Disney just couldn’t hold back a sequel
Tomatoes. A hundred days later it had grossed more than a billion dollars, becoming both the highestgrossing animated film of all time and the touchstone for a generation.
Its titanic success took everyone by surprise, including Disney. The two Academy awards were almost a given. What wasn’t predicted were the four-hour-plus theme park queues for the hastily opened Frozen shows. Who could have known Elsa dolls would be the toy that Christmas, with Disney switching manufacturer from Mattel to Hasbro, to try to meet demand? Or that what felt like every six-yearold-and-under birthday party for the next three years would have a Frozen theme? Or that Elsa would enter the top 100 baby names for the first time?
In 2014, Disney’s profits surged by 22 per cent, primarily due to Frozen, which broke digital download records on release and became the highest-selling Blu-ray of all time in the US. And it wasn’t a case of rapid thaw. The lust for Frozen merchandise remains remarkably constant. The billion-dollar question to all this being: why?
This week Disney has attempted to rebottle that formula with Frozen 2. Is it possible? Perhaps not, given that the impact of Frozen lay in it being, despite first appearances, a game-changer. It was the first film in Disney’s history to be co-directed by a woman – Jennifer Lee along with Chris Buck. And Frozen’s monster box office blasted a trail for other women, like Wonder Woman director Patty Jenkins, to be not only ‘trusted’ with studio blockbusters but to not have their creative visions shoved into some ‘only for girls’ corner. Audiences would instead flock to them in their millions.
As Lee told Metro in 2013, one of her main goals with Frozen was disproving the industry wisdom that ‘girls will watch boys’ films, but boys won’t watch girls’ films’.
‘We made female characters that are as genuine and relatable to girls and women as to boys and men because they are just real people,’ Lee said. ‘They are not on a pedestal and they don’t have a romantic notion of life that we don’t understand.’
Speaking of which, Frozen also radically upends Disney’s traditional ‘happy ever after’ formula. Princess Anna, for example, is scoffed at for her Cinderella-like belief that you should marry a prince you’ve met once at a ball.
And although Frozen predates #MeToo, it undoubtedly caught that challenge to historical Hollywood bad behaviour. Kristen Bell, who voices Anna, for example, has revealed she had problems with Snow White, telling her own daughters, ‘Don’t you think it’s weird that the prince kisses [a sleeping] Snow White without her permission?’ In Frozen the saving act of ‘true love’ is found not in a kiss from the male lead but with Anna’s own sister. That prizing of family over romantic love has been echoed in Disney movies ever since, from Moana to Maleficent.
The real secret weapon of Frozen, though, is anthem Let It Go, written by Broadway couple Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez. In first drafts Elsa was a straight-out one-dimensional baddie. After hearing Let It Go, Jennifer Lee reinterpreted Elsa as a mythically flawed character who meant well but caused harm due to magical powers she can’t quite control.
Audiences remain fascinated by Elsa. She’s become an LGBT+ icon, a queen told to ‘conceal, don’t feel’, to keep her ‘safe’. Her inner struggles strike a chord with toddlers and teenagers alike and she remains the most fascinatingly complex Disney princess ever invented.
To create Frozen, Lee and Buck broke the mould – but built a new one, one that changed the way movies are made and who they are made by and for. For that lightning to strike twice is almost impossible within the same franchise. You can only pray Frozen’s multi-billiondollar success will allow a next wave of radical new voices to break through and push things forward, not just to push ‘repeat’. After all, as Elsa herself sings, ‘I’m never going back, the past is in the past.’
Frozen also radically upends the traditional ‘happy ever after’ formula
Frozen 2 is in cinemas on Friday