Frozen is Disney’s latest blockbuster animation, based on the Hans Christian Anderson fairytale, The Snow Queen. In it two sisters, who have been mostly separate since birth, must come together to save their kingdom from an eternal winter of ice and snow. Here View’s Matthew Turner chats to directors Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee about creating their vision of the much loved classic story.
How did the project come about, first of all?
It was an idea I pitched back to John Lasseter in 2008. It’s changed quite a bit, but the essence is still there. It was the Snow Queen, it was the environment. But I think the Snow Queen character was always fascinating to all of us. Not quite as developed as we went in the story, she’s a villain but you don’t know much about her. And so that was our challenge, to create more of a fully dimensional character you care about.
Chris had wanted to look at an act of true love in a different way. I thought that was fantastic. When I was working on [Wreck-It Ralph], I was poking in and going, ‘Hi guys!’ and we’d often give notes to each other on each other’s films. I really believed in what they were doing.
You keyed in right away.
It did change a lot. When I came on, we didn’t have any songs, we really worked close with Bobby and Kristen [Lopez and Anderson-Lopez, song-writers] and developed the story with them. I went back to the original story, really for the theme. Fear versus love is a theme we hadn’t done before. Straight away, from the good versus evil, because I think we’ve seen a lot of that, and there’s nothing wrong with it, but we wanted to do something more dynamic. It beautifully supported this idea of looking at true love in a different way. It was a very long process, and complicated, but I think the essence was always there.
What kind of changes did you make? Was she a more evil character in the beginning?
She was. We defined her a little bit more than the book, but she was still just a villain. And then when Jen came on, then the songs. We started working with Kristen [Anderson-Lopez] on the songs. And one of the first songs they wrote was Let It Go.
We were just trying to figure out, who was the Snow Queen, and what is she going through? And they wrote it sort of what it would be like to celebrate her. We were just floored. We completely re-wrote the whole script to support that song. It just spoke to all of us.
Once you heard that song, we had to set Elsa up correctly. You have to tee up a song. You have to earn it, or it won’t play.
I think the other big breakthrough, which was just before that, was making them sisters. I think that really opened up a new level, and a layer to the story. The end of the story, there’s a moment where Anna makes a very special choice. There was an element of that that he had in the very beginning. One of the challenges was to earn that emotionally. To do that, having them be sisters, and then having Anna’s parallel story to a mature understanding of love. They worked
together, and I could suddenly see how we could make this emotional journey resonate, because it was very complicated. Those were the two biggest breakthroughs.
It was very tough to earn that ending. As Ed Catmull said to you when you came on as writer, what was it?
He said, ‘You can change anything you need to, but you’ve got to earn that ending. If you do, it’ll be great and if you don’t it’ll suck.’ No pressure! He’d check in and be like, ‘Almost. You’re getting
there.’ It was finally in June, and we had shown it to an audience, and he was there. He came up and said, ‘You did it,’ and I think I collapsed.