a major plot point since Tarzan (we’ve only seen the death of one, or abandonment, in more recent films) and it’s therefore no surprise that that film has been connected to this one with a popular fan theory, especially considering both films have Chris Buck as a director. I’ll get into this more in the plot section and the theory has basically been debunked, but it’s still an interesting interpretation of the characters. You can quickly get lost down a rabbit hole of theories if you’re not careful…
Speaking of interesting character interpretation, let’s take a moment to look at Oaken. This guy runs a trading post on the outskirts of Arendelle and enjoys a brief (but memorable) cameo role when Anna needs a change of clothes for the sudden deep freeze. As she chats with him, a snow-covered Kristoff enters and gruffly tries to buy some tools and carrots for Sven. However, after making the mistake of calling Oaken a “crook,” he gets himself chucked out by the surprisingly massive trader, leaving Anna to purchase the goods for him.
Oaken, like Sven, is a small but appreciated addition to the cast. He may be a sweetheart, but he also won’t take crap from anybody and runs his trading post with a fair but firm hand. Aside from his funny little catchphrase (“Woo-hoo! Big summer blowout!”), the thing people seem to remember about him is a single-second shot of his “family” in the sauna:
In another example of straining to find subtext in almost nothing, some viewers have decided that Oaken is “Disney’s first gay character”, mainly because of Oaken’s stereotypically effete mannerisms and because the family in the sauna has another man at its centre. Now, the family thing could be explained any number of ways – the man could be Oaken’s son accompanied by his own family, his brother, his cousin… Heck, it could even just be some random family (he never calls them “my” family) using the sauna as customers. The point is, nothing has been confirmed, and nothing ever will be, because Disney ain’t Laika – as sad as it is, they can’t afford to risk alienating the huge and profitable right-wing portion of their audiences by featuring openly gay characters, so even if Oaken is supposed to represent the LGBT community in a subtle way, it doesn’t do much for progressive representation.
There’s certainly no harm in reading him as gay if you want to, but leaving politics aside, he’s a fun character in his own right and steals one of the best scenes in the whole film.
Mention should be made of Marshmallow, the giant snow monster conjured by Elsa to throw people out of her palace. He’s not very complex, simply acting as a brutish henchmen on her behalf, but much like the Backson in Winnie the Pooh, Marshmallow turns up again in a stinger after the credits and reveals a softer side – he finds Elsa’s discarded tiara and puts it on, apparently delighted. For most of the film, though, he is simply a physical manifestation of Elsa’s inner defensiveness, just as Olaf is an expression of her childlike joy. The fact that she sets him on her own sister in her desperation to remain alone doesn’t read much like sibling closeness to me!
We also have Weselton’s henchmen, a pair of dark and surly bodyguards who accompany him to Arendelle. He enlists their help to stop Elsa’s magical winter by basically using them as assassins, his darkest act in the story – they go with Hans’s search party and break into the Queen’s palace, cornering her inside and attempting to shoot her point-blank with a crossbow (damn, these guys are monsters!). They spend most of their screen time frowning, sneering and barking gruff orders to one another, making them feel far more sinister than the usual slapstick-prone comic henchmen more typical of Disney films. In her anger, Elsa nearly kills the pair of them, but they’re saved by the intervention of Hans, who reminds her that to do so would make her the monster everyone already thinks she is. Incredibly, one of them then tries to take another shot at her – these guys just don’t know when to quit.
Finally, we also have the two head servants, Kai and Gerda. These two don’t have huge roles, but it’s nice to see them given a touch of personality, reminding the viewer that these are not just servants but people, too. Kai in particular seems to have been waiting on the girls from their childhood and is obviously fond of them, seeming to favour Anna – he watches out for her at official functions and tries to limit her clumsiness so she doesn’t embarrass herself. He and Gerda appear to share a bit of a moment at the end, too – could there be some more romance afoot? Honestly, I’d be more invested in seeing more of their relationship than Anna and Kristoff’s.
Animation
Alright, now I know I haven’t been kind to the film’s characters, but don’t worry – I have much nicer things to say about the animation. Frozen employed a similar artistic technique as Tangled by blending features of both computer-generated and traditional animation, and the results look fantastic. The fact that the animation team pulled this off is impressive considering the kind of crazy schedule they were working with – due to the continuously changing script, they couldn’t really get started on the animation until as late as November of 2012, leaving them less than a year to animate the entire film. When you understand just how many hours it can take to render even a single frame in a computer-animated film, you appreciate how daunting a task this must have been. The team, consisting of around six hundred people, had to put in a lot of late nights and overtime, causing a lot of stress for everyone involved. In addition to the roughly seventy animators, there were also around seventy lighting people and fifteen-to-twenty storyboard artists.
Unlike several earlier CG Disney features, this one did use supervising animators for specific characters. According to producer Del Vecho, “The animators themselves may work on multiple characters but it’s always under one lead. I think it was different on Tangled, for example, but we chose to do it this way as we wanted one person to fully understand and develop their own character and then be able to impart that to the crew. Hyrum Osmond, the supervising animator on Olaf, is quiet but he has a funny, wacky personality so we knew he’d bring a lot of comedy to it; Anna’s animator, Becky Bresee, it’s her first time leading a character and we wanted her to lead Anna.”
Warner Loughlin, an acting coach, was brought in to assist the animators in capturing their characters properly, with many of them doing their own acting to get a feel for the people they were creating. The animators were led by Lino DiSalvo, and in addition to Bresee and Osmond (the latter of whom also supervised Hans), the team also featured Wayne Unten supervising Elsa, Daniel Peixe supervising Kristoff and Sven, and Tony Smeed and Malcon Pierce, who presumably supervised the supporting characters (there’s not a lot of detail provided online). Unten, who had requested Elsa specifically because he found her character so fascinating, studied video footage of Idina Menzel’s recording sessions to help him develop her, matching the character’s breathing with Menzel’s. Peixe, meanwhile, was able to study a real reindeer (named Sage) who was brought into the studio to help him in creating Sven – Jennifer Lee later called this her favourite moment from the production.
The goal from the beginning was to push the envelope in terms of believability; these were intended to be some of the most impressive computer-generated characters in the canon. To achieve this, the studio developed several new tools to allow them to create the desired shots and effects – the heavy snow seen throughout the film was a special challenge, as the characters needed to interact with it in a realistic way. To prepare, several Disney artists went to Wyoming to experience similar conditions for themselves, and later Dr. Kenneth Libbrecht of the California Institute of Technology was invited to lecture the team on how snow and ice actually form, and what makes snowflakes unique. Using this collected knowledge, the effects team created a snowflake generator that allowed the creation of about two thousand individual snowflake shapes.
As if this wasn’t enough, they also had software engineers use advanced mathematics and physics (like the material point method) to create a snow simulation software known as Matterhorn, helped by researchers from the University of California in Los Angeles. This software allowed them to depict realistically snowy virtual environments and was used for over forty scenes in the finished film. According to software engineer Alexey Stomakhin, snow is “an important character in the film” and thus required this careful attention from the artists.
Matterhorn wasn’t the only piece of software created for the film, either. There was also Spaces, which was what allowed Olaf’s collapsible parts to move around and rebuild themselves, and Flourish, which allowed the art direction of the movements of such tiny elements as leaves and twigs. Then there was Snow Batcher, which helped the animators preview the final look of the snow and ensure that the characters’ walking interactions with it were correct, and also Tonic, which enabled them to “sculpt the characters’ hair as procedural volumes” (I’ll be honest, not sure what that means). Tonic was further used to animate fur and individual strands of hair (Elsa has 420,000 strands compared to the average real person, who only has around 100,000).
Everything about the production was on a much larger scale than anything Disney had done prior. There were 312 character rigs in Frozen, along with 245 cloth rigs for the many costumes, far exceeding the totals of any previous Disney film. It took fifty effects and lighting artists working together to create “one single shot” in which Elsa builds her ice palace, with the complexity of it requiring thirty hours to render one frame on four thousand computers. It’s just staggering.
The effects group also created a “capture stage” to display the entire world of the film on their monitors, thus allowing them to “film” in three-dimensions the same as in a live-action film. However, even with all this technology, the filmmakers didn’t completely neglect their Disney roots. They did use plenty of 2D artwork for specific elements and scenes within the film such as Elsa’s ice magic and snow sculptures, as well as for the freezing floors and fountains.
While a lot of this techno jargon does go over my head, I did notice the high standard of the animation on offer here – when you compare it to something like Meet the Robinsons, the improvement over just a few short years is astonishing. The people have realistic hues to their skins that keep them from looking like they’re made out of plasticine, and the animators have mastered the art of using subtle expressions to communicate with the audience rather than exaggerated pantomime.
Also, there’s a theory-breeding cameo to be spotted by the eagle-eyed viewer: pay close attention during For the First Time in Forever when Anna first charges out of the castle gates. The crowds of eager visitors begin to press forwards, and as Anna dances past, she briefly greets none other than Flynn and Rapunzel, who can be seen for a couple of seconds entering from the bottom left. Of course, it’s just an “Easter Egg”; the two films aren’t necessarily taking place in the same time, but it’s certainly more plausible than having Tarzan be the girls’ lost brother!
The only major mistake with the animation that I spotted (which numerous other critics have already pointed out) was a split-second incident during Let It Go. During the last verse, Elsa redesigns her stuffy coronation outfit into the glittery blue number she sports for the rest of the film, and both literally and metaphorically lets her hair down by pulling her braid out of its bun. However, as she pulls it forward, it “clips” through her shoulder instead of sliding over it, despite the hair moving as it should. The angle we’re looking at her from undoubtedly made this brief moment extremely difficult, but it’s not really obvious unless you’re looking for it.
Plot
Frozen is just the latest in a long line of Hans Christian Andersen adaptations at Disney, following the likes of The Ugly Duckling (1939), The Little Mermaid (1989), The Steadfast Tin Soldier from Fantasia 2000 (1999), the title of The Emperor’s New Groove (2000), which was derived from that of The Emperor’s New Clothes, the “Ugly Duckling” plot element from Lilo & Stitch (2002) and the short film The Little Matchgirl (2006). In this film, the characters of Hans, Kristoff, Anna and Sven are all nods to the author’s name – say them quickly in that order.
Jennifer Lee was, notably, the first woman to have sole credit for the screenplay of a Disney canon film since Linda Woolverton for Beauty and the Beast back in 1991. Lee was brought over to the project from Wreck-It Ralph by producer Peter Del Vecho; while giving notes on other projects, as she put it, “we kind of really connected with what we were thinking.” Several of the film’s key themes were already in place before she arrived, such as the “frozen heart” hook and the idea of emotional bonding between siblings, but a lot of the details still needed to be worked out. Lee was advised early on by Ed Catmull that “whatever you have to do to the story, do it. But you have to earn that ending. If you do[,] it will be great. If you don’t, it will suck.”
As fans of the film already know, one of the major changes from the source material was that the character of Elsa, the “Snow Queen” herself, was gradually rewritten from a direct antagonist into a more sympathetic character. When Lee joined the project, Chris Buck and the others were still trying to push the villain angle – Elsa was evil at this point, deliberately kidnapping Anna and freezing her heart, with the second act devoted to Elsa trying to stop Anna from kissing Hans to break the spell. Anna’s part in the plot resembled Hans’s at this stage, with the young princess frustrated at being the “spare” to Elsa’s “heir” and keen to find her own place in the world. This version was also not a musical, instead being “much more of an action adventure”. In the end, the songwriters played a major role in reshaping the film into its final form.
The composition of Let It Go was an important step for the filmmakers. After hearing Lopez and Anderson-Lopez’s work, they realised that the character of Elsa could potentially be far more dynamic than they had planned, with room for sympathy and vulnerability. This new understanding of her led to a major rewrite of the entire first act, which led to further rewrites elsewhere. However, with Elsa no longer filling the role of designated villain, there was now a void which needed to be filled – and that was where Hans came in.
Hans wasn’t even in the earliest drafts of the story and was not evil when he was first introduced, but with Elsa’s recasting, the way was left open for Hans’s inner nastiness to shine through. Lee explained that he was written to be “sociopathic” and “twisted,” pointing out that he mirrors the behaviour of the people around him: “He mirrors [Anna] and he’s goofy with her … [T]he Duke [of Weselton] is a jerk, so he’s a jerk back. And with Elsa he’s a hero.” His betrayal of Anna had to be set up to be believable, but this did pose the problem of consistency in his portrayal. It also caused some difficulties with Anna’s later relationship with Kristoff, since some – such as Disney Studios Chairman Alan Horn – worried about how she could be made to seem interested in him without coming across as shallow or “easy”, since she’s already engaged to Hans when she meets him. For me, that’s just further evidence that she didn’t need a love interest at all; it doesn’t feel natural to her circumstances and dissolves the moral the film tries to teach about not rushing into commitments with people you barely know.
Anna’s own personality caused problems, too, with the filmmakers struggling to pin down her role in the story. Lee eventually pushed for Anna to have a kind of “coming-of-age” story, where she develops from being naïve and lonely into a more mature and level-headed woman able to sacrifice herself for her sister. Along the way, Lee was forced to drop some scenes she had planned to show the sisters’ relationship as teenagers, due to the plot necessity of keeping them separated (what a pity; such a scene could have proved a valuable addition). To construct what we do see of Anna and Elsa’s relationship, Lee found inspiration in her relationship with her own sister Brittney (who also worked on the film as a visual development artist).
Aside from the leads, the production team also tweaked many of the side characters to better fit the new story – Olaf, for instance, went from being Elsa’s obnoxious sidekick to being Anna’s “comically innocent” sidekick (Wikipedia’s words, not mine). Lee had had a particular hatred for the original “mean” version of Olaf, saying “kill the f***ing snowman,” and she continued to find him by far “the hardest character to deal with” (I’m not surprised, he’s dreadful).
John Ripa was responsible for solving the problem of exactly how Anna would rescue Elsa in the film’s climax. Apparently, after he pitched his take on the scene, there was a sort of stunned silence until John Lasseter said, “I’ve never seen anything like that before,” which led to a standing ovation for Ripa. I applaud him, too; it’s one of the most effective of the film’s story beats.
Unfortunately, the same can’t be said of the rest of the plot. I’m sorry to people who love the film, but it just isn’t very well-written – you can really feel the effect of all those last-minute rewrites (which you’ll remember continued right into the summer of 2013, just months before release). The struggles with the story had been by far the biggest obstacle to all of Disney’s earlier attempts at adapting Andersen’s work up to this point, and I don’t think they were entirely successful at dealing with them here, to be honest.
Elsa should have remained the film’s villain – that would have been a truly bold move and it could have avoided all the complications with Hans and Kristoff, both of whom feel rather like distractions jammed in to fill the gap left by Elsa’s demotion. Until recently with films like Moana, Disney weren’t known for allowing their villains redemptive arcs; had they given Elsa one, they could potentially have created a much more nuanced and interesting story. Instead, they simply relied on the “unusual” move of having sisters as the film’s leads, despite diluting this with the obligatory love interest for one of them, assuming that having two female leads was enough to distinguish this from Disney’s earlier output. There’s more to progressive representation of women than just including a greater number of them in your story – it’s about how you represent them, and neither Anna or Elsa stand out as strong role models for girls, especially compared to some of their canon brethren like Mulan, Esmeralda or Tiana.
When the film first came out, people went absolutely crazy for it, with many apparently seeing it as revolutionary simply for featuring sisterly bonding (once again – Lilo & Stitch, anyone?). The thing is, when you strip away that aspect, it’s a pretty standard, run-of-the-mill Disney film; not awful by any means, but certainly not one of their best story-wise. There are plenty of plot holes, although to be fair, those can be found in almost any film, Disney or otherwise. For instance, are we supposed to believe that Anna literally doesn’t see Elsa once during their entire childhood after the troll incident? Don’t they eat together? Pass each other in the hall occasionally? Does Elsa never leave her room, even once? We know that’s not true, as we see her wishing goodbye to her parents at one point in the hall, with Anna having already done so separately. Later, there’s also the whole pass-the-parcel thing going on with the rulership of Arendelle – isn’t there any protocol in place for extreme situations? First Elsa is crowned queen, then within hours Anna has taken over, only to immediately hand the kingdom over to Hans while she goes after Elsa… does anybody really care who runs the place? And good grief, don’t even get me started on the out-of-nowhere “twist” – I’ve talked enough about that above.
Before I leave this section, I should spend a moment on an unusual but very popular fan theory that has developed around this film. Now, I’ll admit that I don’t understand all the details – apparently, this theory is quite complex and encompasses a number of other Disney and Pixar works, tying them all together, but there’s one connection in particular which gained enough attention that the directors had to address it. You see, many fans set up a backstory in which Anna and Elsa’s parents do not, in fact, die in the shipwreck as seen in the film. Instead, they propose that Queen Iduna gave birth to a baby boy en route, and that after the ship went down (somewhere off the coast of Africa), she and Agnarr tried to set up a new life for themselves in the wild, only to wind up killed by a leopard. Yes, the fan theory is that Iduna and Agnarr are Tarzan’s parents, making the king of the apes the long-lost brother of the Arendelle princesses. Although Chris Buck has jokingly “confirmed” it as his own head-canon, it’s not official – there are various clear problems with this theory, such as the fact that Tarzan’s parents look nothing like Anna and Elsa’s, and the different time periods the films are set in. Nevertheless, the theory retains considerable traction among fans, so I thought it was worth mentioning!
Cinematography
Right from the start, director Chris Buck knew that he wanted Michael Giaimo on board as the film’s art director and personally persuaded him to return to Disney – Giaimo had left in disgrace several years earlier after the disaster of Home on the Range. To create the look of Frozen, Giaimo read up on Scandinavian history and visited the Danish-themed city of Solvang near Los Angeles, with the focus ending up on Norway simply because about “80 percent” of the visuals that appealed to him in this early phase were from there.
Since research trips were the norm by this point, Disney sponsored three for the production of this film. Many animators and special effects artists were first sent to Jackson Hole in Wyoming, where they got to try out walking, running and falling in deep snow for themselves, all while dressed in the kind of attire worn by the princesses in the film (both men and women tried the long skirts). Meanwhile, the lighting and arts teams headed for the Ice Hotel (Hôtel de Glace) in Quebec, Canada, in order to study the ways in which light reflects and refracts on snow and ice. Of course, the final trip was to Norway itself – Giaimo and several other artists travelled there and spent time exploring the mountains, fjords, architecture and culture of the country. Del Vecho later said of the trip, “We had a very short time schedule for this film, so our main focus was really to get the story right but we knew that John Lasseter is keen on truth in the material and creating a believable world, and again that doesn’t mean it’s a realistic world – but a believable one. It was important to see the scope and scale of Norway, and important for our animators to know what it’s like.”
A screenshot from Black Narcissus (1947) with one from Frozen
One of the key influences on the cinematography was the 1947 Jack Cardiff film, Black Narcissus. Giaimo stated that he was going for a kind of hyper-reality in this film, saying “Because this is a movie with such scale and we have the Norwegian fjords to draw from, I really wanted to explore the depth. From a design perspective, since I was stressing the horizontal and vertical aspects, and what the fjords provide, it was perfect. We encased the sibling story in scale.” He also looked at Ted D. McCord’s work in The Sound of Music (1965), and decided to film Frozen in CinemaScope, making it the first film done in this style since Titan A.E. in 2000. Naturally, Giaimo also worked to incorporate as much of Norway’s architecture, rosemaling folk art and natural beauty into the design as he could. The final results speak for themselves – flawed it may be, but Frozen is extremely beautiful.
The film includes several real-life Norwegian landmarks, such as the Akershus Fortress in Oslo (the main basis for Arendelle’s castle), the Nidaros Cathedral in Trondheim and Bryggen in Bergen. We also see many other typically Scandinavian elements throughout, such as stave churches, trolls (ugh), Viking-style ships, natural hot springs, Fjord horses (shown to be taller here than their real-life counterparts, but otherwise accurately depicted), clothes and even local foods like lutefisk (which Oaken offers Anna at the trading post). There’s also a maypole being erected on coronation day, and we briefly see some ancient runes in the book King Agnarr opens to find out about the trolls. Some of the cultural references are more subtle; there’s a brief scene where two men argue about which way to stack firewood – bark up, or bark down – which is a nod to a perennial Norwegian debate on the same subject.
Then there are the references to Sámi culture, including the entire character of Sven (reindeer play a big part in their societies), the clothing styles worn by Kristoff and the other icemen and parts of the musical score. Many of the decorations in the castle and on Kristoff’s sled are even inspired by traditional Sámi duodji pieces. The Disney team visited Rørosrein, a Sámi-owned company in the village of Plassje, during their time in Norway; it produces reindeer meat and arranges tours for visitors, providing them with plenty of inspiration. They also went to Nærøyfjord, a branch of Norway’s longest fjord (Sognefjorden), which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and provided the main basis for Arendelle.
The Norwegian trip provided the artists with a rich source of knowledge for their design aesthetic, influencing the colour, lighting and general atmosphere of the finished film. Giaimo cited three particular elements which he considered most important – the fjords and the rock formations found within them, which led to the design of Arendelle, the medieval stave churches with their triangular rooflines and shingles, which were incorporated into the castle, and the rosemaling folk art, from which the panelling and grid patterns were taken and worked into the décor, costumes and architecture.
Nærøyfjord on the left, Arendelle harbour on the right
In a deviation from the usual Disney princess films, where the girls usually only get a couple of outfits for the whole picture, this film has both of its leading ladies changing into a variety of colourful costumes. Giaimo said from the start that it would be a “costume film,” and so he brought in character designer Jean Gillmore to serve as the official costume designer. In computer animation, each costume is treated almost like a separate entity with its own properties and behaviours, so it’s a pretty complex job even with only a small number of outfits. The level of detail in Frozen’s costumes had not yet been attempted, including such minutiae as buttons, trim and stitching, so Gillmore certainly had her hands full.
For inspiration, she looked to “the historic silhouettes of 1840 Western Europe (give or take), with the shapes and garment relationships and details of folk costume in early Norway, circa 19th century.” She focused on fabrics like wool, velvet, linen and silk, which would have been commonly used in that time and place, and during production she “ran around” the various departments to provide the other artists with samples of these different materials for reference. They found them in Disney’s own in-house library of fabric samples, but also drew on the resources of the Walt Disney Parks and Resorts’ costume division in nearby Fullerton. Once the costumes had been designed, the texture artists (known at Disney as “look development artists”) digitally painted the surfaces of them, while other departments handled the movement, rigging, weight, thickness and lighting. All this hard work paid off and the costumes are another of the film’s highlights – I especially liked Anna’s coronation dress. It has to be said, though, that while Elsa’s racy blue number looks dazzling, it’s also jarringly anachronistic for the time period (and how did she make it out of ice?)
The cinematography is probably my favourite aspect of the entire film – say what you will about it, but it looks fabulous from start to finish. The artwork is generally at its best during the musical numbers, true to Disney form; there’s a moment during First Time in Forever where Anna dances through a hall of paintings, and we see that old Disney favourite by Fragonard, The Swing, which greatly inspired the look of Tangled. I don’t need to tell you how impressive the Let It Go sequence looks, either, showing off the animator’s snow effects to their fullest.
The one problem I had with the cinematography was a single moment in the climax, which I thought was badly handled. Right after Anna has thrown herself under Hans’s sword to protect Elsa, she freezes completely and lets out one last little puff of air, followed by total silence. I remember seeing that part in the theatre and everyone just bursting out laughing – it looked so silly and totally killed the mood of the moment, with everyone trying to stifle their giggles during the uncomfortable silence that follows it. Apparently, this choice was John Lasseter’s idea, one he “really wanted.” Lee explained that in that moment, “we wanted everything to feel suspended,” but I don’t think it works well tonally. Perhaps if they hadn’t added that puff of air? Regardless, it’s just a little nit-pick.
Soundtrack
Once it was decided that the film would be a musical, producer Del Vecho turned to the husband-and-wife team of Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez to write the songs, having previously worked with them on 2011’s Winnie the Pooh. Their work on that film had been enjoyed so much by the Disney staff that they didn’t even need to ask for the job – instead, Disney pitched it to them. At the time, Anderson-Lopez was in New York City with their two young daughters, but Disney so badly wanted them both on board that after first pitching the project to Robert in Los Angeles, the production team then headed out to New York in person to pitch it to Kristen. Robert, for his part, felt that Disney were particularly interested in securing his wife’s strong story talents. Naturally, both of them readily agreed: “Whenever Disney asks if you want to do a fairy tale musical, you say yes.”
Still, despite their enthusiasm, the physical distance between New York and California posed some problems during the collaboration. To keep the Burbank team up to date, the songwriters had to engage in frequent two-hour transcontinental videoconferences almost every weekday for around fourteen months. As each song was composed, they would record a demo in their home studio and then email it to Burbank for discussion at the next conference. The pair were acutely aware of the comparisons that would be made between their work and that of the Renaissance legends like Menken and Ashman, so whenever they were struggling with the work, they would ask themselves, “What would Ashman do?” In the end, their productivity resulted in twenty-five songs, but only eight made it into the final film.
For the score, Disney hired Christophe Beck based on the strength of his work for the short Paperman, which had been rapturously received the previous year. He was brought on board only in February of 2013 and set to work immediately, aiming to incorporate as much Sámi influence as he could. Sámi musician Frode Fjellheim contributed an altered version of his 2002 song Eatnemen Vuelie for the film’s opening titles, which contains elements of the traditional Sámi singing style known as joik. A Norwegian linguist was also recruited to help the team with the lyrics for the Old Norse song sung at Elsa’s coronation, even travelling out to Trondheim in Norway to record the all-female choir Cantus singing it. Beck also utilised many setting-appropriate instruments in the orchestra, such as the bukkehorn, as well as traditional vocal techniques like kulning.
Together with the songwriters, Beck aimed “to create a cohesive musical journey from beginning to end” by working the arrangements of their songs into the underscore. Sound engineer David Boucher and scoring mixer Casey Stone even worked together to align their microphone setups, making sure that the transitions between songs and score were seamless, as they were recorded on different dates. The final orchestration was recorded at the Eastwood Scoring Stage on the Warner Bros. Studio lot in Burbank by an 80-piece orchestra, accompanied by 32 vocalists including native Norwegian Christine Hals. The resulting score is an excellent piece of work, standing out in some of the more emotional moments of the climax and during the opening.
Boucher supervised the vocal recordings of the cast members, which began in October of 2012 at the Sunset Sound studio in Hollywood. This was before the songs had been orchestrated, so they had only the songwriters’ demos to work with. Most of the dialogue was recorded at the Roy E. Disney Animation building under the supervision of the dialogue and sound mixer, Gabriel Guy, although some was recorded later at both Sunset Sound and Capitol Studios; both of these offered “vocal isolation booths” for certain scenes involving Anna and Elsa, which allowed actresses Bell and Menzel to read their lines within sight of each other without “bleeding” into each other’s tracks. Some dialogue was also recorded at the Soundtrack Group’s New York schedule, to accommodate the busy work schedules of New York-based cast members like Fontana.
The sound design received yet more careful attention to make sure every detail was exactly right. Due to the complexity of the many snow and ice sound effects required, sound designer Odin Benitez headed out to Mammoth Mountain in California to record them at a frozen lake. Meanwhile, the foley artists at the Warner Bros. lot received daily deliveries of ice to use in their recordings there. The many revisions in the production’s visuals caused problems all the way down the line; five separate versions of nearly every footstep on snow had to be recorded, since the film used five different types of snow. Apparently the team was “particular” about the sound of Elsa’s footsteps in the ice palace, taking eight attempts at them overall which included tapping wine glasses and metal knives on the ice; in the end, they went with a mix of three sounds. (Of course, why Elsa is wearing high heels in an ice palace is anyone’s guess – forget Claire Dearing outrunning a T-Rex, how was nobody talking about this girl running up ice stairs in the damn things?)
So, on to the songs. Our first is also one of the most underrated, entitled Frozen Heart. The songwriters likened this to earlier Disney numbers such as Song of the Roustabouts from Dumbo (1941) and Fathoms Below from The Little Mermaid (1989). Kristen explained, “I guess we were in a meeting, and I kept saying: ‘if we could just have a song which basically said the ice is beautiful and dangerous and set up a little mystery’, while Robert added that the ‘masculine energy of the song establishes the expansiveness of the story’”. Robert elaborated, saying “I think that’s why Fathoms Below is in The Little Mermaid. It’s telling the boys this is going to be a story with songs, but there’s going to be something in it for everyone… It’s not just a princess movie. And Frozen isn’t just a princess movie. It’s got a lot of action and fun and entertainment and stuff like that, and Frozen Heart kind of tells you there’s going to be some violence in this story.”
Honestly, this is one of the better pieces in a very mixed bag and it really deserves some more attention. It has a stirring rhythm to it and features some foreshadowing in its lyrics, as well some stunning scenery of the fjords lit by the northern lights. During it, we also meet little Kristoff and Sven as they try to help the icemen in their task. We’re off to a good start with this one.
Next up is Do You Want to Build a Snowman?, which features three different actresses playing Anna at different ages. Katie Lopez, who plays her as an infant, is the songwriters’ daughter, and Agatha Lee Monn, who plays her as a child, is the daughter of director Jennifer Lee. At one point, this one was nearly dropped from the production because it was considered to be both too sad and too “complicated,” filled as it is with exposition. However, it was so well-received by the staff that it ended up being kept, although an intended reprise for the climax didn’t make the final cut.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. Of all of the film’s songs, this was one of the two that was seriously overplayed on the radio – it was inescapable for months. This has turned it into pure meme fodder in this internet-driven age, and everyone (including me) is so sick of it now that it’s hard to be objective about it. Still, it’s actually quite a catchy number if you try to separate it from the hype, and many critics praised it for the depth it brings to the characters of Anna and Elsa as we watch them grow up apart in fear, confusion and loneliness.
A little further on, we come to Anna’s big number, For the First Time in Forever, which serves as her “I Want” song. She performs it on the morning of her sister’s coronation, bursting with excitement at the prospect of finally meeting other people her own age (still don’t get how she’s avoided that for so long as a royal), while her sister nervously frets about the same thing. This was one of the last songs to be composed in (amazingly) June of 2013, just five months before the release – the filmmakers were scrambling to fix persistent story problems at this point, and the song provided the key to understanding Anna’s character, thus ironing out one of the biggest issues. Originally, it included a line that went “I hope that I don’t vomit in his face,” but Disney deemed this “unacceptable” because it referenced bodily fluids (heaven forbid a Disney princess has those). It was young Katie Lopez who came up with the replacement: “I wanna stuff some chocolate in my face.”
It has a better melody to it than Do You Want to Build a Snowman? and I preferred it overall, although some of the lyrics (including the above) do feel a bit awkward. It reminded me of Rapunzel’s reprise of When Will My Life Begin? from Tangled, in which she suddenly becomes a valley girl: “For, like, the first time ever!” Here, we have the nineteenth-century Norwegian Anna using phrases like “Totally bizarre!” It might not be too distracting to everybody, but I did find it a little annoying. Still, that aside, this is definitely one of the film’s best songs.
During the coronation, Anna gets another song, a faux-romantic duet with Hans called Love is an Open Door. The idea of doing a combination of a romantic ballad and a classic villain song came up after Elsa was demoted to tragic hero and Hans stepped into the role of the antagonist. The first version was called You’re You, which wound up being cut because Hans’s behaviour in it would ruin the reveal intended for the climax, making his evil apparent too early. The version of the song in the finished film was inspired by the date from The Karate Kid (1984) and was set up to “feel like the perfect date,” according to the songwriters.
One particular line about finishing “each other’s sandwiches” has gained attention for a perceived connection with the show Arrested Development, apparently (I don’t watch it myself), but Anderson-Lopez explained that she was simply eating a sandwich herself when she wrote it and had not seen the show. Only after her brother-in-law pointed it out did she realise that she had unintentionally referenced it. While she did try out a few different versions without the line, it ultimately remained in place.
I remember when I saw the film in theatres, I was rolling my eyes hard at this point. On the surface, the song felt so cheesy and jammed-in that I couldn’t believe Disney had included it. Of course, after the reveal of Hans’s true self, it actually becomes quite funny (if also a little tragic, given Anna’s delusion). It’s a deliberately over-the-top parody of more traditional Disney love ballads and makes for a fun scene, even if it does all turn out to be a lie later!
Okay. We’re here. We’ve reached it at last. It’s the anthem of the antichrist himself – Let It Go.
Elsa’s big ballad was the first song to be written for the film that was actually used. Its place in the early story drafts was reserved for what was then called “Elsa’s Badass Song,” which had not yet been written. The songwriters looked to the big showpieces of the Renaissance classics for inspiration, as well as the music of such artists as Adele, Aimee Mann, Avril Lavigne (whose debut album in 2002 was called Let Go), Lady Gaga and Carole King. One day, while walking through Prospect Park in New York, the two of them were “thinking from an emo kind of place” while trying to understand Elsa’s character and found things suddenly began to gel. Anderson-Lopez explained, “We went for a walk in Prospect Park and threw phrases at each other. What does it feel like to be the perfect exalted person, but only because you’ve held back this secret? Bobby came up with ‘kingdom of isolation,’ and it worked.” Lopez further improvised the song’s first four lines right there and then, and back at their home studio they were able to compose the rest by improvising melodies on their piano and brainstorming lyrics on a whiteboard, completing it within that day.
The composition of this piece was the pivotal moment in creating Elsa, leading to the change from antagonist to misunderstood protagonist. During the animation of the scene, the songwriters were particularly insistent about the moment at the end where Elsa slams the doors of her palace on the audience, which they wanted to include as an homage to the Broadway hit Sweeney Todd.
Needless to say, Let It Go was received with absolute ecstasy (at least at first) and became a cultural phenomenon, the likes of which Disney hadn’t caused since The Lion King. It has been interpreted by various critics as everything from a gay anthem about coming out to a song in support of autistic people, and children worldwide quickly became obsessed. It’s easy to relate to Elsa’s desire to just get away from it all and be herself, which is probably why the song connected so strongly with so many people. Much like Do You Want to Build a Snowman?, this one is also immensely overplayed, but if you can just forget the hype for a moment and really listen to it, it’s honestly a good ballad, able to hold its own against the Renaissance classics which inspired it. I chose it as my sixteenth favourite song from an animated film in an earlier post, and I stand by that – it may be impossible to escape from it, but it didn’t become so popular for no reason.
A little while later, Kristoff gets his only small song in the film, Reindeer(s) Are Better Than People. This was originally designed as a joke song for him to perform during the credits, since the songwriters were sad that they hadn’t been able to use Jonathan Groff’s singing abilities in the main film (he’s a Broadway star). Unfortunately, they realised that Kristoff is not the sort of character to just burst into song spontaneously like Anna would; although his confidence increases towards the end, the film is by that time too action-packed for any more songs and thus, his opportunity is lost.
While I understand the decision, it’s still a pity that they couldn’t give Kristoff a bigger song, because this one is beautifully performed. Imagine what he could have done with a ballad of his own!
Unfortunately, this is where the film’s soundtrack hits its first major snag. A few scenes after Kristoff and Anna set out to find Elsa, they run into Olaf, and the little snowman proceeds to deliver the irritating piece of filler that is In Summer. According to Josh Gad, Robert Lopez wrote this song because he was already familiar with what type of voice Gad had (having co-written The Book of Mormon, which Gad also appeared in). The songwriters specifically asked him to do “the operatic ending”, which amused Gad, and the piece replaced an earlier number intended for Olaf called Hot Hot Ice, which was described as “Hot Hot Hot meets Simon & Garfunkel. It didn’t work.” (Yeah, no kidding).
This is one of the two weakest songs in the whole film. It’s pure filler; the comic relief does not need an entire song devoted to outlining their motivations, and besides, this one just gets old fast. It’s not particularly funny after the first watch, filled as it is with predictable gags about Olaf not realising that what he wants most will kill him, and the cartoonish scenery of the fantasy sequence doesn’t gel well with the rest of the film. This one is a definite skip (unless you’re watching with kids, who will undoubtedly force you to re-watch this one until you’re tearing your hair out).
Thankfully, we get to cleanse our palettes with a reprise of For the First Time in Forever at Elsa’s palace, which takes up the bulk of Anna’s confrontation with her sister as she tries to persuade the latter to accompany her back to Arendelle. Originally, the scene was meant for a piece called Life’s Too Short, but as the characters evolved, the song was deemed too “vindictive” and was replaced with this number instead to create a motif. Anderson-Lopez wrote this one in about twenty minutes and successfully pitched it to Disney on her own, since Lopez was busy in LA trying to fix Do You Want to Build a Snowman?
It’s a strong number and another favourite for me, showing off Idina Menzel’s incredible vocals and featuring some excellent harmonising between her and Bell. It builds to a dramatic finish in which Elsa accidentally freezes Anna’s heart, making for one of the most memorable scenes in the film. If only it could have been a little longer! (Why are Disney reprises always better than the main song?)
Oh dear.
Now this – this is where things really go wrong. And this is the last song in the film, too – you were doing so well! Fixer-Upper is performed by Kristoff’s troll family when he brings Anna back to their lair for healing. Assuming that they are together, the trolls proceed to steamroller all over independence and get to the very brink of completing a marriage ceremony without their consent, before the song abruptly ends with Anna nearly passing out.
The idea behind this, at least, is interesting. Kristen Anderson-Lopez based it on her feelings from when she first started dating her husband, saying, “Well honestly the inspiration for {the song} is Bobby [husband Robert Lopez]. When we were first dating, I used to talk about him to my girlfriends as like he’s a bit of a fixer-upper. He lived with his parents but I was in love with him. I knew I was gonna marry him but he lived with his parents, he didn’t have a job. He was writing this crazy, puppet musical [Avenue Q] and so the word, fixer-upper, has always been in my lexicon.”
For his part, Robert said, “When we realized that Kristoff was going to have this relationship with the trolls which was kind of the key discovery, we realized that it was kind of, like, okay, he’s bringing this girl that he’s not dating home to this big, ruckus family and they’re gonna misinterpret the situation. So we thought oh, gee it’s gotta have that kind of New York dating song cabaret feel and so that’s how the music kind of came about.”
While that is all very sweet, I don’t think that’s at all the impression this song gives in the film. It’s really just more filler and doesn’t fit into the overall pacing – Anna is literally dying as it’s being sung, it’s so awkward. As I discussed in my character analysis, I hate the trolls; they have no respect for either Anna or Kristoff’s feelings and it really bugs me. I know I’m probably taking it too seriously, but I don’t care. With the many other songs that were cut from the film, surely there was a better one that could have been kept instead of this?
Over the end credits, we then get the usual pop cover of the film’s main ballad, in this case Let It Go, performed with powerful energy by Demi Lovato. The decision to release a single version of the song was made after it had been written and presented to Disney; the songwriters selected Lovato for the cover themselves. To be honest, I actually like her version a little better than the film one as it has a bit more personality to it, and I chose it as my twenty-seventh favourite credits song in an earlier post.
Okay, now I know this one is running on a bit, so I won’t spend too long on the voice acting. Suffice to say that everybody does a fine job and there were no obvious weak links anywhere. Menzel and Bell both handle their characters with skilful aplomb (if only they’d been better-written), and Groff was perhaps my favourite with his gruff but gentle portrayal of Kristoff. Also, I may not like Olaf, but I do appreciate Josh Gad’s performance – he adds more humour to him than the writing alone would have allowed, and I think he did the best job with this character that anyone could have.
Final Verdict –
To prepare for the international release, Disney Character Voices International translated Frozen into a staggering 41 different languages (compared with the 15 used for The Lion King). One of the biggest challenges during this process was to find sopranos capable of matching Menzel’s warm vocal tone and three-octave range in their native languages. Lopez explained that Disney told he and Kristen to remove any complex wordplay and puns from their songs to ensure the film would be more easily translatable and keep it globally appealing. Bell and Menzel’s voices were used as the “blueprint” during these casting sessions; the team needed the actors to be able to match their voices “as much as possible” while still being native speakers of the languages, resulting in an international cast of over 900 people who completed roughly 1,300 recording sessions between them.
The film was released to theatres in the USA in November of 2013 and was accompanied by a witty new Mickey Mouse short called Get a Horse! (which I’ll be reviewing down the line). It premiered at the El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood like so many other Disney flicks before it, beginning with a five-day limited release before going into wide release at the end of the month. Later, after its explosion of popularity, it was also released in sing-along versions.
Of course, as we all know, Frozen completely blew people away and basically took over western culture for the next year. It set records left, right and centre, surpassing the one billion dollar mark by March of 2014 after 101 days on release. As of this writing, it ranks as the highest-grossing animated film of all time, the highest-grossing film of 2013, the 12th highest-grossing film in general, and the third highest-grossing in Japan. It also held the record of being the highest-earning film directed by a woman in terms of domestic earnings, until it was recently surpassed by Warner Bros.’ Wonder Woman. When the home media releases came out, it sold 18 million units in 2014 alone, becoming the best-selling film of the year in the USA. By January 2015, it had become America’s best-selling Blu-ray.
A large proportion of Frozen’s audiences consisted of women, with female viewers accounting for about 57 percent of its audiences on its first weekend, compared to 81 percent for families. Among foreign viewers, the film did particularly well with the Japanese, topping the charts as that country’s second highest-grossing imported film overall behind 1997’s Titanic. While early commercial predictions of its potential success were strong, nobody really anticipated it getting as big as it did. Elsa actually became a popular baby name for the first time (I can vouch for this myself; a friend of my mother’s recently named her daughter Elsa in honour of the character), and even nature itself seemed to be promoting the film when the US suffered a much colder winter that year than usual. Of course, as the hype surrounding the film grew, not everybody was happy about the inescapability of it, and a great deal of backlash began to be levelled at it as the months passed.
Reviews were largely positive, with many critics comparing the film favourably to the films of the Disney Renaissance, calling it the best Disney film in years (debatable, to say the least). It was praised for its visuals, themes, musical numbers, characters, screenplay and vocal performances, especially Bell’s, Menzel’s and Gad’s. The Norwegian Sámi media also celebrated the film as a great example of a film which showcases their culture to broader audiences, with the Sámi President Aili Keskitalo praising composer Frode Fjellheim (who created the opening title song) in his 2014 New Year’s speech. Among the few negative reviews, the most common criticism was understandably to do with the story, which has often been cited as the film’s weakest aspect (I would have to agree).
There were also a few minor controversies. A statement made by Lino DiSalvo, the head of the animation, led to accusations of sexism in the portrayal of animated women – the offending line was “Historically speaking, animating female characters are really, really difficult, because they have to go through these range of emotions, but you have to keep them pretty.” However, the rest of the team fiercely defended DiSalvo, saying that his comments had been taken out of context and that he was referring to the difficulty of animating characters with computers in general. In 2014, DiSalvo tried to better explain what he had originally meant, saying, “Translating that emotional range onto a CG character is one of the most difficult parts of the process. Male. Female. Snowman. Animal.” He then added, “The really sad thing is people took that … catchy headline and they just repopulated it everywhere. People didn’t get back to me for comments and the sad thing is that’s the way the internet works. They don’t want the truth.”
In addition to this, some evangelical pastors and commentators criticised the film for promoting the “normalization” of homosexuality, an element which many other viewers were celebrating (despite it not being official text in the first place). The whole “Elsa is gay” argument gets surprisingly complicated, with Robert Geal of Film International arguing that “while the film offers a superficially progressive vision of homosexuality, it perpetuates conservative notions about sexuality and gender; whereas Elsa’s female homosexuality is rendered visually pleasurable to a male gaze, male transgressions of heterosexuality are coded in various negative ways.” (To quote Wikipedia again). Director Jennifer Lee said of the perceived homosexual undertones, “We know what we made. But at the same time I feel like once we hand the film over, it belongs to the world, so I don’t like to say anything, and let the fans talk. I think it’s up to them.” She also stated that a 2013 Disney film would have a “2013 point of view.”
At the end of 2013, Disney also filed a lawsuit for trademark infringement against Phase 4 Films, seeking an injunction against the continued distribution of their Canadian film The Legend of Sarila, which had been retitled Frozen Land in the USA and had a similar logo to Disney’s film. By late January of 2014, the two had settled the case – The Legend of Sarila would no longer be marketed under its new title and none of its trademarks, logos or other designs could be too close to Disney’s. Phase 4 also had to pay Disney $100,000 before the 27th of that month and make “all practicable efforts” to remove copies of Frozen Land from distribution by the beginning of March.
As if all this wasn’t enough, Demi Lovato, Idina Menzel and Walt Disney Animation Studios are also apparently involved with an ongoing lawsuit regarding their rights over Let It Go: the artist Jaime Ciero believes that the song is a rip-off of his 2008 single Volar.
Still, the hate never bothered Frozen anyway and it was nominated for masses and masses of awards, winning several of them. Among the most notable were the Academy Award and Golden Globe for Best Animated Feature, a second Academy Award for Best Original Song (Let It Go) and the BAFTA for Best Animated Film. There were also five Annie Awards, two Critics’ Choice Awards, a Grammy for Best Compilation Soundtrack For Visual Media and another for Best Song Written For Visual Media.
The film was released to Blu-ray, DVD and digital download in 2014 and sold a whopping 3.2 million physical units on only the first day of release, while simultaneously setting a record as the fastest-selling digital download of all time (it also quickly became one of the most-pirated films ever through illegal downloading).
The film’s popularity was so great that there was actually a merchandising shortage in the USA and several other countries in early 2014, leading to ridiculous situations where limited-edition Frozen dolls were selling for over one thousand dollars on eBay. The shortage wasn’t rectified until late that year, by which time Disney had sold over three million Frozen costumes in America alone. It must have been hell to be a meet-and-greet character from the film at the Disney parks at the time; wait times to see one regularly exceeded four hours and management were forced to extend what was originally meant to be only a temporary film promotion. Later on, the Disney Parks put on a temporary event called Frozen Summer Fun at Disney’s Hollywood Studios, and then in late 2014 it was announced that Epcot’s Norway pavilion would be redesigned as a Frozen-themed attraction, which opened in 2016. That same year, a live musical stage show officially opened at the Hyperion Theatre in Disney California Adventure. By August of 2014, Random House had sold over eight million Frozen-related books, and that year many tour operators (including Adventures by Disney) noted a sharp increased in demand for trips to Norway. The film was literally taking over the world.
In 2015, a short “sequel” called Frozen Fever premiered alongside the live-action adaptation of Cinderella starring Lily James, and then last year, there was an outcry when Pixar’s beloved Mexican hit Coco was accompanied by another “short” (clocking in at nearly half an hour) called Olaf’s Frozen Adventure, which was perceived by some as an attempt to “whiten” a film starring a non-white protagonist. Due to the outrage at the short’s extreme length and inappropriate placement, Disney officially removed it from later screenings of Coco (thank goodness). Finally, in March of 2015, a full sequel film was announced, with Buck, Lee and Del Vecho all returning and most of the cast reprising their roles. It is set for release in November of next year, making it our final Disney film of the decade.
Well! That was a long one, wasn’t it? If you’re still with me at this point, congratulations on your perseverance. I have to say, this one was a bit of a chore to get through; while I don’t hate this film, it’s far from being one of my favourites, and to have to write so much about it was a real pain. Still, I could hardly do otherwise: Frozen has had a greater effect on western culture than any Disney film since The Lion King and, while it may not be to everyone’s tastes, there is something undeniably compelling about it. Yes, it has underdeveloped characters and awkward writing, but it also boasts some terrific music and truly stunning scenery, all of which blend together into a unique experience which has clearly affected a huge number of people all across the planet. It’s worth seeing at least once, even if you only want to confirm your bias that it’s overrated (which it is, let’s be honest); any film that gets people talking like this one did is worth exploring.
Many thanks for reading this monster of an article. If all goes to plan, I should be back next week for the review of Big Hero 6 – it’ll be much shorter, I swear – although I’m afraid there’ll be no book review since I have an unusually busy week at work. We’re only three films away from completing the entire canon now, it’s so exciting!
My Rating – 3/5
References
Once again, I don’t own the official art book for this film (although it is still listed below for anyone interested) and none of my more general books cover films this recent. However, there was no shortage of material on the film’s Wikipedia page alone, it’s immense!
(I don’t own this) The Art of Frozen (2013) by Charles Solomon
By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37784628 – credit for poster
https://criticsroundup.com/film/black-narcissus/ – credit for Black Narcissus image
By Leif – originally posted to Flickr as naeroyfjord, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8447956 – credit for Nærøyfjord image
http://musingsfromanotherstar.blogspot.com/2015/06/wicked-frozen.html – credit for merch image
By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=41455712 – credit for concept art
https://medium.com/disney-and-animation/the-problem-with-false-feminism-7c0bbc7252ef – a fantastic article by Dani Colman which highlights the many reasons why this film is not as “feminist” as people think
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frozen_(2013_film) – Wiki page
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2294629/ – IMDB profile
Feeling Animated 
This film has always been on the “Eh, not too bad, but nothing special” end of the spectrum for me, but dang if this review didn’t give me a whole lot of stuff to think about! And I thought that the “Waking Snow White” review of POCAHONTAS (you can read that review here, if you like: http://wakingsnowwhite.blogspot.com/2011/10/ive-seen-hundreds-of-new-worlds-thomas.html) was the most thought-provoking Disney canon review I’d ever read…
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Glad you enjoyed it! I’d not heard of “Waking Snow White,” just checked out her Pocahontas review and it’s amazing! Doesn’t look like she’s posted in a few years, but I’ll still check out her other work. Thanks for the link!
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I’m with you: don’t hate it, but not one of my faves either. Great review!
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Yeah, I’ll never understand the insane reaction it got. Thanks for reading!
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Wow. I…can’t say I agree. With like, anything (besides the animation and some of the soundtrack). But, I respect the detail you put into this article.
Nevertheless, what bothers me the most is how you criticized Anna’s character.
Now, I never hailed Frozen as a feminist icon, but Anna spends most of the film looking for her sister — she is not merely motivated by romance. Anna’s desire for romance did not come until after Elsa had rejected her for so many years. Her motivation to find “true love” ends within the first third of the film. Plus, she’s 18 — as if no teenage girl has ever wanted a significant other.
Hans proposes to Anna, but that’s doesn’t make her a passive character, in my opinion. Right afterwards, you can see Anna attempting to plan out their wedding without much input from Hans. When Elsa refuses to bless the marriage. Anna actively confronts her. Elsa wants to speak in private, but Anna refuses. Elsa wants to shut the gates once again, but Anna pleads with her not to. Elsa wants nothing more to do with the conversation, but Anna demands the truth.
Kristoff carries her back to Hans, but only because Anna is physically too weak. As Kristoff drops her off, Anna asks if he’ll be okay. Personally, I thought it was rather endearing that despite her dying state, Anna was still worried about others.
Olaf lights the fire, but only because Anna was freezing on the floor. Olaf tells her that Kristoff bringing her back was an act of love, but only because Anna admitted herself that she did not know what love truly was. During the betrayal, you can see Anna attempt to stop Hans from putting out the fire, but she only manages to stumble on the floor. Olaf points out that Kristoff loves her, but it is Anna who ultimately makes the decision to actually go to Kristoff (whereas Olaf wants Anna to stay by the fire).
I can understand finding Lilo and Nani’s relationship to have been better defined than the Frozen sisters. But, I think it’s important to consider the circumstances of both sister relationships. For Lilo and Nani, the death of their parents likely brought them closer, since they only have each other. Nani is also working hard to make sure that Lilo is not taken away from her. Anna and Elsa are the opposite. Anna pleads with Elsa to open the door and let her in, but Elsa refuses to even attend their parents’ funeral. For years, Anna has attempted to get Elsa to open her door. But, by the ending of “Do You Want to Build a Snowman,” Anna is basically saying, “please let me in, because if you don’t…I give up.” The death of their parents didn’t bring them closer — only further apart.
Ariel makes a bad decision, though with full knowledge of Ursula being the sea witch. Ursula flat-out tells Ariel that she will be imprisoned if she fails her end of the bargain. Anna makes a dumb decision, but, without knowing Hans’ true intentions. I don’t disagree that the execution could have been better. But, whereas Anna has been manipulated, Ariel was explicitly told what Ursula’s intentions were, making her decision seem more foolish.
The comparisons to Rapunzel don’t sit nicely with me, neither. Despite being locked in a tower for 18 years, Rapunzel acts mostly like a carefree, fearless individual. She has been convinced that Mother Gothel is her only means of protection, yet she is frequently comfortable with leaving Gothel’s side. It’s a bit much to buy that Rapunzel can act more resourceful than Eugene throughout the film, when Eugene should have much more experience with how people in the kingdom act. You say that Rapunzel has “people skills” and wit, but that does not make sense for someone who has been told that outside people are evil. Personally, I think Quasimodo is a much better example of an isolated character than Rapunzel, but that’s a different discussion.
Anna isn’t supposed to be a role model — she’s supposed to be relatable. Forget making “strong” or “feminist” female characters. Make female characters who are people.
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Looking back at this article two years on, I was perhaps a little harsh with Anna – and if it’s any consolation, I think she was handled somewhat better in the recent sequel, apart from her random, paranoid new tendency to misunderstand everything Kristoff says (but I think that’s more a flaw with the writing of him than her).
I also agree with several of your points. I do love both Rapunzel and Quasi, but I agree that Quasi is the more believably portrayed of the two, given the abuse they’ve both been subjected to. You could argue, perhaps, that Rapunzel is less repressed and timid than Quasi because Gothel has at least raised her with some semblance of affection, compared to Frollo’s cold, remote manner (or because of the magic of the Sun she has imbibed), but as you say, that’s a whole other discussion.
Your closing point that female characters should not always be burdened with being “role models” is also very true, and it’s a pity that even today Hollywood still seems to struggle with writing “normal” women. To be clear, I’m not saying every female character needs to be some over-compensating badass who beats up men and isn’t allowed to be in love; there are plenty of subtler, more natural ways of writing such characters, and of course traits/behaviours coded as traditionally “feminine” are not bad or weak.
Ultimately, the best female characters are the ones whose gender does not inform their story arc – girls who are people, just like the boys. That’s what feminism is really about, I agree. (Within Disney, I would point to Moana as an excellent recent example of such a character).
However, I still stand by most of my points about Anna and Elsa, who I feel were the victims of poor writing more than anything (the film was still suffering story troubles right into 2013, just months before its release, and the story had plagued all who attempted to adapt it at Disney since as early as the 1940s). Personally, I think Frozen would have been a much stronger film if Elsa had been allowed to remain the villain, with Hans – and maybe Kristoff – removed entirely.
That would have allowed the writers to more fully explore the relationship between the two sisters, which is what the story is ostensibly about. I suppose my main problem with the film was just the absurd amount of praise it got for being “progressive” for having two female leads, when I felt like it really squandered them. Anna and Elsa’s relationship isn’t really developed enough for me to care about them reuniting (although I understand that others may see it differently), and for better or worse, Anna spends far more time interacting with (and falling for) two men. Not a problem in itself, but when critics and audiences continually praise the film for depicting “familial true love” between sisters, I can’t help but be disappointed at how little relationship said sisters have.
That’s my ultimate point – many people seemed to see this film as something that, in my opinion, it’s not. I knew going into this review that most fans would disagree, and that’s fine. I appreciate you leaving such a detailed defence of Anna!
If you’re interested, one of my key sources for this review was Dani Colman’s article on the film, which you can read here: https://medium.com/@directordanic/the-problem-with-false-feminism-7c0bbc7252ef . It’s a bit long, but she goes into more detail on why Anna and Elsa don’t really work.
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Allegorically, “Frozen” lacks the purity and elemental power of a classic myth like “Beauty and the Beast,” but at least its storytelling is fairly coherent, and its gleaming dream world of snow and ice is one of the most visually captivating environments to be found in a Disney animated film. There are moments when you may feel that you are inside a giant crystal chandelier frosted with diamonds.
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