Producer Peter Del Vecho commented on the difficulties adapting The Snow Queen:

“Hans Christian Andersen’s original version of The Snow Queen is a pretty dark tale and it doesn’t translate easily into a film. For us the breakthrough came when we tried to give really human qualities to the Snow Queen. When we decided to make the Snow Queen Elsa and our protagonist Anna sisters, that gave a way to relate to the characters in a way that conveyed what each was going through and that would relate for today’s audiences. This film has a lot of complicated characters and complicated relationships in it. There are times when Elsa does villainous things but because you understand where it comes from, from this desire to defend herself, you can always relate to her. “Inspired by” means exactly that. There is snow and there is ice and there is a Queen, but other than that, we depart from it quite a bit. We do try to bring scope and the scale that you would expect but do it in a way that we can understand the characters and relate to them.”

In the late 1990’s, Walt Disney Feature Animation started on their own adaptation of The Snow Queen after the tremendous success of their recent films, but the project was scrapped completely in late 2002, when Glen Keane notoriously quit the project. Even before then, Harvey Fierstein pitched his version of the story to the Disney executives, but was turned down. Dick Zondag and Dave Goetz all had their try on it, but failed. Disney shelved the project again. Michael Eisner, then-CEO and chairman of The Walt Disney Company, offered his support to the project and suggested doing it with John Lasseter at Pixar Animation Studios, when the studios would get their contracts renewed.

The project was revived again around 2008 when Chris Buck pitched Disney his version of the adaptation. At the time, the project went under name of Anna and the Snow Queen, and was planned to be traditionally-animated. By early 2010, the project entered development hell once again, when the studio failed to find a way to make the story and the Snow Queen character work.

On December 22, 2011, following the success of Tangled, Disney announced a new title for the film, Frozen, and a release date, November 27, 2013, and a different crew from the previous attempt. A month later, it was confirmed that the film would be a computer animated feature in stereoscopic 3D, instead of the intended hand drawn animation. On March 5, 2012, it was announced that Chris Buck would be directing, with John Lasseter and Peter Del Vecho producing.

After Disney decided to advance The Snow Queen into development again, one of the main challenges Buck and Del Vecho faced was the character of the Snow Queen, which in that earlier version of the story, was a villain. Buck and Del Vecho presented their storyboards to John Lasseter, with the entire production team adjourned to a conference to hear Lasseter’s thoughts on this work-in-progress. Production designer Michael Giaimo, recalled;

“That was the game changer…I remember John saying that the latest version of The Snow Queen story that Chris Buck and his team had come up with was fun, very light-hearted. But the characters didn’t resonate. They aren’t multi-faceted. Which why John felt that audiences wouldn’t really be able to connect with them.”

The production team then addressed the film’s problems, drafting several different variations on the Snow Queen story until the characters and story felt relevant. Finally, the team decided to rewrite the film’s protagonist, Anna (who was based on the Gerda character from The Snow Queen), as the younger sibling of Elsa, effectively establishing a family dynamic between the characters.

Actress Kristen Bell was cast as the voice of Anna on March 5, 2012. Lee admitted that Bell’s casting selection was influenced after the filmmakers listened to a series of vocal tracks Bell had recorded when she was young, where the actress performed several songs from The Little Mermaid, including Part of Your World. Bell completed her recording sessions while she was pregnant, and subsequently re-recorded some of her character’s lines after her pregnancy, as her voice had deepened. When asked on her approach to Anna, Kristen Bell replied,

“I’m really excited to show it to people. I became a part of the kind of movie I wanted to see as a kid,” she said. “I always loved Disney animation, but 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.”

Idina Menzel, a Broadway veteran, was cast as Elsa, after impressing the directors during a recording session with Bell. Between December 2012 and June 2013, additional casting roles were announced; including Jonathan Groff as Kristoff, Alan Tudyk as the Duke of Weselton, Santino Fontana as Prince Hans, and Josh Gad as Olaf.

On November 30, 2012, it was announced that Jennifer Lee, one of the screenwriters of Wreck-It Ralph, had joined Buck as co-director. The filmmakers hired Lee initially as a screenwriter, following her work on Wreck-It Ralph. Lee then became heavily involved with the film’s pre-development process, working closely with director Chris Buck and songwriters, Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez. Following the announcement, Jennifer Lee became the first woman to direct a full-length animated motion picture produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios. Once the film entered production, Buck focused on the animation, whereas Lee focused on the screenplay, due to her inexperience with the former field.

The film’s animators visited an Ice Hotel in Quebec, Canada to study how light reflects and refracts on snow and ice. For the film’s setting, the animators used the landscape of Norway and the feel of the winter season of Wyoming for inspiration.

“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,” Del Vecho remarked. “There is a real feeling of Lawrence of Arabia scope and scale to this,” he finished.

Back at the studio, Del Vecho explained the film’s production:

“On this movie we do have character leads, supervising animators on specific characters. 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 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.”

Regarding the look and nature of the film’s cinematography, the film’s art director Michael Giaimo was greatly influenced by Jack Cardiff’s work in Black Narcissus. According to him, it lent a hyper-reality to the film:

“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.”

Ted D. McCord’s work in The Sound of Music was another major influence for Giamo;

“The juxtaposition of character and environment and the counterpart of how they played in terms of cinematography was brilliant in that film.”

It was also Giamo’s idea that Frozen should be filmed in CinemaScope, which was approved by Lasseter. Giaimo also wanted to ensure that Norway’s fjords, architecture and rosemaling folk art, were critical factors in designing the environment of Arendelle. Giaimo, whose background is animation, noted that the art design environment represents a unity of character and environment and that he originally wanted to incorporate saturated colors, which is typically ill-advised in computer animation. A live reindeer was brought into the studio for animators to study its movements and mannerisms for the character, Sven.

During production, the film’s English title was changed from The Snow Queen to Frozen, a decision that drew comparisons to Tangled. Peter Del Vecho explained that

“the title Frozen came up independently of the title Tangled. It’s because, to us, it represents the movie.Frozen plays on the level of ice and snow but also the frozen relationship, the frozen heart that has to be thawed. We don’t think of comparisons between Tangled and Frozen, though.”

He also mentioned that the film will still retain its original title, The Snow Queen, in some foreign countries:

“because that just resonated stronger in some countries than Frozen. Maybe there’s a richness to The Snow Queen in the country’s heritage and they just wanted to emphasize that.”

Disney animated films have been significant to my life since I was a young girl, which grew exponentially as I became a Mother. Living close to Disneyland helped fuel my association with all things Disney, as well. That said, as a woman, and a Mother of daughters, I became less and less enthralled with the “princess trope” that so many of the early Disney animated films perpetuated.

The movies have evolved though, and despite the often “Disneyfication” of literary stories, I have noticed the changes and am happy for them. Still and all, it had been quite a while since I saw a Disney animated feature (Pixar features not included) that I loved. And then there came Frozen.

First off, Frozen is taken from a Hans Christian Andersen story, which automatically had my interest. As a child, I would read Hans Christian Andersen stories obsessively, and at night I would often fall asleep listening to the stories from a Hans Christian Andersen album my Grandmother had given me. They were dark, they were often tragic, but even within the tragedy, the female protagonists were brave and bold, strong and persistent, and all-around survivors. I needed those kind of literary heroes in my life. The Snow Queen was always one of my favorites, tied closely with The Little Mermaid, though I was curious as to how they would translate the story into a musical animated family film, and I worried that they would soften it too much, taking away the emotional complexity of the original tale.

The direction they took the story, the liberties made, and the characters that came out of it, both human and non-human, worked brilliantly, within the movie Frozen. Elsa, the “Snow Queen“, is painted so complexly, and genuinely, that even when she acts selfishly, you can see the layers within the action, and the confusion within the girl who cannot seem to control her powers. Elsa is the character I related to the most, connecting strongly to the notion of having to be the “good girl”, keeping all words and feelings locked up tight, and giving up things for the good of everyone else.

Elsa reminded me a lot of Elphaba, from the musical Wicked, made famous by Idina Menzel, who also voiced Elsa. The song Let It Go has that same chill-inducing, phoenix rising from the flame, song of freedom that Wicked’s Defying Gravity possesses, and it is the song that has stuck with me after the credits rolled past, the song I keep listening to. This past holiday week was painful and fraught with rehashed emotions from being that closed off “good girl” in my past, so this song has an extra punch to it for me, an added relevancy.