Characters / Frozen - Snow Sisters

aka: Frozen Elsa

Frozen franchise character index
Arendelle (Anna and Elsa) | Foreign Nations | Extended Media (A Frozen Heart Exclusive)

ALL spoilers on this page are UNMARKED. This will give away what happens in the franchise.

This page covers the main characters of the Frozen franchise, Anna and Elsa.

Anna

Princess Anna of Arendelle

"Excuse me, I climbed the North Mountain, survived a frozen heart, and saved you from my ex-boyfriend, and I did it all without powers. So, you know, I'm coming."

Voiced by: Kristen Bell (adult), Abby Trott (Disney Dreamlight Valley), Livvy Stubenrauch (child, speaking, 2013) and Katie Lopez (child, singing), Hadley Gannaway (child, 2019), Agatha Lee Monn (9 year old)^{Other Languages} Saara Aalto (Finnish dub), Emmylou Homs (European French dub); Véronique Claveau (Canadian French dub); Einat Azulai (adult), Ayala Feldman (child) (Hebrew dub); Jaedyn Randell (adult), Tuakoi Ohia (teen), Te Atakorihi Tutengaehe (child) (te reo Māori dub); Romina Marroquín Payró (adult), Sara Gómez (teen), Andrea Gómez (child) (Latin Spanish dub), Niji Dyall Price (child, 2013), Tuva Skarby (child 2019), Zoë Ackerman (9 year old), Mimmi Sandén (Swedish dub)
Appearances: Frozen | Olaf's Frozen Adventure | Frozen Fever | Frozen II
Appearances in alternate continuities: Frozen: Northern Lights | Once Upon a Time | Frozen Free Fall | Disney Infinity | Ralph Breaks the Internet | Kingdom Hearts III^note retelling of Frozen | Disney Dreamlight Valley | Disney Speedstorm

♫ Just do the next right thing
Take a step, step again
It is all that I can do
The next right thing. ♫

— "The Next Right Thing"

Anna is the "ordinary hero" of the franchise, the youngest child and the second-born daughter of King Agnarr and Queen Iduna of Arendelle. She is the younger sister of Elsa. In both the first film and the sequel, she goes on a journey along with Kristoff, Olaf, and Sven to save their kingdom and to help her sister Elsa.

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• Action Girl: Played with. Anna may be a normal human without any magical powers like her sister Elsa, but that doesn't make her any less fearless and capable of being badass. Written to be a realistic hero, she can hold her own, but doesn't always rely on that.
  • In the first film, she holds her own when helping Kristoff fight off the wolves, bludgeoning one of them with Kristoff's lute and then burning Kristoff's bedroll and throwing it to stop another one in its tracks. In the end, she punches Hans in the face with enough force to knock him off a ship.
  • Played with in the second film. Elsa insists that Anna would be in danger following her, which leads Anna to list some of her badass credentials from the first movie. Elsa still ends up leaving her behind, but though never involved in direct combat Anna more than proves her bravery by the end of the film. Despite her lack of powers, she still climbs her way out of a cave, leaps from one cliff edge to another, confronts a group of rock giants and gets them to destroy a dam she lures them to by standing on it so they'd throw boulders at it before leaping away when it starts to crumble.
• Act of True Love: When a bolt of ice strikes Anna's heart, a wise Troll informs the victim that "Only an Act of True Love can thaw a frozen heart." Everyone listening assumes that it's True Love's Kiss and acts accordingly. Unfortunately, Hans, the prince to whom Anna is engaged, turns out to be a villain who was was just using her for a shot at Arendelle's throne, and leaves her to die. Anna, on the verge of turning to ice from the inside out, then gives up her chance to kiss Kristoff and presumably save her own life, in order to block Hans' sword and save Elsa's life. It's through laying down her life for her sister's that Anna's curse is broken, and she comes back to life.
• Adaptational Badass: Gerda, on whom she is based, is more of an Action Survivor while Anna is an Action Girl.
• Adaptational Name Change: Her counterpart in the Andersen tale is called "Gerda".
• Age Lift: Gerda in The Snow Queen is a young child, while Anna is eighteen for most of the first film, which is the one most strongly based on the tale.
• Agony of the Feet: She gets hers stepped on by the Duke of Weselton while they dance.
• Ain't Too Proud to Beg: When Hans attempts to advance the icy curse Elsa accidentally placed on her by putting out everything that is fire lit, she is reduced to begging.
• All-Loving Heroine: All she wants is to reconnect with her big sister, and she believes in The Power of Love. Even when believing that her aloof older sister didn't love her because Elsa shut her out and became closed-off toward her, and when Elsa shoots ice spikes at her and then covers the kingdom with an Endless Winter, Anna never gives up her belief in Elsa's goodness and risks her life as she struggles through a blizzard to prove it, rather than letting people's fear of the queen prevail and taking the kingdom for herself like Hans later attempts to do.
• Annoying Younger Sibling: Played for Laughs when she and Elsa are still kids, as demonstrated when Anna climbs into Elsa's bed and begs her to wake up and play with her, then rolls around in mock angst when Elsa playfully pushes her away, only to give in when Anna asks "Do you want to build a snowman?". After the accident, Anna's efforts to reach out to Elsa are depicted in a very heartbreaking way.
• Animal Lover: Anna makes friends with Sven quickly and is seen playing with ducklings in the palace garden. She also scratches Hans' horse and has a horse of her own.
• Badass Adorable: Downplayed. She smacks down a wolf with a lute, hurls flaming wreckage at two more, saves Kristoff from falling into a chasm, knocks a giant Snowlem over with a tree, and punches her ex-fiancé in the face, sending him flying over a railing. Still the story places more focus on her plucky aspects than her action ones.
• Badass Boast: In Frozen II, to convince Elsa that she is strong enough to go to the Enchanted Forest with her, Anna reminds her:
  Anna: Excuse me, I climbed the North Mountain, survived a frozen heart, and saved you from my ex-boyfriend. So, you know, I’m coming.
• Badass Bookworm: At least in the theatre adaption, which explicitly states Anna likes books and spends a lot of time in the library, something that is mostly implied in the film. Downplayed, as above.
• Badass Cape: Anna wears a magenta cape as part of her primary outfit in the first movie and she kicks a lot of ass while wearing it. She goes trenching through thick snow, battling off a pack of wolves and saving Kristoff and standing up to a large snow monster.
• Badass in Distress: Capable enough to save Kristoff and fight off wolves, but getting ice-blasted in the heart slowly freezes her from the inside out and weakens her, before she saves herself from her curse as well as saving Elsa and stopping Hans all at the same time.
• Battle Couple: Downplayed with Kristoff throughout the first movie until they have a Relationship Upgrade at the end of that and become an Official Couple. Kristoff and Anna go on a journey and adventure in order to find Elsa so that summer can return to Arendelle. Along the way on their journey, they have to battle obstacles such as wolves and a large ice monster.
• Beauty Equals Goodness: The beautiful All-Loving Heroine.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: She wanted an adventure. She wanted magic ("There'll be magic" in her "I Want" Song). She probably didn't mean turning into an ice statue.
• Betty and Veronica: Anna is the "Archie" to Kristoff's "Veronica" (manly ice harvester) and Hans's "Betty" (cultured prince, her apparent counterpart). The contrast goes further when Kristoff is revealed to have a good heart under his gruff exterior while Hans turns out to be a Bitch in Sheep's Clothing.
• Beware the Nice Ones: Usually a kind and forgiving girl, but has her limits. At the end, she punches Hans in the face so hard that he falls off a ship into the harbor.
• Beware the Silly Ones: Anna can be completely silly and dorky, but don't think she won't stand up for herself. This is a girl who stood up to a furious giant snow monster and didn't care about the consequences, and sucker-punched a guy who tried to kill her and her sister.
• Big Damn Heroes: Saves Elsa's life by taking a sword slash for her just as her body totally freezes, which counts as the act of true love that in turn saves her life.
• Big Eater:
  • If the first word to come out of her mouth after "We finish each other's — " is sandwiches, she clearly loves food. This gets a nod in Frozen Fever, where one of the gifts she receives for her birthday is a sandwich about as long as her torso.
  • "I wanna stuff some chocolate in my face!"
  • In the Frozen: Reunion Road comic, Anna describes the attractions found at festivals as "Food and games and... and food..." A moment later, Elsa mentions that Anna once won a lingonberry pie eating contest at one.
• Big "NO!": As she jumps in front of Elsa just as Hans is about to strike her with his sword.
• Big Sister Worship:
  • Despite their estranged relationship, Anna has a strong admiration for her older sister Elsa is amazed by what Elsa is capable of. This admiration is obvious when Anna and Elsa are children playing together and Anna is in awe of Elsa's magic. In addition, Anna is very motivated and determined to rebuild the relationship with her sister as she misses how close they were in their childhood. She refuses to give up faith in Elsa, even when Elsa freezes the kingdom and kills — despite it appearing as if Elsa, who truly hadn't meant to do either, had done those things on purpose.
  • This is the theme of the book Anna Loves Elsa, which details some of Anna's favorite things about Elsa while the two of them are young, including her talents such as pillowfort-building. Anna thinks she has the best sister in the world.
  • In Frozen II, Anna tells Elsa, "If anyone can resolve the past, if anyone can save Arendelle, it's you, Elsa."
• Birds of a Feather: Subverted. While she and Hans bond over seemingly being the last in line of their respective kingdoms' thrones and being ignored by older siblings, Hans became a ruthless, power-hungry villain while Anna retained her optimism and compassion. It turns out Hans faked his empathy to take advantage of Anna's desire to be loved and get closer to the throne.
• Body Horror: What she goes through after Elsa accidentally freezes her heart. Her hair slowly turns white, frostbite forms on her fingers and face, and she eventually turns into a solid ice statue.
• Braids of Action: Anna wears her hair in braided Girlish Pigtails for the majority of her screentime in the first movie, including informal occasions like helping Kristoff fight off wolves, or being chased by Marshmallow.
• Brainless Beauty: Downplayed when it comes to the "brainless" part. Anna is youthfully pretty, and while she can actually be quick-witted and clever, she can also be very naive and despite being rather sweet and well-intentioned, her general isolation and neglect growing up leave her social skills underdeveloped, so she often says the wrong thing at the wrong time, like finishing the phrase "We finish each other's — " with "sandwiches."
• Break the Cutie: Goes through a lot:
  • In the first film, if Elsa pushing her away and (accidentally — but Anna has no way of knowing that) freezing her heart wasn't enough, Hans's reveal that he never truly loved her pushes her to Heroic BSoD. Thankfully, she gets better when Olaf saves her in the nick of time and gives a pep talk about love, which is putting others' needs above yours.
  • She gets hit with this even worse in the sequel. Arendelle is put at major risk by the spirits of nature, she and Elsa discover their parents' shipwreck and learn they died trying to learn more about Elsa's powers when Elsa uses her magic to conjure a physical memory of their last moments, Elsa pushes her away in a misguided attempt to protect her while she was trying to protect Elsa and forces her into a canoe she sends down a river without a paddle straight into the territory of the terrifying rock giants, she learns her grandfather started the whole conflict by attempting to subjugate the Northuldra people and killing their leader, she realizes the only way to fix everything is to destroy a dam which would end up taking Arendelle with it, and to top it all off, Elsa and Olaf die, the latter in her arms. All of this eventually pushes her over the Despair Event Horizon, which she is only barely able to pull herself back from during "The Next Right Thing".
• Brooding Boy, Gentle Girl: The Gentle Girl to Kristoff's Brooding Boy. Anna is optimistic and compassionate, while Kristoff is brooding, anti-social, sullen, and sarcastic. Anna is the one that gets Kristoff to lighten up and she has a strong effect on his personality. By the end of the first movie, Kristoff is more upbeat and energetic due to Anna's influence throughout the story.
• Buffy Speak: "Beautifuller", "good different", etc.
• Bullying a Dragon: After Marshmallow literally throws her and her new friends out of Elsa's ice palace, Anna loses her temper and throws a snowball at him... which does absolutely nothing but piss him off enough to chase after her.
• Butt-Monkey: Anna is subjected to about the same amount of slapstick that Kristoff is subjected to, though significantly less than what Olaf experiences.
• The Champion: To Elsa. Anna is the one who saves Elsa by doing a Heroic Sacrifice and using The Power of Love to help Elsa control her powers. Anna is also the one who always believed in Elsa and always thought she was a good person deep down despite her mistakes.
• Character Catchphrase: Her unique expression is "...Wait, what?", which was improvised by Kristen Bell.
• Character Development: In the first movie, the naive Anna comes to have a mature understanding of what love actually is. Specifically, that "love is putting someone else's needs before yours." While Anna never gives up her belief in Elsa's goodness, she thought that her aloof sister didn't love her because Elsa became closed-off toward her. She was unaware that it was a facade that Elsa used to keep her emotions — and, by extension, secret powers — in check. She also thinks at first that Hans must be her One True Love because he acts nice and they seem to share many things in common. When Hans reveals himself to have been an Evil All Along Gold Digger, Anna realizes that she was wrong about what love was, but after sacrificing her life to save Elsa, she acknowledges that her this was an Act of True Love for her sister, her acknowledgement showing she now understands what it is.
  Elsa: You sacrificed yourself for me?
  Anna: I love you.
• Character Tic: Anna tucks a lock of hair behind her ear when she's self-conscious, and often bites her bottom lip when thinking. She also wrings her hands together when she's nervous.
• Cheerful Child: As a little girl she is non-stop cheer and smiles.
• Childhood Friend Romance: Averted with Kristoff. They technically meet as kids when Anna is brought to see Pabbie with Kristoff and Sven watching. But, they don't make a proper introduction, and later romance, with one another until they are young adults.
• Clothing Reflects Personality:
  • At the start of the film, Anna and Elsa wear light-colored clothes, which symbolizes their relationship with each other going well. After they are separated and grow apart (especially during the "Do You Want To Build A Snowman" sequence), their clothes become progressively darker. While Anna's coronation dress and adventuring outfit both are darker, her nightgown at age eighteen is the same shade as her child nightgown, representing that despite the pain, she's retained her same cheerful personality. Then at the end, both the sisters' clothes are light again, representing that they have finally reunited. In The Art of Frozen, it's said, "To reflect her sunny nature, Anna's color palette during her growing years is kept on the warm side. Grayed yellow greens, ochre, and olive dominate."
  • The cape of her adventuring outfit is decorated with a fringe of pom-poms, and her coronation gown also involves ribbons and lace to reflect her playful personality.
  • See Color Motif entry for more.
• Color Motif:
  • Green. Most of her outfits at least a green element to them, even her iconic "winter dress", which has green leaves and stems as part of the floral motif. Many even have it as their primary color, and she always chooses green at formal events. It's also present in her Frozen Fever and queen dresses. If you're familiar with the symbolism of the Chakras: green stands for the Heart Chakra or love — Anna's power. Green is also associated with growth, and spring and summer, which Anna helps bring back after Elsa accidentally freezes the kingdom in an Endless Winter. She was even born in summer.
  • Pink. It's associated with love, particularly romantic love, girlhood, as well as spring and rebirth. Fittingly, Anna's room is covered in in it, as seen when she wakes up excited for the gates to open on coronation day and for life to return to the castle (the French title for the accompanying song translates to "The Renewal") and the chance of finding love, including romantic love. It's in her coronation dress, too. It's also the color of the cape and hat in her adventuring outfit, which she dons when she goes to help Elsa thaw the winter. She loses the hat when Elsa freezes her heart and has her giant snow bodyguard Marshmallow kick her out of the ice palace, eventually losing all pink — and all color at all besides blue — when she finally freezes into solid ice, but her Act of True Love brings her — and the color — back.
  • Significantly, her main winter cape and hat are magenta, and so is her traveling coat in Frozen II. This shade is considered the color of "universal love" and is associated not only with compassion, but also more specifically with support, patience, and open-mindedness. It is associated with independent and intuitive thinking that considers possibilities beyond what is usual, fitting for how Anna realizes Elsa is Not Evil, Just Misunderstood and is the only one to not write her off. On top of that it is associated with impulsivity but also optimism, as well as extroversion and expressiveness.
  • Black; all of her travel outfits and most prominently her epilogue outfit in Frozen II feature black, signifying that while she has a pretty sunny disposition, Anna's also someone who's gone through her share of hardships and can be serious when necessary. It also serves as a direct contrast to her sister's white-based powers and wardrobe.
• Comical Nap Drool:
  • After a lengthy tracking shot through Arendelle of dignitaries arriving for Queen Elsa's coronation, two of them are heard talking about how beautiful they hear the princesses are. The scene then smash-cuts to Anna fast-asleep, sporting terrible bedhead and a visible trace of drool.
  • She is shown to drool while sleeping as a child and once again as an adult at the beginning of the sequel.
• The Creon: Despite her insecurities concerning her status as "the spare", Anna displays no resentment whatsoever towards her older sister or desire to take Elsa's position as Queen. Even when Elsa has exiled herself to the mountains and willingly relinquished the throne, rather than taking the opportunity to take power, Anna literally climbs a mountain and begs her to come back.
• Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: Anna comes off as a Cute Clumsy Girl, The Ingenue, and The Ditz, but she is incredibly badass and capable in a fight. There are many instances throughout the story that she is a Pretty Princess Powerhouse who is incredibly courageous and brave and won't back down from a fight.
• Cute Bruiser: A cute Pretty Princess Powerhouse mixed with her being a Pint-Sized Powerhouse.
• Cute Clumsy Girl: That incident with the statue and cake is endearing. Apparently, all that time she spent in the castle has made her this.
• The Cutie: Her cheerful attitude and endearing quirks make her rather lovable.
• Damsel in Distress: Believes herself to be this because of the ice curse, but in the end she changes into a Damsel out of Distress when she performs the act of true love to save herself, Elsa and the kingdom.
• Damsel out of Distress: Despite initially believing that she needed someone to rescue her by bestowing a True Love's Kiss, she performs the Act of True Love and saves herself, Elsa, and the kingdom. Additionally, instead of letting Kristoff take care of Hans, she insists on doing it herself.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Anna is a naturally extroverted person who is forced to be isolated from others for the majority of her childhood. To make matters worse, she doesn't know why it happened, and from her perspective, her older sister suddenly cut off their friendship and then ignored her for no apparent reason. Her parents died when she was fifteen, and again she had no emotional support. Her sister still shows no interest in talking to her or even attending their parents' funeral.^note Unbeknownst to Anna, this is because of Elsa's Power Incontinence, but Elsa keeps this a secret, so Anna doesn't know why her sister's being so aloof. It's obviously left some scars on her, and is a big reason why she agrees to a quick engagement, because she's starved for affection and isn't familiar with what a healthy loving relationship looks like.
• Death Glare: She glares daggers at Hans after he reveals his true colors.
• Demoted to Extra: The story of the first movie was adapted for a section of Kingdom Hearts III, but the player gets to see little of the plot or the Frozen characters, so despite being the protagonist of the movie, Anna only appears to interact with Sora exactly once before being relegated to a background character as the plot of the movie goes on without Sora's further input.
• Desperately Craves Affection: She grows up isolated from everyone except her parents (who pass away when she's a teen) and a few busy palace staff members (the workforce being reduced to protect Elsa when the girls are young), and is shut out by her older sister and former best friend. As a result, Anna is so starved for love and attention that she's willing to marry someone that she has just met, even if she "knows it's totally crazy".
• Desperately Looking for a Purpose in Life: In Frozen: Breaking Boundaries. Anna doesn't know what her "purpose" is. The second issue of the comic series has her and Mari, who also is looking for one, trying various jobs in order to find it.
• Determinator:
  • She sees her sister shoot out ice spikes, set off a seemingly boundless winter, and then run off into the mountains. Her response is basically "Wait here. I'll be right back". She takes off after Elsa in the winter storm in a ball gown, talks a misanthropic stranger into helping her, attempts to climb a mountain with no mountaineering skills, refuses to leave her sister's castle despite being struck in the heart by ice magic, and eventually gives up her own life so that Elsa can live, finding the willpower to sprint to put herself between Elsa and an incoming sword despite having almost completely frozen from the inside out.
  • This is her biggest strength in the sequel where, after losing Elsa and Olaf, Kristoff and Sven leaving without saying anything, and discovering her grandfather's legacy is a sham, Anna is left all alone again and broken. But despite this, she forces herself to do the next right thing. She gets better at the end when everyone comes back to her. It's this trait, along with her All-Loving nature, that Elsa decides makes her the best person to rule Arendelle.
• Determined Defeatist: In "The Next Right Thing," Anna expresses this sentiment:
  You are lost
  Hope is gone
  But you must go on
  And do the next right thing
• Did I Just Say That Out Loud?: Falls victim to this more than once.
  Anna: [after Hans falls on top of her in a rowboat] This is awkward. I mean, not that you're awkward — we're- I'm awkward — you're gorgeous. Wait, what?
• Did Not Think This Through: As a reconstruction of The Heart and Plucky Girl, although Anna is brave, optimistic, and extremely loving, one of the downsides of these strengths is that this is one of her weaknesses:
  • When the castle gates open and Anna gains a brief reprieve from her isolation, she becomes excited about having a chance to meet and potentially befriend new people. Among the new visitors is the charming Hans, who is the first person in years to treat Anna as a friend, and she agrees to his marriage proposal before the night ends and the gates close, despite not having met any other potential suitors yet to compare and the two only having known each other for a day. Despite being aware that the decision is, by her own admission, "totally crazy", in her happiness and fear of losing her only apparent friend, Anna neglects to consider various potential issues with the quick decision, some of which are later discussed by Kristoff. First, the queen refuses to allow the marriage because of its suddenness, and second, Hans turns out to be a Gold Digger who was not as caring as he pretended. Lampshaded by Hans in his Break Them by Talking monologue:
    Prince Hans: You were so desperate for love, you were willing to marry me, just like that.
  • Her plan to find Elsa and bring back summer. She's so quick to undertake the journey that she leaves unprepared for the ordeal. She also has no assurance that Elsa wants or knows how to thaw the Endless Winter the snow queen's powers created and is acting out of optimism and faith in her sister, but without a backup plan. She's right about Elsa not being malicious and the curse on the kingdom being an accident, but it ultimately takes more than words of support to show Elsa how to thaw. Lampshaded by Kristoff:
    Kristoff: That's your plan? My ice business is riding on you talking to your sister?
• Disney Death: Towards the end when she's frozen solid, before the act of true love defrosts her.
• The Ditz: Downplayed. Anna can have her ditzy and clumsy moments, but she is still a functional person who is completely capable of thinking for herself and making her own decisions. She can be rather idealistic and naive in her beliefs and also impulsive and reckless in how she chooses to go about things, but she is still very competent and capable in her own right.
• Early Personality Signs:
  • The first thing Anna is shown doing as a child is asking her sister to play together. When her sister pushes her off the bed, she picks herself up and suggests an activity she clearly knows Elsa is passionate about and might change her mind — and does. As an adult, she is playful, resilient, and thoughtful.
  • When she and Elsa are making up a story with the snow figurines, Anna's focus is on the people and relationships: "Who cares about danger when there's love?" After Agnarr tells her and Elsa the story about the Enchanted Forest, she's mostly interested in the part about him being rescued and wondering why the fighting began, in contrast to Elsa being mostly interested in the spirits and the Enchanted Forest itself. As an adult, she is people-oriented and her defining quality is her big heart, constantly braving danger for her family's sake.
• Eating the Eye Candy: More modest than other examples, but she spends a lot more time staring goofily at Hans than she really needs to during his intro.
• Elemental Motifs:
  • Fire. She's a Fiery Redhead, her secondary Color Motif is a warm pink, she uses fire as a weapon against the wolves, and her lowest moment in the first movie is punctuated by Hans extinguishing all sources of fire in the immediate area. She can be impulsive, but is also a very warm person, courageous, energetic, and associated with rebirth, playing a role in the restoration to life of all three characters in the franchise to undergo a Disney Death, including herself. She also is the one to take the lead in starting a new era in Arendelle after realizing and addressing the harm in its past.
  • Earth. Green is her primary Color Motif, especially in the first movie, and in the second, her main outfit is primarily black like earth. She also takes on a wheat motif in the second film. She's the one to take on the Earth Giants and is the one who came up with and led the plan to take down the stone dam. Her big solo is in an earthen cave. She is maternal and giving, as well as practical, steadfastly loyal, protective, and determined. When she has every reason to distrust Elsa, she retains her belief in her. She provides stability among change, comforting Olaf when he has difficulty coping with it, and is associated with life.
• Even the Loving Hero Has Hated Ones: Anna strictly believes in The Power of Love and never stops believing that Elsa is good inside. There is one exceptions to this: Hans, when he pretends to love her just so he can usurp the Arendellian throne and leave her for dead after Elsa accidentally freezes Anna's heart.
  Hans: [after Anna's Disney Death] Anna? But... she froze your heart.
  Anna: [calmly] The only frozen heart around here is yours. [turns away for a moment and proceeds to punch Hans in the face]
• Expository Hairstyle Change: In Frozen II, Anna drops the Girlish Pigtails she had in the first film and settles for either a Prim and Proper Bun or braided hair with the bottom loose. This symbolizes her maturity she went through in the last three years.
• Fake Memories: When Pabbie heals Anna's head after Elsa accidentally hits it with magic, he decides it'd be safer for Anna if she didn't remember Elsa has magic powers. He erases her memory of the magic but "leaves the fun", changing the scene of the two playing in the snow indoors with Elsa's magic into a day spent outside in the snow.
• Fatal Flaw: Anna has two weaknesses:
  • Naivety. She is very quick to trust people. She gets engaged to Hans he same day they meet, earning Lampshade Hanging from various characters, including when Kristoff asks "Didn't your parents warn you about strangers?" She also insists on trusting Elsa, even though she has no reason to believe that Elsa isn't evil and intentionally cursing the land. As a result, she nearly dies when Elsa accidentally curses her and Hans leaves her to die. However, it's a downplayed example, as while her trust in Villain with Good Publicity Hans is misplaced, her trust in Not Evil, Just Misunderstood Elsa is validated and is what saves her, Elsa, and their kingdom. Lampshaded repeatedly:
    Kristoff: That's your plan? My ice business is riding on you talking to your sister?
    Anna: Yup.
    Kristoff: [after nearly being impaled by one of the spikes created by Elsa's magic] So you're not at all afraid of her?
    Anna: Why would I be?
    Olaf: Yeah. I bet Elsa's the nicest, gentlest, warmest person ever. [gets impaled on one of the spikes] Oh, look at that. I've been impaled.
  • Recklessness and impulsiveness. She has a habit of doing things without planning them ahead of time, and is quite impulsive. For example: after Elsa runs away, she goes off into the dark and cold wilderness to find her without suitable clothing, supplies, or even a map, and her only plan is to talk her down.
• Fearless Fool:
  • One of Anna's greatest strengths and biggest weaknesses is that she is completely fearless; she will go boldly in areas where others typically would hesitate, but she also tends to be impulsive, and these impulses tend to lead her into trouble. Somewhat downplayed in the first movie, where there are times where she shows fear before putting on a brave face but also times where she really does act impulsively.
  • Much more downplayed in the second, where she's older and less impulsive; she is always aware of danger and only goes into it when she is trying to save others. The trope comes into play because her Character Development involves learning she doesn't always have to risk her life to help her family.
• The Fettered: Despite being a Cute Clumsy Girl who is quirky and awkward, Anna draws strength from her commitment to unconditional love, which drives her through dangerous journeys even when she is literally dying — or feels as if she may prefer to be.
• Fiery Redhead: Downplayed. She has light auburn hair, and although she's usually pretty patient, she can be pretty fiery when provoked, and is outspoken and outgoing.
• Flat "What": Her catchphrase at several points in franchise. She even does it to herself early on.
• Flower Motifs:
  • Sunflowers. They really start to show in Frozen Fever: her dress has sunflower patterns, she carries a bouquet of them, and her birthday cake has sunflowers as part of the decorations.
  • The crocus flower, which is also the iconic flower of Arendelle and a symbol of rebirth and Spring, is on all of her outfits.
• Foil:
  • She's energetic and goofy in contrast to her serious older sister, Elsa.
  • She's also a stark contrast to Hans. While both had older siblings who shut them out, Hans isn't willing to reconcile with his older brothers and would do anything to upstage them out of spite. He represents her darker desire of inadequacy and self-doubt coming out in the open.
• For Happiness: Her motivation behind all of her actions. Anna does what she does because all she genuinely wants is for everyone to be happy.
• Fourth-Date Marriage: Deconstructed and defied. She immediately latches onto Hans because he's the first person in years to pay attention to her, and accepts his marriage proposal right off the bat because the gates are only open. This is acknowledged as an extremely unusual thing by every character who hears about it, including Anna herself. For his part, Hans is a master manipulator who is taking advantage of Anna's emotional vulnerability to get closer to a throne and who fools all the characters and even most of the audience into believing his sincerity.
• Freudian Excuse: She inverts this trope. Despite Anna's desperation for love and affection, she never turns bitter, angry, or overly resentful and remains kind, selfless, and loving despite the lack of love that she has received since childhood. Instead, she treats her troubled childhood as a reason to be kind to other people... to the point that it's both one of her greatest strengths and weaknesses. After years of feeling unwanted and rejected herself, Anna is extremely friendly to others. This is most apparent when she introduces Hans to Elsa, announcing that they're already engaged despite having just met that day. Elsa asks they speak alone. Although Anna has always craved her sister's attention and approval, and she hasn't known him long, she takes one look at Hans's worried face and insists she won't exclude him. She also insists on giving Elsa a chance even when it seems as if Elsa has attacked the kingdom.
• Friendless Background: Anna was raised in seclusion her whole life without any close friends and little to no contact with her sister.
• Friend to All Living Things: Downplayed. Anna seems to get along with animals rather easily. She 1) makes friends with baby ducks in "For the First Time in Forever", 2) manages to charm Hans's horse, Sitron, and 3) waves at Sven when the latter is sitting outside Wandering Oaken's Trading Post & Sauna. Still, she has to fight off the angry wolves that attack her and Kristoff.
• Genki Girl: After being cooped up in a castle for most of her life, Anna reacts to everything outside with enthusiasm and boundless energy.
• Girlish Pigtails: Anna wears braided pigtails in every scene in the first movie, the day and night of the coronation, where because it's a formal affair she styles her hair into a more formal and grown-up fashion. These indicate her youthfulness and playful personality and are braided given her activeness.
• Girly Bruiser: She dresses femininely, has "girly" hobbies, and pink is her secondary color motif. She is strong enough to punch a grown man in the face with enough force to send him flying off a ship.
• Go Mad from the Isolation: Downplayed. Anna isn't a madwoman and she wasn't isolated from all human contact but she has spent most of her life cooped up in the castle and she has become slightly unbalanced and depressed. It doesn't help that Anna has an extroverted personality and needs human contact to thrive. It's Played for Laughs at first, such as when Anna mentions that she has started talking to portraits out of desperation, then promptly tells a painting of Joan of Arc to hang in there. However, it takes a darker turn when the audience realizes that Anna's isolation really has made her desperate enough for human affection to fall prey to Hans's manipulation.
• Good Bad Girl: Anna is hinted to be one. She's extraordinarily goodhearted and extremely loyal to her sister. She is also implied to enjoy physical expressions of affection with her boyfriend Kristoff. When Elsa and Olaf fall asleep on the wagon, she is obviously eager and willing for some makeout time with Kristoff (amusingly, he wants to talk about their relationship, while she is the one who puckers up for some action, then realizes what's really happening, and looks briefly disappointed before showing a happy "I'm listening!" expression, in a hilarious gender reversal of how this kind of scene is usually played). And then later, when he is dressed to the nines, she likes how he looks, but when he says it's only for an hour, she tells him "That's okay. I prefer you in leather anyway."
• Good Is Not Dumb: Zigzagged. One of her main weaknesses is that she sometimes makes rash decisions, and being locked up most of her life has also left her rather naive. Both of these do get her hurt, and other characters question her idealism. After her attempts to help Elsa leave her with a deadly curse, her fiance reveals himself to have been a Gold Digger and mocks her for trying to help Elsa, sneering "You were dumb enough to go after her!" On the flip side, her optimisism and kindness allow her to retain her faith in Hero with Bad Publicity Elsa despite so much evidence against her. She is also rather clever sometimes, saving Kristoff from wolves and falling off a cliff with her quick thinking, and can be remarkably perceptive, realizing that Elsa isn't malicious like she seems. After being frozen by Elsa (without any way of knowing it was an accident) and Hans betraying her, she still rejects Good Is Dumb and chooses to continue to believe in and sacrifice her life for Elsa. Her compassion isn't just a product of naivety — she really is The Pollyanna and an All-Loving Heroine — and it pays off.
• Good Is Not Soft: Downplayed. She's a Nice Girl most of the time and can be very forgiving, but if you unrepentantly hurt the people she loves, she will do something about it, seen when she throws a snowball at Marshmallow in retaliation for hurting Olaf and when she punches Hans after he tries to kill Elsa.
• Hairstyle Inertia: Wears the same Girlish Pigtails she had as a child as a young adult in the first movie. She just does them up in a braided bun for special events. This makes it more noticable when her main style changes in the second movie.
• Happy Holidays Dress: Her outfit in Olaf's Frozen Adventure isn't as grand as Elsa's, but still has several subtle decorations, such as white fur lining on her jacket and hat, hair decorations that look like leaves with cranberries, and a bells-and-goats motif on the hem of her skirt.
• Harmless Freezing: Double subverted (and justified by it being a magic curse). Anna is accidentally frozen from the inside out by Elsa, and not only is it incredibly painful for her, it will leave her as an ice statue forever unless an act of true love stops it. When it does however, she's perfectly fine.
• The Heart: Anna is the emotional centrepiece of the story and she is the one who brings everyone together for a common goal. She's also an All-Loving Heroine who uses The Power of Love to find a way to save both Elsa and the kingdom of Arendelle when at first it looks like only one can be.
• Heroic BSoD:
  • Goes through an early one following her parents' deaths.
  • After learning of Hans's betrayal, she sadly tells Olaf that she doesn't know what love is.
• Heroic Resolve: After getting her heart frozen and freezing from the inside out, she can barely walk, only able to weakly shuffle towards Kristoff for a True Love's Kiss — at least, when it's her own life that's at stake. But she sprints when it's Elsa's that's in danger.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Ends up dodging in front of a sword strike meant for her sister even as she's turning to solid ice. Luckily, the Curse Escape Clause involving "an act of true love" kicks in.
• Heroic Spirit: Anna is The Determinator and isn't the type to give up. It's her determined spirit and passion that ultimately saves Elsa and Arendelle, despite all the obstacles that are thrown her way during her journey.
• Heroic Self-Deprecation: Justified. You'd think she'd think more of herself than "completely ordinary" and "not that princess... it's just me", but years of neglect and apparent rejection did a number on her self-esteem.
• Hero Protagonist: Anna is the one who goes on the journey and mission to save both Elsa and the entire kingdom, and is the one who does so with her Heroic Sacrifice. She's also the main protagonist of the film.
• Heterosexual Life-Partners: Was this with Elsa when they were little; a good portion of the movie's drama is Anna wanting to become close to Elsa like they were as kids and not understanding why Elsa shuts her out.
• Hidden Depths: A female character who can be impulsive and who gets engaged quickly would often be portrayed as ditzy, but Anna ends up being quite intelligent:
  • In the first movie, she shows her wits to save Kristoff from wolves that attack them and from falling off a cliff shortly afterward. She also learns from an earlier mistake with a snow-covered tree and uses it to fend off Marshmallow.
  • In the sequel, she shows a surprising amount of knowledge about Arendelle's ships when exploring the wreck of the ship that had been carrying her and Elsa's parents. She's the one to point out that their parents' ship would have had a waterproof compartment where they may have kept important information.
  • Also, due to all her time spent around the castle to entertain herself growing up, she is able to recognize Mattias from his picture on the wall, recalling its exact location and how he was their father's personal guard.
  • In a short collection of stories "5 Minute Sleepy Time Stories", Anna is very good at chess, beating even Elsa.
  • In "Polar Nights", Elsa states that Anna doesn't mind difficult working so long as she gets to help people. She even found soil reports interesting that Elsa found mind-numbing.
• The High Queen: She becomes the new Queen of Arendelle at the end of the second film.
• Honor Before Reason: Anna isn't always the most logical person and she can be highly reckless and impulsive when it comes to planning, but her sense of duty seems to be of bigger importance.
• Hope Bringer: Anna is the one who remains consistently hopeful and optimistic about bringing summer back to Arendelle. She also represents hope for Elsa in helping her control her powers.
• Hot-Blooded: She's free spirited, feisty, and easily excitable. Other than that, it's Played for Laughs.
• Huge Guy, Tiny Girl: Downplayed with Kristoff. He's only One Head Taller than her as well as being more muscular, while she has a normal build for a young female adult.
• I Can Change My Beloved: Anna believes that she can persuade her sister to bring back summer to Arendelle by unfreezing it. She is also has a strong belief that Elsa can control her powers because she is strong enough to do so. Elsa, on the other hand, doesn't believe that she can change or control her powers and has severe self doubt regarding controlling herself and hurting others.
• Iconic Outfit: Though Anna prefers green dresses, her winter ensemble is the most used on merchandise and promotional material.
• Ideal Hero: Anna is a combination of The Heroine and an All-Loving Heroine. Plus, she is idealistic, naive yet highly noble and selfless in nature. Her strong desire to bring back summer to Arendelle while risking her life and conducting a Heroic Sacrifice through The Power of Love and an Act of True Love is noble and admirable.
• The Idealist: Anna is extremely idealistic and it is one of her defining personality and character traits.
• Idiot Hero: After Elsa runs away, she goes off into the flash-frozen wilderness to find her without suitable clothing, supplies, or even a map, and her only "plan" is to talk her down.
• I Just Want to Be Loved: Anna is someone who Desperately Craves Affection because she has been neglected since childhood with little to no human contact. It's understandable why Anna would end up falling for a man that she just met, because she deeply craves to be accepted and loved by someone.
• I Just Want to Have Friends: Anna is an extroverted person by nature, but she was sheltered since childhood. She never got the opportunity to bond with other people and make friends. It didn't help that the only companionship that she had was her sister Elsa, who kept shutting her out for years. It is why Anna expresses such excitement on coronation day, because she can finally have the opportunity to be around people and possibly bond with others. It's part of the reason why Anna latched onto Hans as quickly as she did, because she was so desperate for companionship of any kind.
• Important Hair Accessory: At the end of Frozen II, Anna is shown wearing a crown as the new Queen of Arendelle, having grown into her place as a leader in her own right.
• Incorruptible Pure Pureness: Despite being locked up and isolated her entire life, Anna never became hateful, bitter, or resentful because of her situation. She never let bitterness or anger consume her despite her isolation and being abandoned and neglected. Instead, Anna remained kind, compassionate, loving, and empathetic.
• The Ingenue: She's been locked up at home all her life, making her very naive about the real world. It's both a Deconstruction and Reconstruction of the trope in a Disney movie. Anna's naïveté and her status as the heir apparent after Elsa becomes queen leads to her being vulnerable to Hans's manipulations in his plot to take over the throne. However, once Hans has been neutralised, Anna gains some wisdom without becoming cynical or losing any of her warmth and sweetness.
• Ink-Suit Actor: Her character was heavily inspired by her voice actress, Kristen Bell. She even sports Bell's lazy eye. In one interview, songwriters Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez said:
  "The more we were working with Kristen Bell, the more, the more she influenced. We all got on the same page with who Anna was because Anna's Kristen Bell. Like Kristen Bell's mind is so fast and she's so funny... we kind of all started writing differently."
• In Love with Love: After spending the first of half of "For the First Time in Forever" excited about not having to be alone anymore, she spends the second half dreaming that she'd find romance, too. She even goes as far as to accept Hans's proposal after knowing him for only one day, already thinking he's her true love. He uses her naïveté and vulnerability to his own advantage and lampshades it.
• Innocent Blue Eyes: Anna's eyes represent her kind-hearted and naive personality. Since Elsa's eyes are also blue, the color seems to run in the family.
• Innocently Insensitive:
  • During "Do You Want to Build a Snowman?", in which she begs Elsa to build a snowman with her, not knowing that the last time they built a snowman together, it almost killed her, but there's a reason why she doesn't know better.
  • The barrage of Armor Piercing Questions she fires at Elsa at the coronation ball is a downplayed example: Anna means to vent her frustration, but she has no idea just how much those questions hurt. She asks what is it that Elsa is so afraid of without knowing that Elsa lives in fear of harming others, especially Anna, with her uncontrollable magic or being hunted down as a witch. "What did I ever do to you?!" is probably the worst, because it's not what Anna did, it's what Elsa herself did. Anna doesn't know how stressed Elsa is at the coronation day and doesn't mean for her outburst to be the last straw that causes Elsa to snap, reveal her powers and unleash the Endless Winter.
  • In "Olaf's Frozen Adventure", as the sisters go through their old trunks, Anna asks Elsa what's in her trunk. Elsa says mostly gloves, and Anna assumes she's joking, "sure, rows and rows of satin gloves." They open it and see exactly that; Anna cracks an uneasy smile.
• Innocent Soprano: Anna is a youthful and naive high soprano, in contrast to her sister Elsa, who struggles with more inner demons and sings in a powerful mezzo-soprano. Fittingly, she falls for the tenor Kristoff.
• Ironic Echo: Elsa's "What do you know about true love?" is answered after Hans leaves her to die by freezing.
  Anna: I don't even know what love is.
• Ironic Name: "Anna" means "grace", but she's hardly a graceful individual.
• It's All My Fault: After Elsa runs off and causes the Endless Winter, Anna blames herself and says, "Tonight was my fault. I pushed her". She even says the trope's title word-for-word twice later, once when traveling by herself on horseback, calling out to Elsa and trying to offer an apology, and again when Kristoff asks why Elsa set off the Endless Winter.
• "I Want" Song:
  • "Do You Want To Build a Snowman", in which Anna wants the close bond she and Elsa previously shared.
  • "For The First Time In Forever", in which Anna is excited at the prospect of meeting new people, and possibly finding true love (also the reprise, in which she wants to help Elsa and bring her back to Arendelle).
• Kill the Cutie: Subverted. Though she eventually does freeze from the curse, she gets better.
• Kirk Summation: She calls out Hans for his selfishness, telling him that he's the only one around with a metaphorical "frozen heart", meaning that because he never truly cared for others but saw them as mere objects, incessantly lied to and manipulated everyone, and always acted purely in self-interest.
• Large Ham: Quite possibly the hammiest princess in Disney, especially when she was a child. "Do you wanna build a snowman?!" while biking in the castle hallways and sliding down banisters.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: Pabbie modifies her memory after Elsa's initial blast hits her as a child, letting her keep the memories of the fun times she had with her sister, but removing all knowledge of Elsa's powers as a precaution.
• The Leader:
  • Even though Elsa is the one who is Queen of Arendelle and is the ruler of a kingdom, Anna is the leader during the majority of the film. She is the one who leads Kristoff, Sven, and Olaf during their journey and mission to bring back summer to Arendelle. It helps that Anna is also a princess and has a higher status than the other characters. Anna is the Charismatic and Headstrong type.
  • In the second film, Anna uses her determination and intelligence to create a plan to break the spells afflicting Arendelle and the Enchanted Forest and leads the rock giants, Kristoff, and the Arendellian guards in carrying it out.
• Leeroy Jenkins: Anna can be very impulsive and reckless. She has a habit of doing things without planning them ahead of time. Sometimes her impulsive nature can get her in quite a bit of trouble.
• Le Parkour: Even as a child, she leaps high and has no trouble vaulting around the castle either. Ironically, she really sucks at climbing.
• Light Is Good: Commonly wears brighter-colored clothing and is a kind-hearted, noble and caring individual.
• Little Miss Badass: Anna is the smallest main character and she is rather naive, but she is still very feisty and courageous. Plus, she can stand toe to toe with the guys.
• Little Sister Instinct: Despite being the younger sister, Anna is very protective of Elsa and would do anything to keep her from getting hurt, even if she has to get hurt herself or die.
  • When Elsa runs off after accidentally freezing the castle, Anna is quick to defend her to suspicious people and immediately sets out in search of her, despite the inherent danger of traveling alone through a blizzard.
  • In Frozen Fever, she is quick enough to stop her sister from falling off the top of a clock tower.
• Living Emotional Crutch: Implied. If Anna wasn't around, Elsa would have probably remained in her own self-imposed exile within Arendelle's castle, struggling to keep her powers hidden.
• Locked into Strangeness: Developed strands of platinum blonde hairs after Elsa accidentally struck her in the head with her ice powers (though due to the trolls altering Anna's memory, she is made to believe that she has had it from birth). Later, her hair begins to turn silvery white after Elsa accidentally freezes her heart, but it turns back to normal after the curse is broken, with the streak gone completely.
• Locked Up and Left Behind: Hans locks her in a room and leaves her to die from a curse freezing her from the inside out.
• Lonely Rich Kid: She grows up in a castle that was closed-off for most of her childhood and doesn't have much interaction with people.
• Love at First Sight: Subverted. When she meets Hans she's awed by him and by the end of the night she agrees to marry him. We learn that Hans exploited this trope by faking being in love with Anna so he could marry into the throne.
• Love Freak: Anna is obsessed with the idea of true love. She also has a strong belief that using The Power of Love for everything will bring happiness and peace. Anna's strong ability to love and faith in it is both a weakness and a strength, something that is even referred to in the casting call for the Broadway adaption. It's a weakness because she can fall prey to people playing on her emotions by using the concept of love to manipulate her, such as Hans. But it's also a strength because it helps her to see the good in people, save her sister, and save Arendelle.
• Love Makes You Stupid: In regards to both Hans and Elsa in different ways. Anna was so desperate for love and attention that she impulsively wanted to marry Hans when she had just met him. Too bad that Anna couldn't see that Hans couldn't be trusted. Subverted in regards to Elsa. While Anna was perceptive enough to realize that her long-distant and secretive sister had not frozen the kingdom purposely and was "just scared", the film emphasizes the low likelihood of her faith being correct. Most notably, when Olaf agrees that Elsa is probably "the nicest, gentlest, warmest person ever", only to be immediately impaled by one of her (previously-created) ice spikes. She also believes that her big sister will know how to thaw the kingdom. While Hans is revealed to be untrustworthy, and Elsa turns out to not be as capable as Anna had expected, Anna's undying love for and faith in Elsa is vindicated when, despite appearances, Elsa is in fact innocent and, with Anna's help, learns to control her powers.
• Love Martyr: Despite the fact that Elsa consistently has shut her out and neglected her since childhood, Anna refuses to leave Elsa or give up on rekindling their relationship. Elsa has repeatedly been aloof, cold, and distant towards Anna while Anna has been nothing but loving, supportive, and understanding of Elsa, regardless of how Elsa has always treated her. As a result, Anna can come off as an Extreme Doormat when it comes to Elsa since the relationship had come off as highly one-sided and unreciprocated.
• Love Revelation Epiphany: Olaf tells her Kristoff loves her. This, coupled with Hans's betrayal, makes her realize that she's in love with him.
• Loving a Shadow: Anna falls for Hans and agrees to marry him quickly because she's desperate for affection—while the person whom she really wants to be close again with is her sister Elsa. After reconciling with her sister and seeing that Hans is not the Prince Charming he made himself out to be, Anna is able to move on and actually spends time getting to know her new Love Interest Kristoff before getting into a serious commitment with him.
• Madness Mantra: Repeatedly says "Cold! Cold! Cold!" over and over as she stands up, clothes completely frozen from the icy river, and plods over to Wandering Oaken's.
• Magnetic Hero: Despite being socially sheltered for the majority of her life, she seems to have the ability of gaining Undying Loyalty from people with ease. Much of it has to do with the fact that Anna is an All-Loving Heroine who consistently chooses to see the good in others.
• The Matchmaker: In the book The Secret Admirer, Anna actively goes searching for the person who has been sending Elsa gifts, hoping that her sister will fall in love with whoever this is.
• Meaningful Appearance:
  • Anna wears a ribbon in her hair with her Coronation Day dress to highlight her playfulness. Along with the pleats in her dress, they highlight her movement and activeness. She also wears ribbons and a sunflower, symbolizing her Sunny Sunflower Disposition, in "Frozen Fever."
  • She wears a festive piece that looks like leaves and cranberries with her Happy Holidays Dress in "Olaf's Frozen Adventure". These show she's enthusiastically embracing the season. Red cranberries are also symbols of love, warmth, and togetherness, which are key themes of the short and all things she stands for.
  • For the Harvest Festival in Frozen II, she wears wheat in her hair, symbolic of her devotion to her community and of the journey of change and transformation she is about to undertake.
• Meaningful Name: While her name doubles as ironic, "grace" can also mean graciousness, as in "kindness and caring", which Anna has in spades.
• Messianic Archetype: Even after Elsa is called a monster by everyone else, unintentionally curses the kingdom with an Endless Winter (seemingly on purpose), and rejects and even nearly kills her by accident (not that Anna knows it's an accident)... she never gives up on her fallen sister, believing in the inherent goodness in Elsa's heart. In the end, the concept of true love comes in the form of a Heroic Sacrifice, which allows Elsa to finally redeem herself and brings Anna back from the dead.
• Modest Royalty: As Active Royalty who likes to go out and mingle with the townspeople, Anna usually dresses nicely but casually, unless there is a formal occasion such as her sister's coronation.
• Motor Mouth: Downplayed. She can talk at a normal speed, but also babbles and speaks more quickly when she's nervous or excited, which is often.
• Muscles Are Meaningless: Has a lot of strength for her size. In "For the First Time in Forever", Anna accidentally hammer tosses a statue bust across a room. She later sucker punches Hans hard enough to send him over the railing of a ship.
• My God, What Have I Done?: When she gets betrayed by Hans, she realizes she was wrong about their relationship being True Love.
• Mystical White Hair: Has a streak of hair which turned platinum blonde after Elsa accidentally struck her in the head as a child. When Elsa accidentally freezes her heart, her hair slowly turns white as she nears death. By the time she unfreezes thanks to her Heroic Sacrifice, the streak is gone.
• Naïve Everygirl: A romantic naive young girl who dreams of finding true love.
• Near-Death Experience: She sacrifices herself to save Elsa from getting murdered by Hans, turning to solid ice; however, she thaws moments later, because said sacrifice constitutes an Act of True Love.
• Nice Girl: Anna is always sweet, cheerful, and kind (though she has her limits), and an All-Loving Heroine whose big day-saving power is love.
• Not a Morning Person: She has a lot of trouble waking up, both on Elsa's coronation day in the first movie and on her own birthday in the Frozen Fever short. Both times, it takes her a minute to realize what's going on and what the people waking her up are talking about, sleepily responding with mistaken words and phrases.
• The Not-Love Interest: Serves as this for Elsa to help her defrost. Ultimately, it's her act of saving Elsa that creates the act of true love; the bond between the sisters.
• Oblivious to Love: Deconstructed. Anna grew up locked in a castle with a policy of discouraging visitors, while her older sister and former best friend suddenly began shutting her out without explanation when she was five, so she turned to stories and paintings for "company." As a result, she doesn't really understand what love really is, despite being incredibly loving herself. She has no clue Kristoff has fallen for her until Olaf points it out.
  Anna: Kristoff... loves me?
  Olaf: Wow, you really don't know anything about love, do you?
• Oblivious Younger Sibling: Anna is convinced her older sister Elsa is just misunderstood, remembering how close the two of them used to be when young, even when Elsa ends up looking really bad after seemingly ignoring Anna for most of their childhood, shooting ice spikes at Anna in the middle of an argument, and then promptly fleeing the kingdom, leaving the country in a magical blizzard in July. She turns out to be right — most of the issues truly are misunderstandings or accidents.
• Official Couple: With Kristoff. They get engaged in the second movie.
• Oh, Crap!: She has a rather huge one while discovering Hans' true self.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: The moment Elsa runs off and Anna prepares to make chase, there is a very distinct difference in how she speaks when she says "Bring me my horse, please", and her tone when placing Hans in charge during her absence. It is a remarkable difference from her normal demeanor and shows just how important Elsa is to her. Compare and contrast her slightly less commanding tone and request when she solicits Kristoff for help the following night.
• Orphan's Ordeal: At the end of "Do You Want To Build a Snowman", after her parents' death, she collapses against her sister's bedroom door, sobbing and begging Elsa for company.
• Overshadowed by Awesome: Her cut song "More Than Just The Spare" helped shape her character even if it didn't make it into the movie. Elsa is simply more talented at everything than her, plus has magic powers, and is the one who inherits the throne.
• The Paragon: Anna is the one who inspires Elsa to learn how to control her powers through The Power of Love. Without Anna, Elsa would be isolated and would let her powers get completely out of control.
• Passing the Torch: Receives this when Elsa decides to stay in the Enchanted Forest with the other spirits, making her the new queen of Arendelle in her place.
• Pimped-Out Cape: Anna has a green cape she wears to go searching for her sister, and later a warmer pink cape. When she's queen, she gets a dark jade cape to boot.
• Pimped-Out Dress:
  • Her dress during the coronation is several shades of green, has large pleats all around the billowy skirt, and is covered with intricate rosemaling.
  • Her winter outfit, which she acquires during her search for Elsa, is less flamboyant but still quite detailed and beautiful with its shades of purple and blue.
  • Her birthday dress in Frozen Fever has several sunflower motifs stitched on.
• Pink Means Feminine: Downplayed. Anna has both tomboyish and girly qualities, and pink is one of the colors associated with her, although not as strongly as her primary Color Motif, green. The walls of her bedroom are pink and the cloak she wears for the main part of the first movie is magenta.
• Pint-Sized Powerhouse: Despite her small stature, she can throw a mean punch. Hans finds this out when she decks him hard enough to knock him overboard after he tries to kill her and her sister.
• Plucky Girl: She shows incredible moxie and always tries to help. The most action-like instances are when she and Kristoff fight off a wolf pack, when they evade Marshmallow, and when she sucker punches Hans into the fjord.
• The Pollyanna: Reconstruction. Despite Anna having a dysfunctional and troubled childhood, she never stopped believing that one day, it would get better. She extends the same attitude regarding her sister Elsa and their relationship. She believes that despite Elsa shutting her out for many years and accidentally setting off an Endless Winter, she is worthy of saving, even when Anna doesn't actually know that Elsa has Power Incontinence and that the Endless Winter was an accident. Anna's optimism doesn't always work out, such as when her attempts to help Elsa get the Endless Winter under control result in an accident that freezes her heart and when Hans betrays her. Eventually, the Trauma Conga Line does bring about Heroic BSoD, but Anna recovers and still chooses to believe in Elsa's goodness, despite most of the evidence, from the perspective of Anna (who doesn't know her frozen heart was accidental, not having seen Elsa's shocked look), pointing otherwise and having just had her trust in the one person she believed loved her broken. She saves Elsa's life at the cost of her own, and her faith in Elsa is validated.
• The Power of Love: Her love for her sister allows her to brave driving snow in little more than a ballgown, climb a mountain and cross a frozen lake in order to throw herself in front of Hans' sword to save Elsa despite being half-dead at the time.
• Pretty in Mink:
  • When she gets winter clothes from Oaken, she gets a cape and cap lined with pink-white fur.
  • In Olaf's Frozen Adventure, she wears a jacket and hat lined with white fur.
• Pretty Princess Powerhouse: This bubbly princess, who has been locked up in her home for 13 years, was able to help Kristoff take on a pack of wolves, stand up to an ice golem, and punch Hans in the face with enough force to knock him off a boat. Heck, she didn't even need a knight-in-shining-armor to finish the job. This is foreshadowed in "For The First Time In Forever", when we see how much strength and agility she has, from hammer tossing a bust across the room on accident, to bouncing off couches like Olympic trampolines.
• Prim and Proper Bun:
  • Anna's hair is put up into a neat, perfectly-shaped bun at Elsa's coronation. A clear contrast to the way she normally wears her hair, which is in braided Girlish Pigtails that reflect her usual playfulness. When she wears her hair up, it's a formal occasion.
  • At the end of Frozen II, she wears her hair in a bun just like Elsa and their mother did, symbolizing her maturity and responsibility as new queen of Arendelle.
• Primary-Color Champion: While she tends to favor outfits that are primarily green, her Iconic Outfit that she wears in most marketing and for the main part of the first movie when she's endeavoring to save Elsa and Arendelle is blue with a magenta cape.
• Princess Classic: Anna grows up to be an archetypal "sweet-natured, innocent, friend to all living things, romantic" princess.
• Princesses Prefer Pink: Downplayed. Most of her outfits contain some pink accents, although all of them are primarily green or blue. As for prominent appearances of it, her winter cape and hat are magenta and her room is pink, but that's about it. The color most associated with her is green instead.
• Princess Protagonist: Princess Anna thinks of herself as a Princess Classic and dreams of a life filled with balls and handsome princes, though that doesn't quite work out for her. Instead, the plot is dominated by Anna's quest to save the kingdom and her older sister, Queen Elsa.
• Rank Up: Goes from Princess to Queen in the second movie.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech:
  • In her hurt and anger at being forbidden Elsa's blessing to marry Hans and Elsa's decision to close the gates again and continue to keep the two of them isolated, she gives a short one to her sister.
  • Near the end, Anna gives a short one to Hans for callously abandoning her to death and trying to kill Elsa, telling him that he's the only one with a "frozen heart". And she then suddenly sucker-punches him without warning.
• Reconstruction: Of The Heart and The Ingenue. Anna's main strength isn't so much her smarts, experience, or power, but her care for the people around her and her determination to save them from their darker sides. However, this doesn't mean she has to be completely useless, completely based around those she cares about, or that she can't have agency in the plot. It does take its toll on her, though, and her naivety and the emotional toll of retaining her faith in and devotion to her sister, despite Elsa's aloof behaviour, leave her vulnerable to Manipulative Bastard Hans, who takes advantage of her heart to get close to the throne. They also nearly get her killed when she chooses to help Elsa, but her faith in her sister is ultimately validated; Elsa really is, as Anna chooses to believe, a Hero with Bad Publicity, and much of the damage Elsa causes really is unintentional, the result of Power Incontinence. Anna gets to grow and readjust her understanding of love without having to turn all cynical or lose any of her warmth and sweetness.
• Redhead In Green: Nearly every outfit she wears in the original movie is green, excepting the black mourning dress and the blue winter dress and pink cape bought from Oaken's. All of her childhood outfits, her nightgown, the dress she wears to Elsa's coronation, her casual summer outfit, and even her coronation gown are green.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: The red to Elsa's blue. Anna is very energetic in contrast to her sister's calmness. Reversed in Frozen Fever, where Elsa is more energetic than her.
• Royal Blood: Exactly What It Says on the Tin. Anna and Elsa are the Princesses of Arendelle until Elsa, the older sister, is crowned Queen. At the end of Frozen II, Elsa leaves to live as a snow queen in the forest and explore her magic powers further, so Anna steps up to replace her as Queen of Arendelle.
• Sadistic Choice: Once Anna realizes that Kristoff does love her and went back for her, she hopes she can get a kiss from him to save her life. On the other hand, she sees her estranged sister about to be killed by her traitorous ex-fiancé. It's her life or her sister's. She chooses the latter and it turns out to be a better choice.
• Save the Villain: An unusual example, in large part because the audience knows that Elsa isn't really a villain, but from Anna's perspective she might as well be. She had basically condemned Anna to a life of misery and plunged the kingdom into an Endless Winter, but when the suspicious Duke of Weselton thinks she's a monster and wants to send his men after her, Anna defends Elsa and insists she can be reasoned with. She volunteers to find Elsa and talk to her herself. When she does, she finds she was right and Elsa really is surprised to hear about the magical winter everywhere. However, when Anna asks her to stop it, Elsa doesn't try and instead insists she can't, freezing Anna's heart before siccing a giant ice monster on her and her friends. The camera shows the audience the initial surprise on Elsa's face after she notices she's injured Anna, establishing to us that it was unintentional, but Anna, doubled over in pain, doesn't get to see it. From her perspective, it appears as if Elsa lost her temper and struck Anna deliberately. Despite this, when all bets are off and Anna sees Elsa about to be killed during the run to her salvation from the curse, she immediately gives up the opportunity to live and instead throws herself in front of the sword, saving Elsa.
• Savvy Guy, Energetic Girl: With Kristoff. She is a spunky princess willing to do whatever it takes to bring her sister home, he is a grumpy, rough-around-the-edges ice harvester helping her along the way.
• She Cleans Up Nicely: Anna is already pretty when she's not dressed up in fancy gowns, but when she does dress up, she looks much more regal and put together.
• Sheltered Aristocrat: Her extreme naivety and awkwardness are a result of spending most of her life locked up in the royal palace with little to no companionship.
• The Shut-In: Thanks to her parents closing off the castle, she and Elsa grow up in virtual isolation.
• Shipper on Deck: In The Secret Admirer, she's determined to learn who has been sending Elsa gifts so the two can meet face-to-face. She gives up on the relationship after learning Elsa's secret admirer, Freddie, is a seven-year-old boy.
• Sibling Yin-Yang: She's energetic, outspoken, and extroverted while Elsa is calm, reserved, and introverted.
• Significant Birth Date: According to extra material, Anna was born on the summer solstice, fitting her warm personality. It does seem like a lovely summer's day on her birthday in the short Frozen Fever.
• Simple, yet Opulent: Her everyday dresses are significantly less fancy than her formal dresses yet her casual dresses are still made of expensive fabric, as she is royalty.
• Single Woman Seeks Good Man:
  • Anna is initially smitten with Hans because of his princely and nice guy demeanor, but it turns out he was just playing her.
  • In the end, thankfully, she becomes an Official Couple with the surly but brave and heroic Kristoff, who would do anything to protect her and their loved ones.
• Smitten Teenage Girl: Falls in love with Hans and agrees to marry him the day they meet.
• Socially Awkward Hero: Anna lacks a lot of social skills and is amazingly awkward around other people. This is largely due to the fact that she spent 13 years of her life isolated in the castle by herself.
• Spare to the Throne:
  • She's raised second-in-line, and makes comments suggesting she sees Elsa as more important, such as when she earnestly reassures Hans not to worry too much about accidentally hitting her, the Princess of Arendelle, with his horse, because she's "not that princess" and it's not as big a deal to hit her as it would have been to hit her sister, "It's just me." This is exploited by Hans, who takes advantage of her low self-esteem to manipulate her into trusting him. When Elsa became queen, she gets bumped up to heir apparent, and soon finds herself needing to deal with the chaos that ensues when Elsa flees Arendelle, while retaining the inferiority complex associated with this trope. Rather than try to keep the power for herself, she promptly sets off in a blizzard to find Elsa and offer her help.
  • Like in the first movie, Anna spends most of Frozen II assuming the role of supporting her older sister, but when Elsa suffers a Disney Death, Anna finds herself in charge in the middle of an international crisis while grieving for the loss of the last of her family, and has to talk herself into finding her own direction independent of her sister during "The Next Right Thing," musing on how she'd always lived for her sister and asking "How to rise from the floor when it's not you I'm rising for?" Elsa comes back to life, but steps down as Queen of Arendelle and Anna is crowned as her successor.
• Stepford Smiler: Implied. While she was energetic and happy even as a child, it seems like staying that way through adulthood was Anna's way of dealing with Elsa's emotional distance, especially after the deaths of their parents, and she is often seen briefly frowning in response to something negative before pasting on a smile.
• Stock Shoujo Heroine: Anna is a clumsy, awkward and excitable young woman who wants to be close to her sister again, and falls for two older boys over the course of the movie; she has a Crash-Into Hello with handsome, agreeable prince Hans, and later falls for One Head Taller loyal mountain man Kristoff. She dreams of love in multiple forms, and in the end retroactively saves herself and her sister due to their close bond.
• Strong Family Resemblance: Anna has similar features to both of her parents, especially to her mother. Specifically, she has her mother's facial structures but has her father's hair and eye colors.
• Stylish Protection Gear: After Elsa accidentally puts the kingdom in an Endless Winter, Anna goes to find her. Anna then has to ditch her summer clothes for winter gear. The only winter clothes available at Wandering Oaken's Trading Post & Sauna not only conveniently fit her, but also look quite nice.
• Successful Sibling Syndrome: Growing up in the shadow of her older, seemingly-perfect sister Elsa, Anna comes to develop an inferiority complex, thinking of herself as "completely ordinary" and "not that princess... it's just me". This low self-esteem is exploited by Hans, and he especially plays on it during his post-reveal monologue, telling Anna that she's "no match for Elsa" and that her sister "was preferable, of course". In an earlier draft where Elsa was written as less reclusive than in the final film, the theme of Spare to the Throne was more prominent and this trope was more heavily explored. This is seen in Anna's unused song "More Than Just The Spare" and this deleted scene, which helped shape her character even if they didn't make it into the movie.
  I'm not part of the town, not meant to be queen, just somebody hopelessly in-between
  She's the scholar, athlete, poet
  I'm the screw-up... Don't I know it
  But then, who could ever compare?
  Of course they're gonna think I'm just the spare
  Well, I won't care.
• Sunny Sunflower Disposition: In Frozen Fever, sunflowers are the theme of her birthday party and dress, fitting Anna's cheerful and sunny personality. In Frozen II: A Forest of Shadows, she calls them her favorite flower.
• Superior Successor: Downplayed, Elsa believed that Arendelle would be better off ruled by Anna instead of her. At the very least, Anna’s more extroverted nature leads her to connecting to the people more and in F2 she is seen giving orders before Elsa does. They are both equally competent as leaders, but Anna is just more personable and natural while Elsa is professional and introverted.
  • In “Polar Nights” Anna turns out to be able to tolerate meetings better than Elsa did.
  • And in one of the stories in “All Is Found” Anna successfully establishes a trade agreement between with the Southern Isles which her father (and supposedly Elsa) had attempted to do before. Though her past history may have helped in that…
• Sweet Tooth: Anna has a love of sugar and sweets, especially chocolate. It runs in the family: her sister Elsa shares this love of chocolate, and in the Tie-In Novel A Frozen Heart, they inherit this from their mother Iduna. In the book, the sisters used to sneak into the kitchen during their childhood while the cook was baking and dip their fingers in bowls of melted chocolate; at the end of the book, after their reunion, they do it again.
• Symbol Motif Clothing:
  • Floral patterns. Both Anna's formal green princess dress and her blue winter dress have crocus flowers on them, as do the sleeves and buttons of her travel outfit in Frozen II . Her birthday dress has sunflowers, which also appear on her birthday cake. This fits her Hope Bringer status, especially the crocuses, which are specifically associated with Spring and rebirth, fitting for a character who brings back the sun. Crocuses are also an official symbol of Arendelle and denote her devotion to the kingdom, while the sunflowers are emblematic of her warm, cheerful personality and constancy.
  • Wheat designs cover her Harvest Festival dress and travel outfit. Wheat is a symbol of Autumn in Arendelle, and Anna enthusiastically loves her community and embarks on a journey of change and transformation.
• Taken for Granite: When one of Elsa's blasts strikes her in the heart, her body begins to slowly turn into really hard ice. Instead of the Literally Shattered Lives you'd expect from her being struck by a sword, it's the sword that shatters.
• Taking the Bullet: Takes a sword slash meant for her sister just as her body turns to ice.
• Textile Work Is Feminine:
  • In A Frozen Heart, as she tells Kristoff about herself, she says she is a mean knitter: she can make a scarf in less than a day, although the yarn gives her trouble sometimes.
  • In a comic, she creates reindeer mittens.
• Thicker Than Water: Even though Elsa shut her out and neglected her for so many years and also set off an eternal winter which froze the entire kingdom of Arendelle (accidentally — but Anna doesn't know that), Anna never gives up on her and is still determined to rekindle their relationship. She has Undying Loyalty and unconditional love for Elsa no matter what. She makes a choice to sacrifice her life to save Queen Elsa despite the fact the she strikes her in the heart (also accidentally — but Anna doesn't know that, either) and continually shuts her out (in an attempt, unbeknownst to Anna, to protect Anna from the magical power Elsa can't fully control). This trope is even stronger because she could have gotten a kiss from Kristoff, which would save Anna at the cost of Elsa's life. However, The Power of Love saves Anna from her Disney Death because her sacrifice was an Act of True Love. In the end, it's Anna's familial love for Elsa that ends up saving Anna herself, Elsa, and the entire kingdom of Arendelle.
• Thinks Like a Romance Novel: Deconstructed. Anna was locked away at a young age and didn't get much socialization, to the point that she ended up turning to paintings for conversation, so her idea of love ends up rather storylike. She believes in Fourth-Date Marriage if it's "true love", which she thinks describes her relationship with Hans after one date. He turns out to be a Gold Digger manipulating her so he can get closer to the throne, and Anna moves on to the more sincere Kristoff, who's proven himself true — and they take things more slowly.
• This Loser Is You: Part of what makes her a character to relate to is her awkward and quirky personality.
• Tomboy and Girly Girl: The Tomboy to Elsa's Girly Girl. Anna is a feisty Spirited Young Lady who stuffs her face with food, punches out a prince, rescues her sister repeatedly, acts awkwardly, is Not a Morning Person with the hairstyle and drool to match, and rides a bicycle indoors. By contrast, Elsa is more reserved and graceful and strives to be a "perfect girl" as a way to control her emotions and her ice powers, manages to be very queenly even after she runs away, and is shown to be more of a Proper Lady through the series, even as a free-spirited nature guardian.
• Tomboy Princess: Downplayed. She has a girly streak and is unashamed of it, often wearing dresses and is unabashedly pink-loving and romantic. But she also spends her childhood climbing around the castle, likes to eat, will stuff her face with food, punches out a prince, rescues her sister repeatedly, acts awkwardly, is Not a Morning Person with the hairstyle and drool to match, and rides a bicycle indoors.
• Tomboy with a Girly Streak: While she's a Tomboy Princess compared to Elsa and isn't always demure, often running around the castle, she also likes pink, romance, and dancing. This combination of traits is to fit her "ordinary hero" status and reflect the many girls who don't fit neatly into "tomboy" or "girly-girl" categories.
• Took a Level in Badass: In the first movie, she struggles to climb a rock for more than a few feet. In the second, she finds the strength to pull herself to the top of rather steep cliffs twice. Fits in as a metaphor for her personal growth, as she is recovering from Heroic BSoD after losing her family and is finding her own inner strength.
• Too Much Information: Her response to one of the trolls mentioning that Kristoff "only likes to tinkle in the woods" during the "Fixer Upper" number:
  Anna: I did not need to know that.
• Trademark Favorite Food: Has a fondness for chocolate. And sandwiches.
  • Her fondness for chocolate comes up twice in the original movie, when she stress-eats some at the thought of talking to an attractive person, and when she and Elsa start to reconnect at Elsa's coronation party and both get excited about smelling some of it in the air. Her birthday cake has some chocolate in it, too. In the book Anna Loves Elsa, Anna lists some of the things she loves about her big sister, including that Elsa shares chocolate.
  • When Hans says, "We finish each other's–", she thinks of sandwiches. This gets a nod in Frozen Fever, where one of the gifts she receives for her birthday is a sandwich about as long as her torso. Her love of sandwiches has come up throughout the franchise, including Tie-In Novel A Frozen Heart and merchandise, like the Frozen Anna Travel Bag Play Set, which includes one.
• Tranquil Fury: The sight of Anna alive confuses Hans, prompting him to ask how she beat the frozen heart curse. Anna has been shown to be a bit hot-tempered when pushed enough, but this time she just coldly states that the only frozen heart is Hans's, and then begins to take her leave... before suddenly turning her heel and sucker-punching the treacherous prince in the face, causing him to fall into the fjord below.
• Trauma Conga Line: Wow, does she go through tragedy!
  • In the first movie:
    • She gets accidentally hit in the head with ice by Elsa as kids and gets her memories wiped clean to not remember her sister's powers.
    • Then, Anna is shunned by Elsa and doesn't know why, and tries desperately to reconnect with her.
    • During this time, she's locked up in the castle, without explanation.
    • Cut to a few years later, her parents are dead and Anna tries again to reconnect with Elsa to no avail, leaving her feeling unwanted.
    • Another three years go by and she finds someone she thinks is true love, Hans, then asking Elsa for her blessing leads to an argument about their unexplained isolation and sudden estrangement, culminating with Elsa shooting ice spikes at her and running away.
    • As Anna deals with realizing that her family kept her in the dark about such a major secret, the kingdom plunges into a magical blizzard in the middle of summer and people begin to believe her estranged but still beloved sister is a "monster".
    • Anna tries to get her to come back but only gets her heart frozen by her accidentally, and doesn't even know that was an accident.
    • She tries to get Hans to kiss her, and he reveals himself to be a manipulative sociopath who tells her no one loves her, leaves her to die, and plans to kill Elsa, crushing her idea of what love is, while she is freezing to death from the inside out.
    • And finally, saves Elsa at the cost of her own life. It's a good thing she comes back to life and things get better for her, but someone needed to give her a hug and that someone was Elsa.
  • Then in the second:
    • She starts by discovering that her sister is still keeping secrets from her and plans to go on a potentially dangerous journey on her own.
    • Then Kristoff leaves without a word. Made worse by the fact that throughout the film, she was being constantly reminded of how disastrously her last relationship ended, with her fiancé revealing he was only pretending to care and telling her no one loved her, and that it's clearly exacerbated her abandonment issues.
    • Then she gets to witness her parents' death through an ice memory.
    • Then, Elsa breaks her promise to her to remain together and pushes her and Olaf away, and, shortly after, Anna learns that her grandfather betrayed the Northuldra, and realises that Elsa is dead when Olaf dies too.
    • Then, Anna has to break the dam knowing that the released water will flood Arendelle. Until Elsa returns, Anna believes that her family and her kingdom are gone.
• True Love's Kiss: Subverted twice. When Anna is struck by her older sister Elsa's out-of-control magic and is slowly freezing solid, it is believed that an "act of true love" is necessary to reverse the process and save her. Anna then goes back to her fiancé Hans to get a kiss from him, only to find out that he's only using her to get at Elsa and snatch the crown of Arendelle, so he mocks her and then says he will leave her to die, at which point she realizes that her companion Kristoff loves her. In the end, Anna forgoes a chance to get the kiss from Kristoff that would save her, instead throwing herself in front of Hans when he tries to kill Elsa and freezing solid just as the sword lands, breaking it. That sacrifice out of love for her sister is what ultimately not only saves her, but helps Elsa finally control her powers.
• Tsundere: Anna is a Type B, which means that her default mood is kind, sweet, loving and caring. But when she interacts with Kristoff, she can become more sarcastic, edgy, and snarky. Ironically, Anna ends up falling for Kristoff at the end of the movie.
• The Unchosen One: Thinks herself "completely ordinary", but volunteers to go on a journey to help her sister and free their kingdom from an Endless Winter because she's the only one who believes that Elsa isn't actually evil and considers herself responsible for the argument during which Elsa snapped and revealed her powers.
• Underestimating Badassery: The reason Elsa initially insisted on leaving Anna behind and go alone to the forest in Northuldra was that it would be too dangerous for her, since she no magical powers. Anna, in response, rattles off her accomplishments in the first movie to convince her sister to take her along for the quest. And indeed, Anna proves to be instrumental to dispel the magical fog.
• Undying Loyalty: Anna seems to always believe Elsa is not someone to fear, but is someone who is just really scared and frightened of herself. When Elsa's powers are revealed, and she runs away, Anna doesn't hesitate to go after her. "She's my sister — she would never hurt me." The fact that she is later dying because of Elsa's magic, and still doesn't hesitate to save her, really proves this trope.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Anna gets engaged to a man she just met and asks Elsa uncomfortable questions in public in the evening of a very stressful day; that causes Elsa to snap, reveal her powers, panic even more, and unleash the Endless Winter.
• Unwitting Pawn: Hans is just using Anna as a pawn to succeed in his plan of killing her sister and eventually Anna to take the throne for himself.
• Uptown Girl: For Kristoff at the end; she is the princess, he is an ice harvester.
• Wakeup Makeup: Averted. Anna wakes up on coronation day with what must be the world's worst case of bedhead◊. The bedhead returns in Frozen Fever, where the occasion is her own birthday. In the Frozen fan-comic Cinema Snob Reviews Frozen, the Snob describes her as being a bassist for an 80s Hair Metal band.
• Well, Excuse Me, Princess!: Anna can sometimes get really sarcastic and snarky towards Kristoff. Her interactions with him come off as Vitriolic Best Buds at the start.
• We Used to Be Friends: She and Elsa were inseparable as children. Then, the accident happened. The two mended their relationship, fortunately
• What the Hell, Hero?: Anna calls Elsa out on shutting her out during the coronation party.
• Wide-Eyed Idealist: Reconstructed. Anna is extremely idealistic by nature and naive. She thinks Hans is her One True Love after less than day, only to find out he's a murderous Gold Digger. She also believes Elsa is just misunderstood when the latter freezes the whole kingdom, but turns out to be right. By the end of the movie, she's become more discerning and realistic, but still retains her idealism. The casting call for the Broadway version even outright says "her greatest flaw — and her greatest strength — is her faith in love".
• Wrong Genre Savvy: Anna Thinks Like a Romance Novel or an idealized Fairy Tale, while Frozen is a Fractured Fairy Tale.
  • She thinks Love at First Sight equals True Love, and after singing a romantic duet, she can totally marry a man she just met. Unfortunately, said man turns out to be the Prince Charmless who only pretended to love her to get to the throne.
  • She assumes she needs True Love's Kiss to break the curse, but the Act of True Love that saves her turns out to be her own Heroic Sacrifice.
• You Are Better Than You Think You Are: Anna is instrumental in pulling Elsa out of her fear and depression. When everyone is afraid of Elsa and thinks that she is a monster, Anna is always the one to believe that Elsa is a good person despite the mistakes that she makes — shutting Anna out since childhood, abandoning her kingdom, dooming Arendelle to an eternal winter, freezing her heart, etc. — even before finding out that the latter two were accidents or Elsa's reasons for the first two. Anna is also the catalyst for getting Elsa to learn how to control her powers that she had so many problems with controlling for years. She even says to her Elsa after she finally thaws Arendelle: "I knew you could do it."
• You Are Not Alone: Anna reminds Elsa that no matter what she might do, whether it be abandoning her, shutting her out emotionally, or cursing Arendelle to an eternal winter, she will always love Elsa no matter what and that together, they can undo the curse that Elsa accidentally put on the kingdom. Anna also tells Elsa that she doesn't have to spend her days alone or live in fear because she will always be there by her side supporting her through it all.
• Youngest Child Wins: Zigzagged. While this trope usually has the older sibling or siblings incompetent (and sometimes even evil), Anna feels Overshadowed by Awesome in comparison to her older sister, which is understandable considering that Elsa is the Queen of Arendelle, has ice powers, and is more dutiful, serious, and regal. On the other hand, Anna is only the spare and a princess (although she is knocked up to heir apparent after their parents tragically die), is a regular human girl with no magical powers, and is quirky, clumsy and awkward. Yet Elsa isn't perfect, either, and it is Anna who ends up saving Elsa and the kingdom because she is the one who doesn't give up hope and in no small part precisely because she always recognizes Elsa's worth, even when Elsa appears evil. The sisters win when they're together.
• Your Days Are Numbered: Twice, both for the same reason: she's unintentionally blasted by Elsa's magic, which begins to freeze her from the inside. The king and queen appeal to the trolls to reverse it the first time, though they're unable to do anything the second time, due to the damage being done to the heart instead of the head (the heart can only be melted by an act of true love, the head can be easily persuaded by memory surgery).
• Youthful Freckles: On her face and shoulders. Serves to highlight her initial immaturity and naivety.

Elsa

Queen Elsa of Arendelle

♫ The cold never bothered me anyway... ♫

Voiced by: Idina Menzel (adult), Danielle Bisutti (Disney Dreamlight Valley and Disney Speedstorm), Eva Bella (child, 2013), Mattea Conforti (child, 2019), Spencer Lacey Ganus (12-year old)^{Other Languages} Ahn Su-yeon (Korean, speaking), Park He-na (Korean, singing), Anaïs Delva (European French dub Frozen), Charlotte Hervieux (European French dub Frozen II), Aurélie Morgane (Canadian French dub speaking), Willemijn Verkaik (Dutch speaking and singing, German singing), Takako Matsu (Japanese dub), Jolanta Strikaite (Latvian dub), Anna Buturlina (Russian dub), Taryn Szpilman (Brazilian Portuguese dub), Serena Autieri (Italian dub), Mona Mor (Hebrew); Awhimai Fraser (adult), Anewa Waititi-Rata (child) (te Reo Māori dub); Carmen Sarahí (adult), Andrea Arruti (teen), Regina Carrillo (child) (Latin Spanish dub), Malva Goldmann (child and teen, 2013), Viva Östervall Lyngbrant (child, 2019), Annika Herlitz (Swedish dub)
Appearances: Frozen | Frozen Fever | Olaf's Frozen Adventure | Frozen II
Appearances in alternate continuities: Frozen: Northern Lights | Once Upon a Time | Frozen Free Fall | Disney Infinity | Ralph Breaks the Internet | Kingdom Hearts III | Disney Dreamlight Valley | Disney Speedstorm

♫ Every day's a little harder
As I feel my power grow
Don't you know there's part of me that longs to go...
Into the unknown! ♫

— "Into the Unknown"

Elsa is the Snow Queen, the oldest child and the first-born daughter of King Agnarr and Queen Iduna of Arendelle. She is the older sister of Anna. Elsa has had the ability to conjure up ice from birth, sometimes unwittingly, but tried to suppress and hide it for years before embracing it with the support of her family.^note She also had numerous tropes from when she was going to be a villain, which are found on the trivia tab.

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• 0% Approval Rating: Downplayed, exploited, and zig-zagged. It starts and ends well, and doesn't reach absolute zero, but comes close for much of the story. She starts off well-liked, and people are excited to see her crowned, but during the coronation ball, Elsa loses her temper and shoots ice spikes at her sister, then flees the castle. When she enters the crowded courtyard, she starts to lose control of her powers, which turn a fountain into spiky ice, and accidentally shoots a blast into the crowd. She then flees the kingdom as, unbeknownst to her, her Power Incontinence sends the country into an Endless Winter. Pretty much everyone begins to fear her and believe that the new queen intentionally doomed them to freeze and starve, with the exception of her sister and, once she creates him, her snowlem Olaf. After it looks as if she murdered said sister, Hans is able to convince people to accept him as their new ruler and even comply with his orders to sentence the former queen to death without fuss. Once she is able to end the Endless Winter and the prince's deceptions are exposed, though, her popularity returns.
• Abdicate the Throne: At the end of Frozen II, Elsa passes the crown on to Anna while she herself retreats to the Enchanted Forest. Despite this, she is often still called "Queen Elsa" and "Snow Queen Elsa" in extended works such as Polar Nights and Forces of Nature.
• Above Good and Evil: Played with. After running away to be alone, she resolves to discard concepts like "right" and "wrong" and simply live by her own rules, no longer caring what the rest of the world will think of her actions. Nonetheless, when she finds out she has unknowingly frozen the entire kingdom of Arendelle, she is deeply horrified. Essentially, she is rejecting right and wrong because she's internalized a toxic view of what right and wrong actually are. The only way for her to do what is really the right thing and come into herself is to let go of those ideas.
• Action Heroine: As the token super of the main cast, using her superpowers to blast ice at things is her main method of problem-solving. It's how she deals with the wind spirit and the water spirit, freezing the wind spirit and beating the water spirit in battle with her ice magic. It also plays a key role in how she deals with the fire spirit, blasting ice before charming it with ice flakes after it becomes clear it's a super-adorable and cuddly salamander.
• Adaptational Heroism: The Snow Queen was a neutral entity in the original tale, open to interpretation as either good or evil. While Elsa fears she's the latter, she's really the former, especially in later installments.
• Adaptational Name Change: Is a Composite Character of the nameless Snow Queen and a boy named Kai from the source material, The Snow Queen, but is called "Elsa".
• Adaptational Sympathy: Most prior adaptations usually depicted the Snow Queen as an outright villainous character, who sought nothing but power, or, in the case of the original tale, made her a morally ambiguous party with questionable intent. In this film, Elsa does do harmful things, but she usually does them entirely by accident, having no idea how to control her powers, and is shown to be a good person who's afraid of hurting those she cares about, due to a childhood accident that harmed her sister.
• Aesop Amnesia: In the first movie, Elsa learns the importance of opening up and trusting in people, especially Anna, after her attempts to avoid her problems by avoiding other people backfire and while no perfect solution exists, love turns out to be much more helpful. In the following installments, Elsa has a bad habit of forgetting this. While Elsa is more open, she displays a reluctance to believe in Anna or acknowledge her own need for help. This is especially prominent in Frozen II, where she repeatedly refuses to work with others and ends up becoming frozen after ignoring warnings about going too far into Ahtohallan.
• Affection-Hating Kid: Elsa is seen as a child being disgusted by her sister Anna's story that has everybody get married.
• Afraid of Their Own Strength: Ever since she was a child, she has obsessively tried to suppress her ice powers and stay as far away from people as possible and is afraid that she will hurt others like she did Anna.
• Aloof Big Sister: Justified. Elsa acts distant and aloof to Anna because she's afraid of losing control of her powers. The trope ends when she finally controls her powers.
• The Atoner:
  • Played with. When she learns that she caused an Endless Winter in Arendelle, she would like to fix it, but ends up panicking over not knowing how.
  • Her desire to make Anna happy in Frozen Fever is driven by guilt over how much her sister suffered because of her powers. "For everything you are to me, and all you've been through..."
• Badass Adorable: She's a cute woman who has very powerful ice powers and is a Big Sister Instinct to Anna.
• Badass Boast:
  • "Here I'll stand, and here I'll stay" from "Let It Go" is a boast to the world that it won't be making any more demands of her.
  • In the same song: "I am one with the wind and sky."
  • "What power do you have to stop this winter? To stop me?" An odd version since at that point, she herself can't stop the winter either.
• Badass Bookworm: Her powers make her considerably badass. Anna also says in the book Unlocking Arendelle that Elsa likes to read.
• Badass in Distress: Although extremely powerful, she's vulnerable whenever her state of mind is affected.
• Beauty Equals Goodness: She is beautiful and, Beneath the Mask, kind and caring.
• Beneath the Mask: Anna has only seen her distant attitude for years on end, so she's both surprised and a little relieved to see Elsa having fun talking about chocolate and teasing her by making her dance with the Duke of Weselton, and also surprised to see Elsa grinning when she shows up at the ice palace. It turns out that Elsa really hated having to always repress her emotions, and she shows a playful and creative side with a lot of artistic sense. Unfortunately, there's also a lot of anxiety bubbling away beneath the surface.
• Benevolent Mage Ruler: The first movie is basically the story of how she becomes one, and the hard road to mastering both her magical talent and the responsibilities of a Queen.
• Beware the Nice Ones: Elsa usually doesn't want to hurt anyone intentionally, even two guys clearly sent to kill her. But when it's clear that it's her or them, she becomes brutal. She also bans all trade and business with Weselton for the Duke's actions.
• Beware the Superman: Played with. Elsa is generally good at heart, but she is so afraid of accidentally hurting someone that she feels she has to shut everyone out of her life, including Anna. The show of her powers makes her someone to fear. Once she runs away, she decides "screw this, I'm going to run away and let loose", yet it causes an Endless Winter. Hans exploits this trope to justify killing Elsa.
• Big Sister Instinct: After Anna informs Elsa about the Endless Winter, Elsa panics and accidentally shoots Anna in the heart. Worrying that Anna isn't safe near her, she conjures a giant snowlem to throw Anna out of her ice palace, believing this will help protect her.
• Blessed with Suck: She was born with magical ice powers, but started to fear them after her accident with Anna. She actually loves making ice and snow, but could never do so for fear of hurting others or them hurting her. Then the powers start operating out of control, exposing her to the fear of other people, plunging the kingdom into an Endless Winter, and killing Anna.
• Blue Is Heroic: Elsa's primary color scheme is blue and despite her aloof nature, she's quite kind-hearted.
• Blue Means Cold: Befitting her ice magic, her outfits tend to be very blue.
• Born Winner: Elsa was born with her extremely powerful ice powers, and she's the only human character in the franchise to have any magic. It's zigzagged; her powers aren't always predictable and can be both dangerous as well as beautiful. At the end of the first movie, ironically, it is "completely ordinary" Anna who helps Elsa reach her inborn potential and reconcile the complicated nature of her powers. In the sequel, Pabbie suggests Elsa's powers make her Arendelle's only hope. They certainly are helpful, although in the end, not enough in themselves. She and Anna — who has no inborn powers — end up both having to play a role in saving the day, Elsa with her magic and Anna with her determination to keep doing the next right thing.
• Braids of Action: Elsa wears a French braid over her left shoulder for the majority of her screentime after "Let It Go", including her fight with two of the Duke of Weselton's guys.
• Breakout Character: Despite Anna being the protagonist of the first film and Olaf initially receiving most of the marketing before the movie's release, Elsa became the most popular character in the film by far, eclipsing Anna and the rest of the cast. As a result of her popularity, much of the franchise's marketing treats Elsa as the Series Mascot.
• Break the Cutie: Starts off rather cheerful, but after accidentally striking Anna with a misaimed ice bolt and being shown an image of her future self being attacked by a mob as Grand Pabbie warns her there's danger in not controlling her power, she becomes haunted and repressed. She reaches the Despair Event Horizon when Hans tells her that her magic killed her sister.
• Broken Ace: Brilliant, beautiful, artistic, intense magical power, graceful, and even a very kind person. However, she has a lot of emotional issues because the graceful perfect act is a misguided attempt to keep her magic in check.
• Broken Bird: After many years of isolation in fear, Elsa has become more detached.
• Byronic Heroine: She is an Ice Queen who not only is brooding about her powers, but also exiles herself after her powers are exposed at the coronation. Her inner conflicts over her powers end up driving many central elements of the plot. In fact, "Let It Go", with its extolling of rejecting the conventions of society — not to mention her responsibilities as monarch — is essentially an anthem to a kind of Romantic Existentialism.
• Brutal Honesty: As much as how she shuts people out, she outright forbids Anna marrying a guy she just met and tells her that she knows nothing about true love.
• Calling the Old Man Out: Upon travelling the mystic river called the Ahtohallan, Elsa learns of a horrible truth: her grandfather King Runeard, who was thought to be a benevolent ruler, turns out to be a ruthless tyrant who plotted to subjugate the Northuldrans to his rule because he feared magic that they have connections with. To that end, he had built a dam to weaken their resources under a ruse of peace and murdered the Northuldran leader. As such, Elsa coldly condemns her grandfather for letting his fear overcome his judgement.
  Elsa: [to statue of Runeard] That is NOT what magic does! That's just your fear! Fear is what can't be trusted!
• Cape Swish: She performs one at the end of "Let it Go", right before the door to her ice palace balcony closes behind her.
• Celibate Heroine: While trying to hide her powers, Elsa is reclusive and avoids relationships of all kinds, including romantic ones. When Hans is explaining his plans to Anna, he notes that his original plan to take the throne of Arendelle was simply to woo and marry Elsa, but he had to abandon that plan since "nobody was getting anywhere with her". The creators clarify that she is not in the right place yet for a romantic relationship as she is focusing more on herself as a person, understanding her powers, and finding her place in the world. Even as a kid, she's shown not to like the idea of the princess kissing the prince when her younger sister suggests the idea when they are playing.
  Jennifer: One thing that came out clear was that she wasn’t ready for a relationship at all. She was still getting used to the fact that people were accepting her and she still had so many questions about her powers. The big thing with this film is that this woman is carrying the weight of the kingdom on her shoulders and is wrestling with this extraordinary power. It was this feeling on which she is focusing on and that is a lot.
• The Chains of Commanding:
  • Implied. Although much of Elsa's stress is about hiding her powers, the way she looks at her father's portrait and models it during "For the First Time in Forever" suggests she is also concerned about the responsibilities of her royal position, at least until she gleefully breaks those chains in "Let it Go".
  • Downplayed in Frozen II: While she has become content and happy with her position as Queen, finding her current days "precious," she does display a reluctance to socialize with dignitaries and some stress. She also displays a desire for change and says a feeling that she isn't where she's meant to be and is seemingly eager by the end of the film to put Anna in charge and leave Arendelle to live in the Enchanted Forest.
• Character Development:
  • Following her return to power as Arendelle's reigning monarch, Elsa's original personality, not dominant since childhood, makes a return. With a warm aura, Elsa rules her kingdom with a genuine smile, and uses her abilities for the pleasure of herself, her sister, and the entire kingdom. As seen in Frozen Fever, this aspect of Elsa's personality has not only remained, but strengthened, as the short heavily showcases Elsa's lighter side as fun-loving and devoted to her sister.
  • Zigzagged Trope for some of her development: By the end of the first Frozen, Elsa seems to have fully come to peace with her identity as the Snow Queen of Arendelle, beloved by its people and accepting her responsibilities as Queen with her sister at her side, after realizing her mistakes — first trying to cut off both the entire world and her own magic to protect herself and others, then later trying to cut off the world entirely so she could focus on that magic, both of which ended in disaster. During the "Into the Unknown" sequence of Frozen II, she again runs off into the night to explore her magic without any preparation or a word to anyone. In the end, she decides once again to leave Arendelle and the queenship behind to live as a full-time mage, but now does so in a much healthier and more responsible way, remaining in contact with other human beings this time, including her loved ones.
  • Her reaction to realizing that she accidentally set off a magical disaster in the second movie shows a lot of growth from her reaction in the first. In the first, she became consumed by panic and would not consider looking for a way to reverse the storm. In the second, she is able to keep a cool head and work together with her family to evacuate people and look for more solutions.
• Character Tics: Notably, a lot of them are variants on hiding or containing her emotion, which in her case is often expressed through ice powers that she associates with her hands.
  • She tends to cross her arms when she feels stressed. Moments include when she is confronted by Anna during the coronation just before she cuts loose with her powers (especially since it's to hide her uncovered left hand), when she's alone on the North Mountain during the first lines of "Let It Go", and twice in her ice palace when she realizes that her powers have plunged Arendelle into Endless Winter.
  • When she laughs (once when she and Anna are kids and sneak off into the ballroom to play, and a couple of times during the coronation), she tends to place her fingers over her lips^note although you'd be forgiven for thinking that she's just trying to hide it the time she does it when laughing at the Duke's poor-fitting toupee.
  • She also wrings her hands a lot.
  • She rolls her eyes when she's impatient (when Anna keeps stalling to tell her what happened in Arendelle).
  • Elsa often clasps her hands in front of her when she is anxious.
• Cheerful Child: In the beginning of the first film, before she accidentally hurts Anna, she's gleeful about playing with her powers.
• Chewing the Scenery: Most of the time, she is an anxiety-ridden Stoic, but when she lets her emotions loose during "Let It Go", she makes dramatic gestures and relishes in Badass Boasts.
• Classical Anti-Hero: In the first movie, most of her story is more about her learning to deal with her anxiety over controlling her powers and facing her mistakes than it is about facing any external enemy.
• Clothing Reflects Personality:
  • At first, young Elsa and Anna wear light-colored clothes, which symbolizes their light-heartedness. After they are separated and grow apart (especially during the "Do You Want To Build A Snowman" sequence), their clothes become progressively darker, with Elsa regaining lighter clothes after fleeing the kingdom and feeling less restricted.
  • While she's concealing her powers, she wears gloves to help her do so. On a more metaphorical level, they also represent her hiding a key part of herself.
  • At the end of Frozen II, she's wearing a loose, flowy white dress, showing how free-spirited she's become.
• Color Motifs: Blue — The main color choice for her clothing (including her ice dress); represents her melancholy and her ice powers, and later her happiness with said powers.
• Composite Character: Elsa takes the role of both the Snow Queen and Kai from the source material, The Snow Queen.
• Conspicuous Gloves: Hoping to constrain her powers, Elsa is never without her gloves. Anna later comments that she thought the gloves were due to Elsa being Terrified of Germs.
• Contrapposto Pose: When Elsa is feeling at her most assertive and confident, she often falls into some version of this pose, reflecting her dynamic nature. See for example some of the film posters.
• Consistent Clothing Style: She consistently dresses in cool tones, especially an icy blue, that evoke her ice magic.
• Control Freak: Elsa shows this tendency in Frozen Fever, with perfectly kind intentions: she insists that Anna's birthday celebration should be "perfect" and that for it to be perfect, it should go exactly as she planned, in spite of her sickness and Anna's protests.
• Cool Big Sis: Pun intended, but she's this for Anna when they are younger. In the ending, she becomes it again. In Frozen Fever, this trope is definitely on her mind as she forces herself to go through Anna's birthday celebrations, even while suffering a bad cold.
• Cool Crown: She initially wears a small tiara, but she discards it when she abandons Arendelle. The Stinger reveals that her minion Marshmallow found it.
• Cope by Creating: After Elsa escapes Arendelle, she creates a beautiful ice palace both to test her Elemental Powers and to release her pent-up emotions. She is singing "Let It Go" as it forms around her.
• Costume Evolution: Though she changes her coronation dress to something she's more comfortable with, she's willing to wear other clothes, as long as they also fit the general form of the ice dress.
  • In Frozen Fever, she gives her ice dress a spring look, but still keeps the general shape.
  • In Olaf's Frozen Adventure, her winter dress is a fabric dress that looks like her ice dress, but darker blue, a more obvious snowflake motif on the ice train, and a fur collar.
  • In Frozen 2, she wears a blue travel outfit with trousers before being transformed into a white dress with a long cape once she reaches Ahtohallan and ascends to her true power.
• Costume Porn: Par for the course for Disney, but Elsa's sky-blue snow queen dress deserves a special mention. It's breathtaking, and detailed to the stitch. Her revamped ice outfit she wears for most of Frozen II is even more detailed and elegant.
• Covers Always Lie: A downplayed example for the first movie. A lot of promotional art depicts her as confidently smug, while in the movie proper she only appears this way briefly, but spends much of it anxious.
• Creating Life Is Unforeseen: When she recreates Olaf during "Let It Go", she has no idea that he's alive until he shows up with Anna. In Frozen Fever, she spawns the Snowgies by just sneezing and it takes a while for her to realize what she's doing.
• Cultured Badass: The "cultured" part is more prominent in A Sister More Like Me, which shows her many talents. The "badass" part comes from her powers. "Let It Go" unites them when she uses math to create her ice palace.
• Damsel out of Distress: After Elsa is captured, she uses her powers to break her shackles and escape the dungeon.
• Daddy's Girl: During the growing up montage, it's implied that she is closer to her father than to her mother, as she interacts with him more.
• Dark and Troubled Past: As a child, accidentally hit Anna in the head with her powers, severely injuring her little sister, which makes her Afraid of Their Own Strength. To make matters worse, when the trolls try to warn her how important it is that she learn control and that "fear will be your enemy," they show a vision of a fearful mob to illustrate the danger, which also makes her fear for her life. Then her father tries to protect her from such a fate by isolating her, locking her up in the castle. This essentially drives the entire plot and is the reason why Elsa is so detached from her sister and avoidant in general.
• Dark Magical Girl: She's a good person at heart who was isolated from everyone due to her powers, leading to her becoming an (unintentional) antagonist. As with most Dark Magical Girls, she's eventually saved through the Power of Love by her heroic Foil.
• Death Glare: Executed with a Kubrick Stare when she fights off the Duke's guards.
• Defrosting Ice Queen: She has to keep her emotions and feelings in check, because if she doesn't, she loses control of her magic, and it can do terrible things to the people. It is Anna's love for her that ultimately frees her from her fears and unlocks the ability to thaw out the winter.
• Demoted to Extra:
  • The story of the first movie is adapted for a section of Kingdom Hearts III, but the player gets to see little of the plot or the Frozen characters, so despite being the deuteragonist of the movie, Elsa only appears to interact with Sora exactly once before being relegated to a background character as the plot of the movie goes on without Sora's further input.
  • Downplayed in A Frozen Heart: despite being the deuteragonist of the movie, she appears only in a handful of chapters of the book. The narration is shared between Anna and Hans.
• Determinator: In the sequel, once she sets her mind on following the voice, nothing can stop her. If she has to fight a forest fire or stormy sea, she will.
• Deuteragonist: Anna serves as the main protagonist in the first movie, but the story is just as much about Elsa coming to terms with and handling her uncontrollable ice powers.
• Disease by Any Other Name: Naturally, no specific diagnosis is mentioned, the closest being references to the general "fear" Elsa feels, but in the first movie, her social isolation, emotional invalidation, and the trauma of nearly killing her beloved sister and losing their parents certainly left its marks: Elsa is emotionally unstable, brooding, anxious, and irritable. The creators state that she suffers from depression and anxiety.
• Dreamworks Face: She does this classic promo expression In-Universe a few times, but much more often on posters.
• Early Personality Signs:
  • Her first appearance features Elsa sleeping in a very neat pose. When her younger sister wakes her up asking to play, Elsa tells her at first to play by herself — until her sister, with a knowing look on her face, asks if she wants to build a snowman. Then Elsa becomes interested and answers with a mischievous grin, and the two of them sneak into a bigger room to play with Elsa's snow powers. As an adult, Elsa is generally poised and reserved, but she has a rebellious side, especially when magic is involved.
  • When Elsa and Anna are making up a story with snow figurines, Elsa's focus is on the magic, talking about a "fairy queen who breaks [a] spell." When Agnarr tells them the story about the Enchanted Forest, she's mostly interested in the spirits and the Enchanted Forest itself, in contrast to Anna being mostly interested in the part about him being rescued and wondering why the fighting began. As an adult, Elsa is often motivated by a desire to explore magic, and at the end of the movie, she chooses to live in the Enchanted Forest to be with the spirits and explore the magic of Ahtohallan.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: Finally conquers her crippling fear and reconnects with her sister.
• Easily Forgiven: Once she returns to the kingdom and undoes the Endless Winter she caused on Arendelle, the citizens welcome her with open arms without any hint of resentment despite the casualties it could have caused.
• Elemental Motifs: She's An Ice Person, and the franchise presents ice as being a combination of air and water. This fits in with her role as one half of the bridge between the four elemental spirits (who represent water, air, fire, and earth), with her sister fulfilling the role of the other half associated with fire and earth. In "Let It Go," she sings about being "one with the wind and sky." In the sequel, the glacier Ahtohallan is said to be a frozen "river" found "where the North Wind meets the Sea." "Frozen Fever" also establishes her powers include wind. Much of her ice is blue like water.
  • Water is known for its duality, much like Elsa and her powers. It can be life-giving or very destructive. It's associated with creativity and reflection, two things Elsa is prone to. It's also associated with change, and changing water is considered healthy while stagnant water is considered unhealthy. Elsa, too, tends to be unhealthy when stagnant but thrives when unbound.
  • Air is associated with freedom, something Elsa craves and thrives in. It's also associated with curiosity, something that can be a powerful driving force for her.
• Elemental Personalities: Analyzed. The dangerously uncontrollable nature of Elsa's ice powers strongly influenced her personality. Elsa hides from the world by acting emotionally detached because she's afraid of what might happen to her or what she herself might end up doing if she doesn't control her powers.
• Emotional Powers: Her powers are connected to her emotions. When she's feeling better she creates happier things like Olaf, but when she wants to hide away from the world she creates the massive Marshmallow. Negative emotions like fear or worry tend to give her Power Incontinence, while positive ones allow her more control of her powers. Embracing her love for others is what allows her to lift the Endless Winter from Arendelle.
• Emotionless Girl: Comes off like this, but is actually a subversion. Elsa spends years constantly suppressing her emotions in fear she would lose control of her powers, but she's actually quite emotional.
• Ethereal White Dress: She gains a white gown upon entering Ahtohallan and becoming more in touch with her powers and nature as part of the fifth spirit.
• Everything's Better with Sparkles: Her ice dress is pretty glittery, which becomes particularly evident when she steps into the sunlight at the end of "Let It Go". There are also sparkles in her hair, as her braid is adorned with tiny sparkling snowflakes.
• Expository Hairstyle Change: Elsa wears her hair in a French braid as a child. As a teenager, she starts wearing it in a bun similar to her mother's, first seen when she's saying good-bye to her parents before their voyage. Fast-forward to Coronation Day and it's still in a bun, symbolizing how she's trying restrain herself and imitate her parents. Then at the end of "Let it Go", Elsa drops her Prim and Proper Bun in favor of the French braid she originally wore, symbolizing she isn't as constrained anymore and is trying to find her own identity. When she crosses the Dark Sea, she loosens her hair further into a ponytail, and when she enters Atohallan, she completely unties it, showing she's embracing her magical nature even more.
• Fatal Flaw: Elsa's refusal to work with others leads her to take on far more than she is able to handle alone and at times views her sister's help as a hindrance. This ultimately leads to death twice: Anna's death in movie 1, and Elsa's own in the sequel. Even in the relatively light-hearted short "Frozen Fever," her insistence on planning every part of Anna's birthday herself and rejecting any suggestions she make any adjustments leads to her nearly falling off a clock tower, only surviving because Anna rescues her.
• Fanservice Pack: Her breasts become larger and her curves become even more pronounced in Frozen 2, in addition to letting her hair down, and taking off her shoes to go barefoot.
• Fisher King: The weather changes according to her mood.
• Foil: In the first movie, she is serious, reserved, and primarily fear-driven in contrast to her goofy, outgoing, and optimistic sister, Anna.
• Form-Fitting Wardrobe: Her coronation dress, and especially her ice dress, are tailored enough to perfectly highlight her curves. She wears even tighter clothing in Frozen 2 that further flatters her body.
• Freudian Excuse: Played with. One reason why she's so distant and cool towards others is that she's afraid of their reactions if she loses control of her powers, having been shown a vision of an angry mob when younger. Another is that she knows part of the reason why mobs are a possibility is that her Power Incontinence can end up hurting other people (and making her look like an Evil Witch in the process). This is especially true because she had accidentally almost killed her little sister with her powers before, giving her more reason to worry about the harm she could to do if she lost control and thus more reason to be distant.
• Friendless Background: She was raised in seclusion and she doesn't have any friends her age for most of her childhood.
• Friend to All Children: She's often shown to get on well with children. In Frozen II she creates toys made of ice for them.
• Full-Contact Magic: Whenever she uses her powers intentionally, she always makes grand gestures with her hands or dancing. When she creates her ice palace, it's more like she's actually lifting it out of the mountain than anything.
• Glass Cannon: She's very powerful, but still ultimately a young woman susceptible to conventional harm if one bypasses her icy defenses. When a crossbow knocks down the ice chandelier, it knocks her out.
• Go Mad from the Isolation: Inverted. Instead of involuntary isolation giving someone mental/emotional issues, she isolates herself on purpose because of her emotional issues.
• God Save Us from the Queen!: The whole kingdom after Elsa accidentally casts an eternal winter in Arendelle, thinking she has done it on purpose,and when Anna's horse comes back alone, they think Anna is in trouble and is taken hostage by Elsa. Later due to Han's lies, they think Elsa has killed her sister Anna.
  Duke Of Westlton: "There can be no doubt now. Queen Elsa is a monster and we are all in grave danger."
• Good All Along: Downplayed in that the audience knows from the start that she's at least not completely evil, since she shows concern for her family's safety as a child. But there's a good chunk of the first film where it looks like she's become a villain when she plunges the country into a severe storm with her powers while singing a song about how she doesn't feel any contraints now that people know about her magic anyway, even singing "No right, no wrong, no rules for me!" Anna's steadfast faith in Elsa and decision to go on a journey through the storm on that faith is questioned just as much as her rushing into marriage with someone she barely knows is. However, when Anna reaches Elsa, it's confirmed that the storm truly was an accident and Elsa is in shock when she finds out that Arendelle is frozen in eternal winter. She also collapses when she thinks she killed her sister, showing that she is not the Bitch in Sheep's Clothing that she was built up to be.
• Good Is Not Soft: She usually doesn't like to hurt people on purpose, but does do so when she thinks it's necessary.
• Good with Numbers: It is stated in A Sister More Like Me that Elsa loves geometry. This is shown in the film when she describes her snow designs as "fractals", an advanced geometry concept for the time period.
• Gorgeous Garment Generation: Her powers can conjure clothing made of ice, or clothing closely associated with winter such as ice skates.
  • Her sparkly blue Snow Queen dress is woven from ice and snow.
  • In Fever she updates it to green, with flower decorations, to fit with Anna's birthday.
  • And, in the sequel, she suddenly finds herself wearing a pure white dress that transitions smoothly to a gown from frost on her skin, although it's not clear whether she generated this one herself or Ahtohallan did.
• Guilt Complex: Almost killing Anna when they were kids hit Elsa hard, and even though it was an accident, she seems to blame herself for all the grief it caused her family and for things out of her control.
  • In Frozen Fever, she thinks she's "ruined" Anna's birthday because her cold interferes with her regimented plan for how she wanted them to spend the day.
  • In Olaf's Frozen Adventure, Elsa says it's her fault she and Anna don't seem to have any Christmastime traditions.
  • In Frozen II, when Elsa finds out that her parents perished on the journey to find answers about her powers, she says she's responsible for their deaths — no matter Anna quite firmly pointing out that their parents were adults capable of making their own decisions and the lack of sense in insisting it was her fault.
• Hairstyle Inertia: After "Let It Go", Elsa goes back to wearing the same single French braid she had as a child, and sticks to this for the rest of the first movie, plus both animated shorts, and in part of Frozen II.
• Hand Blast: She shoots her magic primarily from her hands.
• Happy Holidays Dress: In Olaf's Frozen Adventure, Elsa has a dark blue dress◊ with a snowflake motif visible on the train, and the neckline is trimmed with white fur, giving her a festive snow queen look.
• Hartman Hips: Elsa has very large hips. This is especially evident in her iconic song Let It Go. Olaf even uses this attribute to nail his impression of her.
• Hates Being Touched: She won't let other people touch her, out of fear of losing control of her powers. Once Elsa has her powers in check, she's freer with physical contact.
• Hero Antagonist: She unintentionally drives the conflict, creating an Endless Winter in the middle of summer when she runs away to the mountains to isolate herself. Her sister, Anna, has to seek her out so that they can find a way to stop the winter she unknowingly caused.
• Heroic BSoD:
  • When Hans tells her that Anna's dead, she collapses in horror and despair. When Elsa goes through these, the snow tends to freeze outside (also happens when she learns that her parents have died).
  • She goes through one in Olaf's Frozen Adventure when she believes she and Anna don't have any traditions.
• The Hermit: She tries this lifestyle for a while, as she thinks she can escape her problems by living alone in an ice castle on the side of a mountain. She ultimately learns otherwise, however.
• Hidden Depths:
  • She demonstrates a sly sense of humor during the coronation, when she tricks Anna into dancing with the Duke of Weselton and barely suppresses a laugh at her sister's expense.
  • Although she is passive compared to Anna, it is implied that she ironically enjoys more thrilling activities than her sister. When she creates a public ice rink in the first film's epilogue, she also creates a pair of ice skates for Anna. While Anna is somewhat hesitant at first, claiming she doesn't skate, Elsa grabs her arms and spins her around on the ice.
  • In Frozen Fever, she's game enough to dance at the top of a clock tower.
• Hidden Heart of Gold: Although Elsa may seem aloof towards Anna, this is only her repressing her emotions in order to keep her powers in check, and she really does deeply care for her sister and her well-being, but thinks she has to push her away.
• High-Class Gloves: Though her gloves are to contain her power, they are still items fit for royalty. Even her coronation gloves match her dress.
• The High Queen: She tries to be a good ruler for her kingdom. She continues to do so while being herself after she returns, and her people love her in the follow-up shorts and Extended Universe material.
• Hot Witch: Once she's finally able to be herself and embrace her powers, her beauty really shines.
• Hypocrite: Elsa says that Anna is too sheltered to understand what love is. But Elsa herself is just as sheltered, having never set foot outside the castle for the same amount of time. Anna throws that back at her.
  Elsa: Anna, what do you know about true love?
  Anna: More than you! All you know how to do is shut people out!
• Hypocrite Has a Point: Elsa is right that Anna is too sheltered to understand what love is, although Elsa herself is just as sheltered.
• I Can't Dance: In one of the tie-in comics, Elsa doesn't know how to dance, so Anna teaches her in preparation for a group of princes she's scheduled to dance with...and it turns out said princes can't dance either.
• An Ice Person: Has the ability to create ice and snow, which also extends to creating sentient snowmen and even a dress made of ice for herself. The origin of these powers isn't revealed until the sequel, which establishes them as part of her parents' union between Arendelle and Northuldra.
• Ice Queen: Both literally and figuratively! At first she feels a need to tightly control her emotions so that no one will find out about her secret ice powers, which are affected by her emotions, or be hurt. In particular, Anna feels shut out and disliked by her sister for no reason she can understand. When, in a moment of anger during an argument, Elsa unleashes her powers in public, she just gives up entirely on controlling it, leading into her song "Let It Go".
• An Ice Suit: Elsa's slinky blue ice dress seems much better suited for warm weather. As a cryomancer, the cold never bothered her anyway.
• I Choose to Stay: Ultimately decides to remain in the Enchanted Forest at the end of Frozen II, leaving her to abdicate the throne to Anna.
• Iconic Outfit: Her silky blue gown + gauzy cape is her most recognizable outfit by far, and is printed on more merchandise than her others, and appears in more fanart and cosplays.
• Icy Blue Eyes: Not evil, but since her element is ice, this fits.
• If You Kill Him, You Will Be Just Like Him!: While she was going to kill the Weselton guards attacking her, Hans pleads with Elsa not to do it, telling her "Don't be the monster they fear you are!"
• Imagination-Based Superpower: She can make ice constructs of anything, including clothes woven from ice, a whole palace, and sentient snowmen. Plus, she can use the wind part of her powers to move things around, like when she uses them to move flowers and chlorophyll to decorate her and Anna's outfits in "Frozen Fever."
• Important Hair Accessory: Elsa's crown was a symbol of the responsibility she didn't want, and when she throws it away along with her purple cape and regal gloves, it shows her becoming more free.
• Impossibly Cool Clothes: Her main outfit was woven from ice crystals.
• Impossible Hourglass Figure: Downplayed, as her figure is still unrealistic, but not to the proportions typical of the trope. It becomes more impossible in the sequel. See Fanservice Pack.
• Inexplicably Awesome: In the first movie, her powers go unexplained to focus on the trouble and beauty they cause. Averted come the second movie, where they get a proper origin.
• Ink-Suit Actor: Downplayed example, with the shape of her eyes and mouth and the way her mouth forms words being based on Idina Menzel's natural speaking voice.
• Instant Expert: During the course of "Let it Go", she gains increasing control of her powers, going from creating a few wisps of cold, to constructing a crude snowman, to a fairly large bridge, which becomes crystalline and intricate as she crosses it, to an entire palace made of ice. Also downplayed in that while she knows how to direct it, she doesn't know how to turn it off.
• Internalized Categorism: Thanks to some childhood trauma, she grows up fearing her own powers. This is especially bad for her since her powers can be triggered by her own emotions, so this made them even harder to control.
• It's All My Fault:
  • In Frozen Fever, she thinks she's "ruined" Anna's birthday because her cold interferes with her regimented plan for how she wanted them to spend the day.
  • In Olaf's Frozen Adventure, she says it's her fault she and Anna don't seem to have any Christmastime traditions.^note At least, until she and Anna go through their trunks of childhood possessions and realize that Anna regularly sliding drawings and crafts of Olaf under Elsa's door counts as a tradition.
  • In Frozen II, when she finds out that her parents perished on the journey to find answers about her powers, she says she's responsible for their deaths. She is also clearly overprotective of Anna to the point that she is continually trying to leave her behind to 'protect' her and denying Anna agency in her decisions, all out of the enormous guilt she still carries around for everything that has happened to her sister. She may no longer feel this way upon discovering the truth of their grandfather's treachery.
• Jerkass Has a Point: While she isn't being particularly understanding, she's right you shouldn't marry a man you just met, to which a sentiment Kristoff calls Anna out on it when taking her up to the North Mountain. She and Kristoff were proven right upon the reveal that Hans was Evil All Along.
• Kicking Ass in All Her Finery: Best displayed when the Duke's guards try to kill her. She's in her ice outfit, as in the slinky dress, cape, and heels, and her powers still make her formidable against them.
• Kubrick Stare: She does it in the end of "Let It Go"◊ and while fighting the Duke's guards◊.
• Lady of Black Magic: Ice-oriented variant. Downplayed, as her magic can be destructive but is certainly not evil.
• Letting Her Hair Down: After tossing away the crown, she knocks off her bun in favour of a French braid. In the sequel, she undoes her braid into a ponytail before facing the nokk. And then she undoes the ponytail.
• Lonely Among People: In the sequel. Elsa has a circle of friends, including a sister who loves her more than anyone in the world, but still feels like she doesn't belong because of her powers. Thus, when she starts hearing a strange call from the north that nobody else can hear, she decides to embark on a journey to find the source, wondering if maybe the singer is another being like her.
• Lonely Rich Kid: She's a princess whose parents isolate her for most of her childhood to avoid potential mobs attacking her while she's dealing with Power Incontinence. Even after they're gone, she isolates herself from everyone, including Anna, even though they live in the same house.
• Love Redeems: A downplayed example. She spends much of the first film aloof because she's trying to keep her emotions in check and she can be a bit of jerk when she's stressed, but in the end, the love between her and her sister helps Elsa warm up.
• Mad God: Technically she's a Neurotic Overpowered-Mage, but the results are surprisingly similar: She sets off an eternal winter by having an anxiety attack, and accidentally creates life while in a good mood.
• Madness Mantra: "Don't feel, don't feel, don't feel, don't feel!" She says this after Anna tells her that she caused an endless winter in Arendelle. To make it creepier, the icy room around her turns red and ice spikes jut forth from the walls as she says this, springing from the dread she is unable to suppress.
• Mage Born of Muggles: She was born with powerful ice magic, despite being born into a family of ordinary, mundane human beings. Exactly how that works isn't elaborated upon until the sequel.
• The Makeover: In the first movie, once people learn about her ice magic she leaves Arendelle, she quickly drops her restraint, lets down her hair, and puts on something that embodies that ice magic. In the second movie, she gets another hair and dress makeover upon learning the truth about who she's meant to be. This time, her hair is completely free and her dress is a spectacular white masterpiece showing her role as the magical half of the bridge between magic and humanity.
• Male Gaze: Her chest, legs and hips are shown at many flattering angles.
• Malfunction Malady: In the Frozen Fever short she has a cold that gets progressively worse. Every time she sneezes, she creates a few tiny armless "snowgies". At the end, Olaf and Kristoff herd hundreds of them up to the ice palace. She also sneezes right as she tries to blow on the ceremonial horn which through sheer coincidence happens to launch a massive snowball that knocks Hans into a pile of manure all the way over in the Southern Isles.
• Master of the Mixed Message: Elsa and Anna's strained relationship is not helped by Elsa acting happy to see Anna (such as her coronation party and when Anna first enters her ice palace), which gets Anna's hopes up, only to turn around and abruptly tell her they can't see each other anymore.
• Meaningful Appearance: As a kid, An Ice Person Elsa had a blue headband and generally sticks to cool-tone colors, especially blues and whites, in her clothing as she ages. Elsa's hair is subtly adorned with snowflakes as an adult and is white like ice. She usually appears in an ice dress, and several of her non-ice outfits have snowflakes on them.
• Meaningful Name: "Elsa" is German for "noble", which alludes to her high status as a princess, her ascent as queen of Arendelle, and the fact that deep down she really has a good heart and spirit. Also, the name Elsa comes from Elizabeth, which stems from the Hebrew name Elisheva, which means "God is my oath", reflecting her sense of duty.
• Mike Nelson, Destroyer of Worlds: When fleeing across the fjord. she doesn't realize that behind her the steps across the water are expanding, causing the entire area to freeze solid. The rest of Arendelle freezes over within hours, before she manages to figure out how to actually thaw the ice she creates.
• Milking the Giant Cow: During "Let It Go", she makes a lot of grand gestures, some for Full-Contact Magic, some for kicks. She makes even bigger gestures during "Show Yourself" in the sequel.
• Ms. Fanservice: Fairly Downplayed, but after transforming into her ice dress, she is the most scantily-clad character in the film (relatively speaking). Enhanced somewhat in the sequel, when she lets her hair down, takes off her shoes and goes barefoot in the 2nd half.
• Most Common Superpower: Downplayed. Though it's hard to tell given the animation style, Elsa's figure qualifies as a downplayed version of the Impossible Hourglass Figure (see above). It's easy to see what contributes for Elsa's top half and she does have powers, completing the trope. Also, looking at the sisters side by side, one notices that Elsa's bust is considerably larger than Anna's.
• Mood-Swinger: In her songs.
  • "Let It Go" is emotionally deep and complicated, and during some of its most intricate moments, Elsa wears many highly expressive faces that change within seconds. It almost seems like Elsa has mixed emotions. At points, she has the facial expression of outright anger (for instance, when she casts off the gloves and cape), mixed emotions (when she creates Olaf), and outright happiness (when Elsa conjures up the icy staircase to bridge the chasm). And there are lines like "I'm never going back, the past is in the past!" where Elsa really rapidly changes facial expressions: from anger, to distress, to resolve, to anger, to relief and happiness, and triumph.
  • "Into the Unknown" shows her flipping between fear of making mistakes and losing her beloved family, annoyance with the persistent voice, longing to find out where it would take her, sadness that she won't find that out as she refuses to follow the voice, hope that there might be someone else like her, sorrow and fear at the thought that she is not where she's meant to be, and joy at the thought of following the voice into the unknown.
• Mundane Utility: At the end of the first film, Elsa uses her ice powers to make an ice-skating rink in summer. She also can use magic to create and redesign clothing, and in Frozen Fever, to decorate Anna's birthday cake. For Christmastime, she makes a giant ice Christmas tree and decorations. During the harvest festival in the sequel, she makes some ice toys for the children.
• My God, What Have I Done?: She suffers this a couple of times in the first film:
  • When she and Anna are first playing with snow in the beginning, Elsa hitting her sister accidentally with her ice spell is what first causes her to hate her powers.
  • She's horrified when she learns that her powers have caused an endless winter, and utters the line word-for-word when she sees it firsthand.
• My Greatest Failure: She deeply regrets how she almost killed Anna by accident when they were kids, and still worries it might happen again (in a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy, she does almost kill her again). This is the main reason she refuses to get close to her sister.
• Mystical White Hair: It's implied that Elsa's platinum-blonde hair (a shade of blonde that is a few shades away from perfect white) is somehow connected to her ice magic, since she clearly couldn't have inherited the gene for platinum blonde hair from her parents, and Word of God confirms that Elsa's hair-color is due to her magic. This is evident when she accidentally hits Anna with her ice magic and Anna gains a platinum blonde streak as a result.
• Near-Death Experience: In the first film, she is almost murdered by Hans. In the second, she becomes frozen alive upon venturing into the deepest part of Ahtohallan; she thaws once the dam breaks down.
• Neat Freak: More prominent in A Sister More Like Me, in which Elsa keeps a neat and tidy room. Downplayed in the film itself, in which Anna admits that she always assumed that this was why Elsa wore gloves so much, implying that Elsa isn't one to get messy often.
• Named by the Adaptation: In Andersen's original tale, the Snow Queen character is only referred to by that title. When Disney transformed the story into Frozen, she was given a name.
• Nervous Wreck: Underneath her calm and aloof façade she's this. The creators state that she suffers from depression and anxiety.
• Nice Girl: She is caring, protective, and benevolent. Even before her Character Development, her metaphorical Ice Queen tendencies were really an act to keep her powers in control.
• Not Evil, Just Misunderstood: Acts aloof and secretive, attempting to be an Emotionless Girl, for thirteen years in order to keep her powers as a literal ice queen controlled and hidden, both to avoid the reactions of others and to avoid hurting them, but it makes her look like a metaphorical one. And then she opens up the castle for her coronation day, during which a stressed Elsa lashes out, shooting ice spikes and revealing her powers, in an argument with her neglected sister Anna, who doesn't know why her family's been keeping her and the rest of them so isolated or why Elsa appears to not care about her. She flees as, unbeknownst to her, the kingdom plunges into an Endless Winter — which doesn't help her image. For all the other characters know, it looks as if Elsa cursed the land on purpose. Despite the argument, Anna's the only one to believe that Elsa is not the stereotypical evil witch-queen she appears to be and to realize that she's just scared.
• Not So Above It All: Despite her Emotionless Girl facade early in the first film and generally serious demeanor, she still has a (good-natured) Gadfly moment during the coronation when she manages to rope Anna into dancing with the Duke, who is a horrible dancer. And she proves game enough to dance on the clocktower while high on Oaken's medicine.
• Odd Name Out: All the main characters follow a trend of filling in parts of the original novel's author's name (Hans, Kristoff, Anna, Sven = "Hans Christian Andersen"), except for her.
• Ode to Apathy: The song "Let it Go" is sung by Elsa and about how she doesn't care anymore about people finding out about her powers since now they know. She also mentions not being bothered by the cold.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: The first movie and shorts establish that "the cold never bothered" Elsa due to her powers...so when she starts shivering in Ahtohallan and her breath becomes visible, viewers immediately know something is wrong. As the scene progresses, she ends up freezing solid.
• Parental Marriage Veto: She's the queen^note which gives her the power to legally veto the marriage of a court member and Anna's older sister, so Anna goes to her to ask for her blessing to her engagement with Hans, assuming it's a done deal. She says no because Anna has just met Hans and definitely has known him for no more than twelve hours.
• Passing the Torch: To Anna, when she chooses to stay in the Enchanted Forest and make her the new queen.
• The Perfectionist: She always tries her best to be "the perfect girl" so could keep her powers under control. Even after opening up and learning to use her powers, she still keeps this trait, as seen in Frozen Fever where Elsa is fixated on giving Anna her idea of a "perfect" birthday. She insists on keeping everything according to her party plan, despite Anna herself clearly wanting more to take care of her sister's cold, which Elsa refuses to acknowledge because it's not in her plan. It's not until she nearly falls off a tower she was dancing on that Anna is able to convince her to make accommodations in her plan. The day might not be perfect, but taking care of the cold makes Anna happier than trying to ignore it for the sake of sticking to a plan.
• Person of Mass Construction: She can use ice powers to construct an ice castle for herself filled with giant doors and a spiral staircase, all in the course of a single song!
• Person of Mass Destruction: She accidentally causes a country-wide Endless Winter.
• Physical Goddess: Her powers are impressive and with no addressed limit to them, having the power to plunge all of Arendelle into an Endless Winter in the middle of summer, create giant ice-constructs within minutes and can even create life. In Frozen II, it's revealed that she's half of the fifth spirit (the other four corresponding to the classical four elements), the bridge between magic and humanity.
• Pimped-Out Dress:
  • Her coronation dress has gold trimming on the waist and neckline, and floral motifs on the skirt and bodice.
  • The dress she makes is loaded with small wintry things that make it glitter, and an attached cape with subtle snowflakes all over it.
  • She creates another one with her powers in "Frozen Fever", and a holiday-themed one in Olaf's Frozen Adventure.
• Poor Communication Kills: A lot of Elsa's stoicism stems from corrupting her father's "conceal it, don't feel it, don't let it show" mantra and dropping the "it"s to "conceal, don't feel".
• Power Dyes Your Hair: Elsa has a platinum-blonde hair color not shared with any other members of her family, which is presumably related to her ice powers. Without her powers, she'd look like her mother with similarly brunette hair.
• Power Incontinence:
  • Her powers can manifest involuntarily, such as freezing things she touches. When running away after the coronation ceremony, she accidentally freezes the entire harbor and fjord and creates an Endless Winter without even realizing it. When Anna tells her what she's done and asks her to lift the winter, a horrified Elsa tells her she doesn't know how. The secret turns out to be love.
  • Played for Laughs in "Frozen Fever". Elsa catches a cold and whenever she sneezes, the snowgies appear. In the end, she sneezes into a bukkehorn and accidentally creates a giant snowball that travels across the sea to knock Hans into a cart full of horse manure.
• Power Limiter: Her gloves allow her to touch things without freezing them and keep her from blasting anything around her with ice on accident. The plot is kicked off when she loses one while arguing with Anna. It's implied that their effect is mainly psychological, as later on, hand-covering manacles can't keep her powers at bay, and it repeatedly shown that her powers don't come directly from her hand. Ice can appear from beneath her feet, or not even near any body part, such as when her powers make it snow from the sky all over the kingdom.
• The Power of Love: How she gains control of her powers. "Love will thaw" indeed.
• Pretty in Mink: In Olaf's Frozen Adventure, her holiday dress has an extra festive touch with a white fur collar◊.
• Pride: Her Fatal Flaw in later installments. Elsa's pride manifests in overconfidence in her powers and a reluctance to let Anna and other allies help her. This combined with her tendency to push herself means that Elsa often finds herself in over her head in life-threatening situations — she nearly fell off a clock tower because she wouldn't admit she was sick and she ran off to find Ahtohallan alone and nearly froze to death.
• Prim and Proper Bun: Elsa's coronation appearance is with her hair woven in a French-braided crown twist bun. When she realizes she can cut loose with her emotions, she tears out the braid and allows her hair to hang in relative freedom.
• Proper Lady: After learning to control her powers, she's collected and poised enough to eventually be The High Queen. In A Sister More Like Me, she enjoys keeping things clean and neat, and intellectual pursuits such as geometry.
• Properly Paranoid: Played with in an interesting way, with a hint of Self-Fulfilling Prophecy. As a child, Elsa is told to never reveal her powers in case people attack her for it, and is told this shortly after an accident involving said powers nearly kills her little sister. She ends up refusing any physical contact with her parents as well as Anna, so as not to hurt them. This seems to be justified when she appears publicly for the first time on her coronation day, and, by the end of it, she's set off an eternal winter. Later, Anna gets too close to her during a moment of panic, resulting in her accidentally freezing her sister's heart. However, since her powers are affected by emotion, her fear of what might happen if she gets near someone is actually a big reason things go wrong. Once she overcomes her fears, she gains enough control over her powers to not need to be afraid.
• Psychometry: While she doesn't have to directly touch the water/ice involved, her powers allow her to make ice sculptures depicting past events of environments where she is by using the water there. This is explained in Frozen II as being because "water has memory".
• Psychoactive Powers: When Elsa feels agitated or fearful, her power tends to manifest as an untamed explosion of ice and snow. When she's despairing, everything stops, ending any ongoing storms from her powers and suspending any snowflakes in midair. When she feels good about herself, it becomes much more controlled and even artistic, such as when she creates her own castle out of ice, gives a makeover to the Arendelle castle, and creates a giant Christmas tree from ice.
• Purple Is Powerful: Her coronation cape and the dresses she wears as a teenager are deep purple. In Frozen II, she wears a violet colored nightgown, and she's shown wearing a purple colored dress in daytime. Her bedroom is decorated in shades of lilac and violet, which is more obvious in A Sister More Like Me, in which the parts narrated by her are told in purple font, and in concept art.
• Rage Breaking Point:
  • She does a fairly good job at keeping her powers in check by "concealing, not feeling" her fears... until Anna asks her a few Armor Piercing Questions and causes Elsa to snap, showing her powers.
  • When the Weselton guards try to assassinate her, she tries to reason with them, but is forced to defend herself when she realizes they won't stop. So she goes into Tranquil Fury mode, and on the offensive.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: Becomes this after learning to better deal with her problems in the first movie. When not freaking out, Elsa is a competent ruler, and helps evacuate the kingdom after accidentally awakening the elemental spirits.
• Reluctant Ruler:
  • In Frozen (2013), Princess Elsa is a teenage shut-in who has no choice but to become Queen after her parents' deaths. When the powers are revealed and manifest themselves in dangerous spikes and blasts, her people are naturally terrified. She flees into the mountains, renouncing her throne and preparing to live a life of complete exile. By the end of the film, however, she gains mastery of her powers, thanks in largest part to the love of her younger sister, and the people accept her as their Queen once more.
  • In Frozen II, Elsa, now Queen, says that although she's happier now that she's living openly with her powers mostly under control and with the enthusiastic support of her family, she still feels as if she's "not where I'm meant to be." While initially afraid to acknowledge the mysterious voice she's been hearing, when she begins to think it could lead her to her destiny, she immediately leaves the castle behind to chase after it and never looks back. At the end, she renounces the crown to live with her mother's people in the North, where she has more opportunity to practice her magic than she did while ruling.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: The Blue to Anna's more openly-emotional Red given her stoicism.
• Required Secondary Powers: The cold never bothered her anyway.
  • Not only does she not get cold, even on top of a frozen mountain wearing a dress made out of ice, she doesn't even have visible breath like everyone else in the cold.
  • Subverted in Frozen Fever, where she tries to argue that she doesn't catch colds either, but unfortunately that's not how colds work.
  • She doesn't slip on the smooth ice she makes (except one time, when she got scared.) In the first movie, she runs the stairs of her Ice Palace in high-heeled shoes made of ice. In the sequel, she runs up a platform made out of ice while she's soaking wet.
• Requisite Royal Regalia: She has a Cool Crown, a Staff of Authority and an orb, a Pimped-Out Dress, a pair of High-Class Gloves, and a Pimped-Out Cape at her coronation as queen. She abandons most of it and changes what she does keep (her Pimped-Out Dress and Pimped-Out Cape) after reinventing her image from Queen of Arendelle to the Snow Queen.
• Right for the Wrong Reasons: Elsa is right Anna shouldn't have gotten engaged to Hans right away. But she doesn't have a clue he's evil; she's just afraid anyone getting too close to their family will learn her secret.
• Royal Blood: Exactly What It Says on the Tin. Elsa is the Queen of Arendelle and the plot kicks off at her coronation.
• Safety in Indifference: After an incident in her childhood when she accidentally hit her little sister in the head with her ice powers and is warned about the need for control, Elsa detaches herself from others, convinced that she should "conceal, don't feel" and is better off alone.
• Sexy Slit Dress: The skirt of her ice gown has a slit in it, symbolising her percieved freedom.
• Sheltered Aristocrat: Elsa didn't leave the castle grounds for 13 years and her parents tried to protect her by keeping her isolated for much of her childhood. As a result, she doesn't really know how to handle problems when she grows up.
• Showing Off Your Powers: As a child Elsa uses her powers to delight and entertain Anna. As an adult, she falls back into this by creating an ice palace during her song "Let It Go" (although this is only showing off to herself).
• Sibling Yin-Yang: Elsa is calm, reserved, and introverted while Anna is energetic, outspoken, and extroverted. This is especially evident in "For The First Time In Forever" where Anna bounces around inside and outside the castle joyously looking forward to the coronation while an anxious, collected Elsa nervously sings about it in her room, and even more so in the book "A Sister More Like Me": Anna is messy and loves picnics and physical activities while Elsa is tidy and shown to enjoy tea parties and quiet activities.
• Significant Birth Date: It's All There in the Manual, but according to scriptwriter/codirector Jennifer Lee, she was born on the winter solstice.
• Significant Wardrobe Shift: In the middle of her song "Let It Go", Elsa magically changes her clothes from stately royal robes to a slinky gown, symbolizing her decision to stop hiding her powers and letting others determine how she will live her life.
• Simple, yet Opulent:
  • Her coronation dress has very few decorations, but is still made of high-quality materials, and she wears a simple but grand purple cape. Purple is such a "royal" colour because the dye was made of sea snails, and according to The Other Wiki, twelve thousand snails yield no more than 1.4 g of pure dye, enough to colour only the trim of a single garment. Elsa's cape is at least 3 meters long.
  • Her ice dress is not complicated, but it shows just how beautiful and versatile her magic is.
• Solitary Sorceress: Elsa runs off to the mountains to live by herself after exposing her powers.
• Squishy Wizard: Downplayed. God-like ice powers, but human-like constitution. She's knocked out by a falling chandelier.
• The Stoic: Her attempt to shut down her Emotional Powers leads to her often trying to repress her emotions.
• Strong Family Resemblance: Elsa and her sister look similar to their mother, save for subtle differences in the shapes of their eyes, nose, chin, etc.
• Sugar-and-Ice Personality: She's reserved and tries to control her emotions, but she genuinely cares for her sister and the people of Arendelle. She reacts with "What have I done?" when she sees the frozen fjord. In this case, the "ice" part mostly results from her self-discipline, but she noticeably lightens up after she's ultimately able to control her powers and undo the Endless Winter.
• Supermodel Strut: During Let It Go, shortly after she generates her snow dress, she's seen doing an assertive strut while swaying her legs and hips, denoting her newfound confidence. The sequel reveals that this specific strut has become linked with her, to the point where how Olaf (successfully) demonstrates her in a game of charades. Amusingly, none of the players were there for L"et It Go" — suggesting she sometimes walks like this in her everyday life now, too.
• Survival Mantra: "Conceal, don't feel." She casts this off later.
• Sweet Tooth: It runs in the family: just like her sister, Elsa loves chocolate. In A Frozen Heart, they inherit this from their mother Iduna, and in their childhood, the sisters used to sneak into the kitchen while the cook was baking and dip their fingers in bowls of melted chocolate; at the end of the book, after their reunion, they do it again.
• Swiss-Army Superpower: Her ice magic covers a wide range of possibilities, from dress-making to the creation of sentient life, so long as it's in snow form.
• Symbol Motif Clothing: Her coronation dress has the crocus of Arendelle on it, while her ice dress has snowflakes all over the cape. Her holiday dress in Olaf's Frozen Adventure has an even larger snowflake motif.
• Take Care of the Kids: When Elsa escapes the castle, she tells Hans to take care of Anna.
• Thermal Dissident: Elsa, who has ice superpowers, remarks as such. She seems immune to hypothermia, wearing a single-layer dress in a blizzard without any problem.
  Elsa: The cold never bothered me anyway.
• Tomboy and Girly Girl: The Girly Girl to Anna's Tomboy. Elsa is more reserved and graceful and strives to be a "perfect girl" as a way to control her emotions and her ice powers. She manages to be very queenly even after she runs away. She is shown to be more of a Proper Lady through the series, even as a free-spirited nature guardian. By contrast, Anna is a feisty Spirited Young Lady who stuffs her face with food, punches out a prince, rescues her sister repeatedly, acts awkwardly, is Not a Morning Person with the hairstyle and drool to match, and rides a bicycle indoors.
• Thrill Seeker: As revealed "In Into the Unknown" partially prompted by her powers, Elsa is revealed to want to seek out adventure and magic. This is a marked contrast to Anna, who takes strength and joy in being grounded and surrounded by her friends and family.
• Took a Level in Badass:
  • Elsa has a pretty good control of her powers as a child, and can cover a room in snow. She then spends some years repressing them, and when she finally lets go again when she's older, she ends up — not just accidentally, but unknowingly — freezing the entire kingdom and creating sentient life.
  • She takes another one by the time of the second movie, this time in control. While her attempts at offense in the first movie were somewhat clumsy and panicked, now her aim is perfect, she utilizes other abilities beyond simple hand blasts, and she's capable of clever strategic thinking. She's also braver and more tenacious than she was before, more willing to face her problems.
    • And by the end of the second movie, she's gotten another boost in power, to the point where she froze the entire Dark Sea.
• Took a Level in Cheerfulness: Elsa grew up highly reserved, because she was afraid being emotional would cause her ice powers to flare. The first time she opens up is when she sings her iconic "Let It Go" solo. She's still very anxious in "For The First Time In Forever (Reprise)", but at the end seems to have opened up more thanks to The Power of Love, and has gained greater control over her ice powers.
• Took a Level in Kindness: After letting go, she uses the Power of Love to end the eternal winter, creates a small storm over Olaf so he'll never melt, makes Kristoff the official Ice Master and Deliverer, creates an ice skating rink open to the public, and, in the final scene, she helps Anna learn how to ice skate.
• Trademark Favorite Food: Elsa has a liking towards chocolate.
• Tragic Ice Character: After accidentally striking her sister with her ice powers, she is forced to hide them for most of her life out of fear that she would be seen as a monster. This fear prevents her from properly controlling them. When she loses her temper and uses her powers in public, revealing them, she becomes so panicked that she accidentally freezes the entire kingdom and runs away to live in isolation. "Let It Go" connects both her isolation and later rebirth with her ice powers.
  The snow glows white on the mountain tonight
  Not a footprint to be seen.
  A kingdom of isolation,
  And it looks like I'm the queen.
• Trauma Conga Line: Elsa goes through one traumatic experience after another:
  • She accidentally knocks out her little sister with her ice powers, which makes her Afraid of Their Own Strength.
  • When the trolls try to warn her how important it is that she learn control and that "fear will be your enemy," they show a vision of a mob to illustrate the danger, which makes her fear for her life.
  • Then her father tries to protect her from such a fate by locking her up in the castle.
  • Then her parents are lost at sea.
  • She's crowned queen but her powers are exposed to the entire kingdom, so she runs away and accidentally freezes Arendelle in the process.
  • She's tricked by Hans into thinking that Anna is dead (and because of her, too!).
  • She's heartbroken when Anna sacrifices herself to save her and she sees her frozen body. Thankfully, her younger sister comes back to her and they both reunite and reconnect, finally ending the line.
• Troubled, but Cute: She's shown to be rather aloof and brooding.
• True Blue Femininity: With a couple of exceptions, almost every outfit Elsa wears is mostly made of blue, up to and including non-fabric items she wears (like the headbands she wears in her single-digit years). Her coronation cape is purple, but it's still over a mostly blue/cyan dress. This continues in the holiday special Olaf's Frozen Adventure, where her Happy Holidays Dress is mostly dark blue. Her main outfit in Frozen II is a light blue ensemble.
• Truly Single Parent: Is an accidental one of the magical variety to snowlems Olaf and Marshmallow, since she created them with her magic, and she does seem to regard Olaf at least with some kind of maternal affection. Furthermore, in "Frozen Fever" Olaf calls the small snowmen that Elsa's cold creates his "little brothers", suggesting that he does view Elsa as a parent and other (living) snow creations as his siblings.
• Unskilled, but Strong: Her main problem for most of the first movie. She can freeze hearts and make a harsh winter in the middle of summer, and she does all that by accident, because she has little control over her powers. This quality carries over into the sequel, albeit downplayed and this time less as a problem and more as strength. Although she shows some skill when she crafts a bridle for the Nokk during their fight and her aim with her powers has improved since the first film, Elsa goes through obstacles mainly by blasting them with her power. This is how she deals with the wind spirit, and the main way she deals with the fire and water ones.
• Unstable Powered Woman: The film plays with the trope. Elsa had repressed her ice powers since childhood, so they are an additional stressor when she is crowned queen. Not knowing how to handle them in public, she keeps the castle closed off from the rest of the world until her coronation day. When she reveals her powers to the court while arguing with her sister, who has had the powers hidden from her, over Elsa's decision to close off the castle again, she is branded a monster and runs away to the wilderness. In doing so, she embraces her powers but inadvertently plunges Arendelle into an Endless Winter for which she is demonized. However, thanks to The Power of Love and The Power of Family, she is able to rein in her powers and comfortably settle into the role of a Benevolent Mage Ruler by the film's end. The movie also gives reasons for her difficulty handling the situation besides her natural character; her parents also didn't know how to handle it and started the isolationist strategy in an attempt to protect her.
• Used to Be More Social: Before the accident with Anna, Elsa was perfectly willing to play around with her sister and happily participated in the Yule Bell ceremony every Christmas.
• Vapor Wear: Implied, as her stockings disappear after she forms her ice dress.
• Villain Song: Her big song "Let It Go", during which she builds her ice kingdom after running away and gleefully allows herself to express her emotions and show off her powers, is a subversion. It was initially written as a Villain Song^note Ironically, it ended up being what drove the writers to change her into a Classical Anti-Hero Deuteragonist instead., and sounds like one, with lines like "No right, no wrong, no rules for me" and "The cold never bothered me anyway" (sung in the middle of Elsa unleashing her ice magic, enveloping the kingdom in an Endless Winter in the middle of July). But it's revealed later that the Endless Winter part is actually an accident — Elsa didn't even realize her powers went that far.
• Voice for the Voiceless: When Elsa and Anna first build Olaf as children, Elsa provides a funny voice for the inanimate snowman Olaf ("Hi, I'm Olaf and I love warm hugs!") to make Anna laugh.
• Walking Wasteland: Zigzagged Trope. Elsa's powers aren't always dangerous, especially when she manages to control them, but when she doesn't, the ground and the fjord sometimes turn to ice beneath her feet, and she unwittingly freezes some of the things she touches. At its height, she even accidentally sends the entire kingdom into a harsh winter. She becomes reclusive because of it, wearing gloves constantly to prevent accidents, afraid of the destruction she can cause if not careful and how people will react to it. By the end of the movie, she gains better control over her magic, and is even able to use them constructively.
• "Well Done, Daughter!" Girl: Implied during "For the First Time In Forever", by the way she looks up at the painting of her father while she is mentally preparing herself for her coronation.
• We Used to Be Friends: She and Anna were close as children. Then, the accident happens, and their parents decide it's best to keep Elsa's powers secret while she's still learning control and isolate her in order to do so, and Elsa grows up to be reclusive.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Anna calls her out on her hypocrisy in mocking Anna's ideas about love when the equally-isolated Elsa doesn't have any more knowledge about it than her.
• When the Planets Align: The circumstances of Elsa's birth, according to Jennifer Lee. A child is born with ice magic "when Saturn is in this alignment with such-and-such on the thousandth year". It was meant to be explained in the film but was left out due to in part to raising too many more questions about the rules of magic. However, this was subjected to a Retcon in the sequel, where her powers are instead a gift of the elemental spirits, because as one of the two daughters of a Northuldran and Arendellian who fell in love, Elsa is one half of the bridge between magic and humanity along with her sister.
• Willfully Weak: After nearly killing Anna with her powers, she spends a good chunk of her life doing everything she can to keep her powers in check.
• Winter Royal Lady: A regal Ice Person queen often dressed in blue, especially light blue.
• Youthful Freckles: They're not as prominent on Elsa as they are on Anna (which can be partially explained as Elsa is a bit older than Anna), but they are still there.

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