Trivia / Frozen (2013)

• Actor-Inspired Element: Kristen Bell pushed for Anna to be more goofy, wanting a flawed, realistic heroine. Her catchphrase, "Wait, what?", came from Kristen, who also requested Anna wake up with bedhead and have a tendency to "put her foot in her mouth."
• Actor-Inspired Heroism: An interesting variant of Music Inspired Heroism, where it was not the main actress who inspired the change, but the performer who sung (and co-wrote) the demo version of a key song. Originally, Elsa was going to be a villain, and the writers "were struggling with how villainous she should be." Then the demo of "Let It Go" was performed by lyricist Kristen Anderson-Lopez, whose vulnerable yet powerful interpretation of the lyrics inspired them to rewrite her as a more sympathetic character.
• Ascended Fanon:
  • A fan sent Jennifer Lee a tweet saying that the fans had been calling Hans' horse "Lemon". She liked the idea and named the horse the Norwegian equivalent, "Sitron".
  • Similarly, when a deleted scene mentioned an "Admiral Westergard" who was apparently in love with Anna and acting in opposition to Elsa, fans assumed he was the character that eventually became Hans and asked Jennifer Lee whether Westergard would be Hans' last name. Since the Admiral was Hans in an earlier draft and the issue of Hans' last name never (properly) came up in the final script, Jennifer Lee confirmed that it was as good a last name as any other. Tie-In Novel A Frozen Heart uses it as Hans' surname.
  • It was speculated that the people in the sauna were Oaken's family. "Olaf's Frozen Adventure", while not canon according to the main films' codirector Jennifer Lee, is a spin-off Christmas Special that takes this route.
• Awesome, Dear Boy: Kristen Bell had wanted to voice a Disney character since she was a little girl. Here, she finally gets her chance.
• Baby Name Trend Starter:
  • In the year after the release of the film, the popularity of the name "Elsa" went up over 240 spots in the U.S.
  • It also jumped 243 places to become the 88th most popular baby name for girls in the UK.
  • In Japan, the names Anna and Rin (Rin meaning "cold" in Japanese, which was also popular due to Love Live! having a character with the name) made the top ten baby names thanks to the film.
• Beam Me Up, Scotty!: Hans' Wham Line is often abridged as "If only someone loved you", aside from spawning a fount of memes.
• Better Export for You: The American Blu-ray lacks a 3D option, but some foreign countries received a 3D Blu-ray release.
• Blooper:
  • While Letting Her Hair Down during "Let it Go", Elsa's braid passes through her arm◊. This "mistake" was actually intentional; according to the animators, her rig was so complex that they could either let her hair phase through or watch her braid crumple like an origami model.
  • At the end of "Let it Go" Elsa takes several steps out to her castle balcony, but in the next shot she only has to turn her heel and take one step to go inside and shut the doors behind her.
  • There's also a scene near the end where Kristoff's thumb phases through Anna's dress.
• Breakaway Pop Hit: This is inverted. While Demi Lovato's version of "Let It Go" is popular in its own right, it's the original version, in the context of the movie, that became the cultural hit. It was so good it even won an Academy award for Best Original Song in 2014.
• Celebrity Voice Actor:
  • Most of the cast, as is usually the case for big-budget animated films, are celebrities. For instance, Kristen Bell landed the lead role as Anna, while Elsa is voiced by Idina Menzel. Maurice LaMarche as the King and Frank Welker as Sitron are the token veteran voice actors in the main cast. Character actress Edie McClurg, known for her distinctive voice, also has a bit part as Gerda.
  • Most of the rest of the cast is made of Broadway Musical celebrities, Jonathan Groff (of Spring Awakening), Santino Fontana (of Cinderella), and Josh Gad (of The Book of Mormon). Idina Menzel (of Wicked) also counts as one of these.
  • The opposite seems to be true for the Brazilian dub, in which the only celebrity is local comedian Fábio Porchat as Olaf.
• Children Voicing Children: The preteen versions of Anna and Elsa from Frozen are voiced by children, even when singing. Oliva "Livvy" Stubenrauch voices Young Anna (speaking), Eva Bella voices Young Elsa, Katie Lopez voices Young Anna (singing), Agatha Lee Mon voices Preteen Anna, and Spencer Lacey Ganus voices Teen Elsa.
• Colbert Bump: Thanks to this movie Norway saw a large increase in tourism because families wanted to get as close to the story as possible.
• Completely Different Title:
  • In some European countries, the movie is known as The Snow Queen, the same title as the story by Hans Christian Andersen that inspired the movie, ireportedly because of Europe's strong cultural bond with Andersen, even though the movie only resembles his Snow Queen in a very loose way. A number of other countries changed the title to "Kingdom of Ice" or some variation on it ("Snow Kingdom", "Land of Ice", etc.).
  • Inverted in the Latin American/Brazilian dub, with the title left untranslated and the redundant subtitle Uma Aventura Congelante (A Freezing Adventure) added.
  • The Finnish dub does the same, even adding basically the same subtitle in Finnish: Huurteinen seikkailu, literally "frosty adventure".
  • The Japanese Title literally translates to Anna and The Snow Queen (アナと雪の女王), which is also the Working Title of the movie.
  • The Polish title is very simple - 'Kraina Lodu' ('The Land of Ice') maybe because the word Frozen - Zamarznięty/Zamarznięta doesn't translate well by itself in Polish, as it's a 'perfective' - we need to know the 'gender' of the subject word to use it properly - is it a land (female - Zamarznięta) or the heart (neutral - Zamarznięte) that becomes frozen? Slavic languages can be a pain when translating English words.
  • The Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish title is simply 'Frost'.
  • The Estonian title translates to The Snow Queen and the Eternal Winter.
  • The Hungarian title Jégvarázs translates to "Ice Magic".
  • The Israeli title לשבור את הקרח, when translated, means "Breaking the Ice".
  • The German title is 'Die Esköenigin - Völlig unverfroren' (literally 'The Ice Queen - Completely Unabashed'), with the subtitle (a pun that doesn't translate well to English) making it similar to Tangled's German title, which is 'Rapunzel - Neu verföhnt'.
  • The Russian title is Холодное сердце, which means "Cold heart."
• Creator Couple: Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez are a married couple who worked together to write the movie's songs.
• Dawson Casting: 21 year old Elsa is voiced by a 42 year old Idina Menzel. 18 year old Anna is voiced by a 33 year old Kristen Bell. 23 year old Hans is voiced by 31 year old Santino Fontana. 21 year old Kristoff is voiced by a 28 year old Jonathan Groff.
• Demand Overload: The Merch sold as expected at first, and then word of mouth turned it into a shortage nightmare that took Disney months to even begin to meet. Even Disney Animation's own employees weren't exempt from the shortage, as many of them had neglected to buy any merch of their own until after the movie premiered. Also, while Frozen merchandise in general was still selling out months after the film's release, Elsa merchandise in particular was very hard to find. People were selling Elsa merch on sites like eBay for much higher than their retail value. Official Cosplay Gear for her even more so. Even scriptwriter and co-director Jennifer Lee had trouble finding an ice dress costume for her daughter.
• Diagnosis of God: Jennifer Lee has stated that Elsa suffers from anxiety and depression.
• Double Feature:
  • As is Disney's modus operandi with more recent film releases, Frozen was paired up with Saving Mr. Banks in many American theaters and drive-ins.
  • During its annual British holiday re-releases, it's often shown alongside The Muppet Christmas Carol.
• DreamWorks Face: Several promotional pictures have Elsa making that face, and while she does it in the movie itself a few times, it's not often.
• Dueling Movies:
  • A Russian animation company put out a Snow Queen adaptation around the same time.
  • An American stage musical adaptation debuted the same week as Frozen did, as well, complete with a song about ultimately letting go.
• Early Draft Tie-In:
  • There's a plush Elsa doll with a voice box with deleted lines:
    • One of her given lines is "But I am still your queen," which comes from an earlier version of the scene where Anna asks for Elsa's blessing to marry Hans. When Elsa refuses in the cut version, Anna responds that she doesn't need Elsa's permission anyway, because Elsa isn't her mother, prompting this quote.
    • Other lines include "I'm impressed you made it all the way up here" and "Nah, I think I'm better over here... thank you."
  • A lot of merchandise used older models of the sisters; Elsa's face is more angular and Anna's is rounder than in the final version.
  • The novelization contains a difference near the end that was from a developmental change. Kristoff was going to have a larger role in the climax, knocking Hans out after the latter has a villainous second wind and tries to attack again. The novelization kept the scene.
  • An early coloring book follows the "Life's Too Short" version of the story, in which Elsa tells Anna she won't thaw the Endless Winter, as opposed to what happens in the final cut, in which she instead says she can't.
• Executive Meddling: The movie was originally going to be traditionally animated, and first titled "The Snow Queen", then "Anna and the Snow Queen". After The Princess and the Frog under-performed at the box office, they made it CGI and the title was changed to "Frozen" (which actually fits the film's theme more, anyway). Even the Signature Song, "Let It Go", went through a slight lyric change. The third line was originally going to be "Couldn't keep it in, God knows I tried". It wasn't because they wanted to remove religious references (as some people initially thought), but it didn't want to be considered to be taking the Lord's name in vain. The final line is instead "Couldn't keep it in, heaven knows I tried", which fits better with the song's pattern anyway.
• Extremely Lengthy Creation: The film is over 70 years in the making.... Walt Disney himself even had ideas for an adaptation of The Snow Queen. People at Disney planned to produce this in The '90s as a hand-drawn feature, but they scrapped it during their change in management, and their shift to CG features starting with Chicken Little. Only after the success of Tangled was it picked up again.
• Fake Brit: American Alan Tudyk voices the Duke of Weselton with an English accent.
• Fake Nationality: American Chris Williams puts on an Scandinavian accent to voice the trading merchant Oaken, making Oaken the only character in the film with an accent accurate to its Nordic setting.
• Fandom Life Cycle: It took less than a year after it had been released to hit Stage 5, with the song "Let It Go" going so viral and Elsa's ice dress being so popular among little girls that it became the norm for people, whether or not they had seen the film personally, to know at least some basics (mainly, that there is a royal named Elsa with ice powers who wears that famous ice dress and sings "Let It Go," and usually that sisterhood is a big theme).
• God Never Said That: A popular fan theory emerged that Anna and Elsa's parents actually survived their shipwreck and managed to escape to a faraway continent with their newly born infant, who was raised by apes after they died. Chris Buck, who co-directed both Tarzan and Frozen, was reported as "confirming" this fan theory as canon, though he was actually joking about this. ^note Buck also said that he liked to imagine a group of surfing penguins existing on the other side of Tarzan's island in reference to a non-Disney film he co-directed. The theory was further disproved when the second film confirmed their parents were indeed killed from the shipwreck.
• Missing Trailer Scene:
  • The scene of Kristoff shouting "Now we just have to survive this blizzard!" while holding onto Olaf, to which Anna responds, "That's no blizzard! That's my sister!" which is followed by a shot of Elsa conjuring up a blast of snow on top of the mountain is absent from the film. The scene itself comes from test animation of the sequence where Anna and Kristoff dive off the cliff to escape from Marshmallow.^note While the sequence of events and some of the dialogue is the same as in the final film in this version, in this version Anna is reluctant to go off the cliff. The clip is too short to show it, but in the full version even the character designs are different: Elsa is a short haired blonde with different clothes, Anna doesn't have her skunk stripe, and Marshmallow has tree branches for arms instead of solid snow and ice. Marshmallow also is actively trying to kill them instead of scare them away. Naturally, this scene makes Elsa look like the villain, which had been the case in earlier drafts when the test animation was first created, but had changed by the final version.
  • The shot of Sven dragging his butt along the ice with his front legs scrabbling frantically, but making very slow progress, also doesn't appear in the film itself.
• No Export for You: A weird inversion. Several countries have 3-D and 2-D Blu-Ray Discs available on the same day, but with the exception of a Spanish-language release in Mexico, the Greater North America 3-D Blu-ray release has yet to occur. For now, Americans and Canadians will have to either download from a legitimate website, or import from another country if they want the 3D version.
• Non-Singing Voice: Played straight for Anna at age 5; Livvy Stubenrauch voices her, but Katie Lopez takes over for singing, the rest of Anna's age voices do their own singing.
• Playing Against Type: Maurice LaMarche as Elsa and Anna's father; LaMarche typically doesn't voice serious characters (and when he does, they're usually villains).
• Playing with Character Type: Only a year after voicing King Candy, Alan Tudyk plays another quirky old Bitch in Sheep's Clothing. Though rather than being a manipulative Hidden Villain, the Duke of Weselton is a far more open albeit indirect threat to the heroes, and is ultimately just a Red Herring for the film's true antagonist.
• Portmanteau Series Nickname: "AnaYuki" for the Japanese title, Ana to Yuki no Joou (Anna and the Snow Queen). Disney even uses it as the address for the film's Japanese page.
• Promoted Fanboy:
  • In the European Spanish version with Gisela, Elsa's singing voice. She started her career in 2001 in "Operación Triunfo", the Spanish equivalent to Pop Idol and American Idol. During the show, she stated in a special episode dedicated to Disney songs that singing in a Disney movie was one of her life dreams. Her wish was only half-fulfilled then, since Disney Spain chose her for singing in Return to Neverland. However, 12 years and a whole career as a stage musical performer later, she got her wish completely, with a big hit to boot.
  • Kristen Bell has been vocal about being a lifelong fan of Disney movies, especially Disney Princess ones, and had being part of a Disney movie as one of her life goals. She even got the job based on a recording of her singing music from her favorite, The Little Mermaid (1989).
  • Jennifer Lee is another long-time fan of Disney, citing Cinderella as a source of inspiration for her while suffering middle-school bullying. After joining the company as the scriptwriter for Wreck-It Ralph, she became Disney's first female director for Frozen and was especially excited about getting to work on the sequel short "Frozen Fever" that played before the live-action remake of Cinderella. This also opened the door for her to work on Frozen II and even become the Chief Creative Officer of Walt Disney Animation Studios.
  • Co-director Chirs Buck also adored Disney animation from a young age, especially Pinocchio. When he started working at Disney, he was excited to even be in the same room as one of the animators on Pinocchio, Eric Larson, who became his mentor.
  • Brittney Lee, a costume designer, was another fan of Disney, especially The Little Mermaid (1989).
  • Animator Becky Breese also grew up wanting to work on a Disney movie, especially a Disney Princess one. Like Jennifer Lee, her favorite was Cinderella.
• Reality Subtext: Explaining the sudden (and especially relatively slow) explosive popularity of the movie. In late 2013 into early 2014, the United States had been hit by what's now referred to as a "polar vortex" - long story short, there was a metric ton of snow dropped all over the country, especially along the snow-prone Eastern Seaboard. As explained by some media outlets at the time, people began seeing Frozen during the few days of thaw available with their families as a means to get over the weather, particularly given the themes and very title of the movie (the opening musical number of Kristoff harvesting the ice particularly resonated with the national zeitgeist of that specific time). It didn't take long for these families to realize that Frozen had legitimate appeal and word of mouth quickly spread.
• Referenced by...:
  • When The Nostalgia Critic reviewed The Lorax (2012), Frozen was mentioned twice: first with the Crossover Ship with Jack Frost of Rise of the Guardians, and then with assuming "Let It Go" was so popular, people were spoofing it before the movie even came out.
  • Knights of Buena Vista is a Campaign Comic for Disney works, and Frozen is the first covered.
  • Cracked referred to it at least twice in its articles.
    In this article about people not letting lack of talent stop them: Even though her parents forbade this child of luxury to pursue her creative calling (which you might recognize as both the plot of Frozen and the life story of every theater nut obsessed with Frozen), she never quit her dream, no matter how horrifying it was to see her practice it (again — Frozen).
    
    In this article about battles with twist endings: In the end, the Finnish army managed to hold their borders against wave after wave of hardened Soviet infantry, whose giant tanks and machine guns couldn't defeat the cast of Disney's Frozen.
    
    In this article about mistakes that led to PR disasters, children in a Florida cinema who came to see Frozen were treated to a traumatizing minute of the trailer for the pornographic movie Nymphomaniac.
  • Cinema Snob Reviews Frozen is a fan comic imagining if The Cinema Snob reviewed this film.
  • Guild of Dungeoneering has an ice-themed dungeon called "Ice Cream Mountains area". The boss is named "Generic, Non-Infringing, Cartoon Ice Princess", and her character art is basically Elsa.
• Saved from Development Hell: Disney had been trying to adapt The Snow Queen on-and-off since the 1940s, finding the concepts compelling but the titular character difficult to adapt to a feature-length film. The first attempt was part of a collaboration with another studio to make a film about its author, Hans Christian Andersen, which would include parts based on some of his most famous tales. The story was considered for a theme park ride in the 70s and for a stage show at Tokyo DisneySea in the early 2000s, but both plans were scrapped. The Brizzi brothers, Dick Zondag, Dave Goetz, and Harvey Fierstein all made pitches that didn't get off the ground. Although a late-90s attempt was ended in 2002, the idea was brought up again in 2003 and approved by then-CEO Michael Eisner in 2003, but it wasn't until 2008 that the pitch that would become Frozen was made by Chris Buck, then-titled Anna and the Snow Queen. Even then, the movie was shelved in 2010 before being revived the next year.
• Serendipity Writes the Plot: Originally, Elsa was not going to be a heroic character; the writers struggled to see her as anything more than a one-note villain. Then "Let It Go" was performed by Kristen Anderson-Lopez, whose vulnerable yet powerful interpretation of the lyrics inspired them to rewrite her as a misunderstood girl.
• Shrug of God: When asked by fans about Elsa's sexual orientation, the film's writer and co-director Jennifer Lee said that it was best left unsaid.
• Sleeper Hit:
  • Disney at first only hoped it would do as well as Tangled, which looked like a tossup after the opening weekend. This film was making money in theaters several months after release. Eventually it topped Iron Man 3 to become the top-grossing film of 2013, making it one of the slowest films to do so on its initial release. At 155 days, it was also the slowest film to reach $400 million at the domestic box office.
  • The soundtrack and "Let It Go" were surprise hits. The Demi Lovato version was released, but did modestly at best. After word-of-mouth for the film came out, the sales of the soundtrack started picking up, and YouTube hits for official versions of "Let It Go"^note There are quite a few, from the pop version, to the movie scene, to the singalong version, and these are duplicated across Disney's official channels were getting higher and higher, some into the hundreds of millions. The sing-along version posted on the Disney UK YouTube channel hit 1.6 billion views, and that's just one of the official videos.
  • Even the merchandise was this. Disney based projections for toy sales based on initial sales of The Princess and the Frog and Tangled, and some of the toys initially didn't even meet those. Then just as word-of-mouth picked up, merchandise across the board was selling out for months. Frozen remains one of Disney's hottest-selling franchises even years later.
• Softer and Slower Cover: "Let It Go ~ありのままで~ (Heartful Version)", a R&B cover done by May J, the singer of the credits version of "Let It Go" in Japan.
• Throw It In!: Due to the actors recording together, improvisation was encouraged by the directors in order to get a better sense of the characters. Josh Gad in particular improvised many of Olaf's lines.
• Tie-In Cereal: The first movie had a had plain kernels with marshmallow cereal, one box starring Elsa and Anna together, another with Olaf, both of them with a glossy finish.
• Tourist Bump: Tourist visits to Norway spiked up to 34% after the release of the movie, whose lore and setting was inspired by Norwegian culture and geography (even though the source material was written by a Dane). The country now hosts Frozen-themed family holidays to drum up publicity for those who are curious about the film's setting.
• Troubled Production: Not in terms of actually making the film, but in terms of trying to figure out what the film would be, even after the film finally started production. By the time the story was finalized, there was only 15 months to finish the film (less than half the time it took to make Wreck-It Ralph).
• TypeCasting:
  • Alan Tudyk is playing another quirky old bad guy in a Disney film again.
  • Idina Menzel also plays a Queen of a fantasy kingdom, though only at the very end in the Disney movie Enchanted.
  • Idina Menzel previously played Elphaba in Wicked, and Elphaba is fairly similar to Elsa in terms of being a powerful witch who learns to embrace her power, which is expressed in a big solo. At least four of Elsa's foreign dubbers have also portrayed Elphaba: Maria Lucia Rosenberg (Danish), Willemijn Verkaik (Dutch and German), Mona Mor (Hebrew) and Hyena Park [ko] (Korean). And just to cap it off, both Elsas to star in the musical — Caissie Levy on Broadway, and Caroline Bowman with the North American Tour — had played Elphaba on Broadway before being cast.
  • The te reo Māori dub has Jaedyn Randell, previously the te reo voice of Moana, playing another Disney Princess, Anna.
• Voices in One Room: Unusual for animated films starring well-known actors, the main cast, particularly Kristen Bell and Idina Menzel, would regularly record scenes together in order for the characters' relationships to feel more authentic.
• Word of God:
  • In an interview in 2014, between the film's initial release and the creation of the sequel, Lee explained that Elsa's powers were a result of her being born on a Winter Solstice, 1,000 years after a certain alignment with Saturn. This was ultimately contradicted when the second film gave her powers a new origin.
  • Hans is based on the mirror from the original story. This is shown by him mirroring the personality traits of whoever he is interacting with (acts dorky around Anna, polite and regal with Elsa, and harsh and rude to The Duke of Weselton.) When in the dungeon with Elsa, he even goes so far as to mimic the way she wraps her arms around herself and the way she turns slightly askew.
  • Hans also "was raised without love".
  • Jen Lee also said Kristoff is an orphan when adopted by the trolls.
• What Could Have Been: Shares a page with the rest of the franchise.
• Working Title: Was The Snow Queen for many years, as discussed above; by 2008 it had become Anna and the Snow Queen before progressing to its final title in 2011. It retains the Snow Queen title in a number of countries, and is indeed titled Anna and the Snow Queen in Japan.

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