Casting divas to give chills in 41 languages
That’s the challenge with taking ‘Frozen’ around the world
The first time Rick Dempsey heard Idina Menzel sing “Let It Go,” the ice queen empowerment anthem in the Walt Disney Animation movie “Frozen,” he knew he had a serious problem on his hands.
“How are we going to do that in 41 languages?” wondered Dempsey, with the title of senior vice president of creative for Disney Character Voices International. It’s his job to internationalize Disney films — matching voice actors in foreign territories to performances in the English-language version of a movie and supervising the translations.
As the film business has become an increasingly global one, Dempsey’s job has become ever more complex, with languages in emerging territories added every year. The newest additions include Bengali, Malay and Vietnamese.
“Frozen,” which surpassed “The Lion King” to become Walt Disney Animation Studios’ highest-grossing film (not adjusting for inf lation), is an outsized hit both domestically and internationally. So far the fairy tale has made $812 mil- lion worldwide, 57% of that outside North America, and it has yet to roll out in key territories such as China and Japan. Among non-English-speaking countries, the movie has performed best in Germany, France and Russia.
This weekend Disney is releasing a singalong version of the film in 2,000 U.S. theaters, where fans can participate karaoke-style, and the studio is working on bringing that treatment abroad as well, according to Dave Hollis, executive vice president of distribution.
The studio has tweaked its sales pitch in different countries. In parts of Europe, where the movie’s lineage as a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale helps entice an audience, “Frozen” is called “The Snow Queen.” A Russian poster features a snowman feeding his carrot nose to a reindeer, while a Japanese version shows the film’s male romantic lead holding a lantern beside its heroine.
“There’s some local nuance in every market,” Hollis said. “There’s a far more emotional sell
‘Idina has one of the best voices, period, in terms of her smooth tone, the warmth when she hits the lower end.... It was always a challenge to find her match.’
— Rick Dempsey, senior vice president of creative, Disney Character Voices International
in a country like Japan … and Russia responds well to slapstick humor.”
The music in the movie, which is directed by Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee, is at the core of its critical and box-office success. With two Oscar nominations — for animated feature and for original song for “Let It Go” by composers Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez — “Frozen” has yielded a chart-topping soundtrack and thousands of fan-made singing videos on YouTube.
For Dempsey, “Frozen’s” music posed a special challenge: He had to mimic the vocal tone and texture of Menzel, a Tony Award-winning soprano famous for her penetrating pipes.
“Idina has one of the best voices, period, in terms of her smooth tone, the warmth when she hits the lower end,” Dempsey said. “In certain territories — Taiwan, Cantonese — the voice might want to be thin because that’s part of the culture. It was always a challenge to find her match.”
From his base in Burbank, Dempsey enlisted some women who are divas in their own countries, including Spanish pop singer Gisela, who voices the Castilian and Catalan versions, Naples, Italy-born singer and actress Serena Autieri, Netherlands musical theater star Willemijn Verkaik, actress and pop singer Takako Matsu, Mexican actress and singer Carmen Sarahi, Malaysian reality TV star Marsha Milan Londoh and Moscow jazz vocalist Anna Buturlina.
“We’re trying to match the words and the lips — the m’s, b’s and p’s,” Dempsey said. “Some languages carry a little more of a staccato nature, others are more f luid and legato.”
Translating the language, too, was a hurdle, with many of the jokes in the songs dependent upon puns and colloquialisms. Dempsey sent out a continuity guide to the approximately 80 translators and lyricists working on the movie, advising them on the creative intent of the filmmakers. “Sometimes you just have to blow past the joke, but we really try to preserve the puns,” he said.
In the case of the song “Fixer Upper,” in which a bunch of trolls sing about a rough-hewn character’s romantic potential, he advised the translators to “come up with a term that relates to something you could technically fix up, like a house or old car.”
In the film, Germany’s version of “Fixer Upper” translates as “Aufpolieren” (Revamp), Brazil’s is “Reparos” (Repair) and Spain’s is “Tiene Que Mejorar un Poco” (He Only Needs to Improve a Little).
Sometimes localizing a Disney movie requires an even more meaningful adjustment. On the 2012 film “Wreck-it Ralph,” in which Sarah Silverman voiced an occasionally rude 9-year-old video game character named Vanellope von Schweetz, the filmmakers softened the Japanese version of the character, so as not to offend moviegoers in a country with a culture of respect for elders.
The work of taking a blockbuster global wasn’t always so complex. While “Frozen” is currently available in 41 languages, Dempsey recalls casting for about 15 languages on “The Lion King” in 1994. And sometimes, the English-language talent is able to pitch in; on the 1999 movie “Tarzan,” Dempsey recorded Phil Collins himself singing the soundtrack in French, Italian, German and Spanish.