Designing clothes for Anna and Elsa
Costume design in animated features has reached levels of artistry never seen before
Fans of Frozen have a lot of questions about the film’s long-awaited sequel, due this month. What happened to Anna and Elsa’s parents? Will Elsa have a girlfriend? And among the most pressing, particularly if you’re one of the millions with Frozen princess dresses hanging in your closet: What will Anna and Elsa be wearing this season?
Costume design in animated features has reached levels of artistry never seen before, thanks in large part to advances in CGI that have made previously impossible fashions possible. Back in the glory days of hand-drawn animation, every outfit, and every bead and button on it, had to be hand-painted, frame by agonising frame, which meant that Cinderella’s dress from 1950, say, while lovely, is remarkably unadorned. Today, computers can do in moments what used to take months, allowing animated clothing to become ever more detailed and intricate. And as the garments have evolved, the relatively obscure field of costume design in animation has become increasingly prominent — and celebrated.
In 2016, Deborah Cook was nominated for a Costume Designers Guild Award for the tiny Edo-period looks she created for Laika’s stop-motion Kubo
And The Two Strings, the first time such work was up for that honour. An entire team of costume, tailoring and “groom” artists was assembled for the 2018 Pixar sequel Incredibles 2, which put the spotlight on animated costume design with midcentury fashions and futuristic, superhero-ready fabrics (fittingly, because a bespectacled fashion designer, Edna Mode, is one of the main characters). And in academia, scholars like Maarit Kalmakurki are writing about the importance and expanding roles of costume designers in the animation industry.
This year, California Institute of the Arts, still the biggest source of toon talent in Hollywood, began offering “Costume Design In Animation”, a course meant to introduce this niche to fashion and animation majors alike. Among the biggest questions that CalArts instructor Camille Benda gets about her class: Why do you need costume designers in the first place when there isn’t any physical clothing?
“People tend to think of costume design in terms of an end product,” she said. “It’s a garment. But costume designers think of costume as part of the character that they’re creating, so it’s the hair, the costume, the props, the make-up, the way they move, whether these costumes and props are ever physically made or not.”
On a recent morning, visual development artists Brittney Lee and Griselda Sastrawinata-Lemay were at the Walt Disney Animation Studios building in Burbank, discussing their work on Frozen 2 (opening in Thailand on Thursday). In the film, the sisters embark on a grand adventure far from Arendelle, searching for answers about the origins of Elsa’s magical powers. The film’s creative team travelled to Norway, Finland and Iceland for design ideas and studied everything from haute couture runway shows and 1940s fashion to traditional Norwegian satchels and photos of “anything that feels crystalline”, Lee said, adding: “We try to be as thorough with detail as possible, down to the direction of the embroidery thread.”
There was a lot for Lee and Sastrawinata-Lemay to consider. The sisters are now three years older, for one, and that meant losing, after much debate, Anna’s signature braids, which skewed girlish. “We tried different braids, we tried a French braid, but she still looked too young, no matter what,” Sastrawinata-Lemay said. “Then we thought, oh, let’s put her hair down, and instantly she looked age-appropriate.”
Anna and Elsa also needed practical travel outfits that would allow them to move (and leap and swim), not the long gowns of the first film. But raising hemlines turned out to be anything but simple.
“Elsa always has been floor-length everything, so with her iconic capes and long trains, her shape line is a very large, elegant triangle,” Lee said. “When we lose that length, it starts to not feel like her anymore.”
And this time around, the action takes place in the fall, which means fall fashions. (The original was set in a balmy summer, before Elsa froze everything.) For Anna, they created a deep purple travel cloak festooned with symbols of both harvest time (wheat) and Arendelle (the crocus, the kingdom’s national symbol). “Anna is all about Arendelle,” Sastrawinata-Lemay said.
Elsa, however, proved trickier. When Lee tried to come up with travel clothes for her that were appropriately autumn, something didn’t feel right. A long jacket in colours “that skewed on the cool side”, with rich teals and purples and reds, felt like fall but didn’t evoke Elsa, the Snow Queen. In short order, her signature white and pale blue hues were back. “Elsa’s a little bit more limited in what works for her,” Lee said.
Even so, there are several new elements in Elsa’s wardrobe, including a new snowflake design, a pattern that’s everywhere from Elsa’s travel cape to the film’s poster — and, for the first time, pants.
For Anna, there’s a new “obi belt”, a hint that maybe the sisters have entertained visitors from Japan. “I’d like to think that there have been people from many parts of the world who have come to Arendelle, and Anna has greeted them and has been influenced by these world cultures,” said Michael Giaimo, art director on both Frozen films. “It was a way of showing her expansiveness, of her becoming more aware of the world outside Arendelle.”
Frozen is among the movies discussed in Benda’s CalArts course, alongside stop-motion titles like The Boxtrolls and Coraline, and lesser-known features like the French Kirikou And The
Sorceress (1998). In the class, costume design majors pair up with animation students to create characters.
“We have costume designers interested in branching out, outside of the theatre,” she said. “And on the animation side, they really want to learn about the physical clothing: how seams are constructed, why people behave the way they do in their clothes.”
As for the Costume Designers Guild Awards, recognition for animated films comes down to something as simple as a job title. “Our rules are very specific,” said the guild’s president, Salvador Perez. “You have to have a costume designer on your show to be nominated. And for the longest time, animation has called them character designers, not costume designers.”
In the case of Kubo, Perez said, “the woman who designed that was a true costume designer and fought to get the credit as a costume designer”.
Perez noted that many of his guild’s members are already working in animation and said he thought it was just a matter of time before an animated film wins an award from his organisation. “Look at the costumes in Frozen,” he said. “They are so detailed, the trim on their dresses, the sparkle. All of that is costume design.”
Lee has seen attitudes toward costume design in animation change just in the short time since she worked on the original Frozen film. “On the first movie, when I told people that I was working on Frozen, nobody knew what
Frozen was,” she said.
And now? “Right after Frozen, people started emailing, ‘How do you get that specific job? I want your job.’”
We try to be as thorough with detail as possible, down to the direction of the embroidery thread