For your reading pleasure, please enjoy this preview with Frozen II director Chris Buck from Issue 40 of Backstory.
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Surprise might not be the right word to describe the beautifully rich and oftentimes dark Frozen 2 given the filmmaking talent behind it, but the fact that Frozen’s sequel outpaces the original in almost every way can at least be termed a mild revelation. The massive success of the first film—Disney’s 2013 animated hit turned studio franchise tentpole—caught the studio so off guard that when the demand for a sequel couldn’t be met right away, Disney Animation commissioned a theatrical short film from Frozen co-directors Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee, as well as original songwriters Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez, a mere six months after that film’s release. While they were hard at work, the movie’s success only seemed to grow. Audiences around the world became engrossed in the journey of sisters Anna and Elsa, and the film scored two Oscars for Best Animated Film and Best Song for the can’t-get-it-out-of-your-head “Let It Go.” Since Buck and Lee were busy making that short, a lot of international post-release press appearances were tasked to producer Peter Del Vecho. As he went country to country promoting the film, he got asked the same thing over and over: Where did Elsa get her powers?
Finding the right story for a sequel or prequel is a challenge many filmmakers have faced and often failed. But there was no question there would be a next installment of Frozen. The only question was what would the plot be. So Del Vecho asked Buck and Lee what people had been asking him, and they, too, began pondering where Elsa had gotten her mysterious ice magic, as the topic wasn’t covered or even broached in the original film. “Jen and I started to question the same thing, so we put our heads together and realized there is more story to tell and that really their story had just begun,” Buck says. Helping to inspire the filmmakers were their own children, who were similar in age to Elsa and her younger sister, Anna. “My boys had just graduated college, and Jen’s daughter was getting older as well. Our children were figuring out what they were going to do with the rest of their lives or where they fit in this world, and that’s what Anna and Elsa were exploring as well. They’re still very young, so there’s a lot of story to play with. We were also working on the short at the time, and doing that made us realize how much we missed these characters.”
If you’re one of the few who haven’t seen box-office titan Frozen 2, now would be the time to turn back, as Buck is finally talking about the intricacies of the plot the filmmaking team conceived. Part of the reason the first film became what it did was the beautiful relationship between the two sisters and the refusal of Anna (voiced by Kristen Bell) to give up on Elsa (Idina Menzel), whom others first saw as a monster. The sisters’ bond is also front and center in the sequel, and though their unwavering mutual love and support doesn’t change in the sequel, the filmmakers found ways to keep them apart for the back half of the film as they each go on important solo journeys. Elsa is on a discovery to fully understand where she comes from and why she has been gifted her magic. This comes to a head early in the film in the form of “Into the Unknown,” the movie’s beautiful showcase song. In the glorious sequence, Elsa is awoken by a literal siren call only she can hear. The song that follows begins as she wrestles with the decision to follow the voice or not and ends with her confession—to herself and the audience—that she knows being the queen of Arendelle isn’t what she’s supposed to be doing.
The song is powerful enough to stand on its own, but the visuals in the second half may be Buck and Lee’s high point as directors. At one point in the tune, Elsa enters a dreamlike landscape where she is surrounded by nothing but black yet dancing all around her are icy figures and shapes. Gorgeously animated, it calls to mind Disney’s hand-drawn opus Fantasia. “Our original idea for the sequence started as a dream Elsa was having, and as it started Anna was able to see what [her sister] was dreaming in the snow that formed around her head,” Buck says. “That wasn’t working the way we wanted, but the song was stunning and we wanted to be able to walk through Elsa’s dream images. So what would that be like? This voice is calling her and she’s using her powers to show how she’s connecting with her memories and all that. Kudos go to our art department because we give them challenges all the time and they always go way beyond whatever we can draw. It’s a stunning sequence because of them.”
For Anna’s story, the filmmakers were aided by an unusual method they undertook at the beginning of the film. “When we first started thinking about a sequel, we took online personality tests as Anna and Elsa that helped give us an overall view for who they are,” Buck says. “Elsa came out ‘protector’ and Anna came out ‘leader’—which is exactly how we saw them. All of Anna’s personality traits have wonderful leadership skills to them. She’s a people person. She invests in people. She’ll rally people to work together. She’s a great leader, and that got us excited.” The method guided Buck and Lee to their ultimate destination for Anna only a month into the process, despite the fact that the endings for animated films can sometimes take up to two years to map out. In the end, Elsa relinquishes her crown and makes Anna the new queen of Arendelle. “We always had the ending in our mind. Elsa would find where she needs to be, and Anna becomes the leader. She’s the queen, and Elsa’s finally free. To me, that felt right for both of them.”
Though both Frozen and Frozen 2 are clearly Anna and Elsa films, there’s plenty of space for supporting characters Olaf (Josh Gad) and Kristoff (Jonathan Groff). In the sequel, Kristoff especially gets a richer arc than in the first film. He tries to propose to Anna throughout the film but is increasingly wondering where he fits into her Elsa-centric world. This is encapsulated in one of the film’s high points, the song “Lost in the Woods,” where he laments that Anna has left him behind to chase after her sister. Before the song begins, Kristoff imagines his reindeer Sven telling him to wear his emotions on his sleeve when trying to explain his feelings to Anna. What results is an pivotal character moment for Kristoff, yet Buck and Lee purposefully stage it like a cheesy 1980s music video, complete with slow motion and split screens. The tune by Anderson-Lopez and Lopez matches the images with hair-metal-band guitar solos and background vocals, and the out-of-character moment is one of the film’s biggest laughs. “We wanted to give Kristoff a song, and Jonathan Groff is such an amazing singer so we had to find a place for it,” Buck says of the track’s genesis. “We had to think about a way for Sven to convince him to sing about these feelings. How does this mountain man express himself—what’s the best type of song to do that? So we had him go out there with this classic ’80s power ballad.” It’s yet another bold choice that pays off for the filmmakers, as what could have strayed too far into parody never does. They stage it in a way that finds the humor in the moment but stays genuine. “It was a challenge to get the tone right. You really do feel for the guy. We tried to have fun with it but still have it be sincere.”
In early drafts of Frozen 2, Buck and Lee had Anna and Kristoff temporarily breaking up in act two. While that story point stayed in for quite some time, they ultimately deemed it distracting, not lessened by the fact that no one thought the pair could stay broken up for the duration of the film. More than that, though, it diminished the attention on the central relationship of the film. “We call it the power of Anna and Elsa,” Buck says. “Any time the story strays from them for too long and the story becomes about something else and not Anna and Elsa’s relationship, it just doesn’t feel right. So we always go back to the core, which is Anna and Elsa. We love the Anna-and-Kristoff relationship, but it started to take over too much. This is Anna and Elsa’s story.”
Perhaps no sequence in the film is as showstopping as “Show Yourself,” the moment where Elsa discovers not only who had been calling her but why she was chosen to be gifted with such immense powers. During the song, Elsa discovers the siren beckoning her was the spirit of her own mother, Iduna (Evan Rachel Wood). This was the sequence that underwent the most changes, so much so it was the final thing animated for the film even though a draft of the sequence was done before Anderson-Lopez and Lopez wrote the song. “We knew some key story points for the sequence, but a lot of it was working it out in real time,” Buck says. “What would she see? We wanted to play with a bunch of ideas to get them inspired.” The songwriters then penned a version that lasted upwards of six minutes, but all agreed it just wasn’t working. Once the filmmakers decided it would be Iduna calling Elsa, the songwriters went back to the drawing board, and now the end of the tune features a reprise of “All Is Found,” the lullaby Iduna sings to a young Anna and Elsa that opens the film. It gives the moment a powerful coda. “All these things feel like they should have been easy, but you try all these other avenues. We even tried a reprise of ‘Let It Go’ in that moment instead of the lullaby. As much as we loved that idea, it wasn’t as powerful as the mother singing. It took a while to get there.”
For an animated film directed at children, Frozen 2’s plot veers into the dark toward its conclusion, a bold and wonderful choice for the franchise, even if the story mechanics are a bit convoluted. After Elsa follows the siren call to the mythical island of Ahtohallan, she discovers a terrible truth about her and Anna’s family: Their grandfather, the former king of Arendelle, had betrayed his allies, a woodsfolk known as the Northuldra. It was during this conflict that Anna and Elsa’s father—then a young boy—was knocked unconscious and rescued from a fire by a Northuldra girl, who would later become their mother. The revelation that their grandfather was responsible for this decades-long conflict shocks the girls and pushes them to make things right by the Northuldra. It also brings up deeper topics like reparations, usually not topics you find in a Disney film. But Buck was never afraid to wade into deeper waters. “I grew up on the Disney classics, as we all did, and Pinocchio is one of my favorite films,” he says. “There are a lot of dark elements to that one. But Walt was wonderful about being able to balance the darker elements, which you need for a very rich story, with the lighter and fun stuff. We felt we had to go to places that might push our audience a bit. I’m always amazed by the younger audiences. We never talk down to them, and they always rise up. There’s something about watching these films. They can go to scary places, but when you survive it you feel stronger. That’s how I was when I saw what Pinocchio went through. I put myself in his shoes, and as a young kid I thought, If he can survive the belly of a whale, I can get through stuff that’s going on at school.”
Those past films and his work on the studio’s current legacy will forever be personal for Buck. He began working as an animator at Disney in 1978, learning under Eric Larson, one of the studio’s famed Nine Old Men. Though he left the company to direct 2007’s Oscar-nominated Surf’s Up for Sony Animation, he was lured back the following year. And now, not only has his creative partner Lee been named chief creative officer of Walt Disney Animation Studios, but Buck confirms he’s working on a new original film there. “I’m not going anywhere,” he says of Disney. “Eric handed down [the legacy of] Walt’s storytelling and Walt’s sense of entertainment to my generation. It’s quite a challenge to try and live up to that, but my goal is to carry that torch.”
If you enjoy what you’ve read – we hope you’ll join us to read the rest of the article by buying Issue 40 as a single issue or subscribing to Backstory Magazine!
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