Nov 16, 2019

Making "Frozen2": How the Disney team approached the story, design, and animation

Disney's Frozen (2013) was a fairy tale with a fairy-tale ending: estranged sisters Elsa and Anna are reunited, and everything wraps up nicely. But in the wake of the movie's titanic success - it remains the second-highest-grossing animated film of all time - the filmmakers found that they couldn't let the characters go.

Cue this sequel, which will hit theaters next Friday, November 22. Where the original film played as an intimate coming-of-age character study, Frozen 2 is shaping up as a darker, more action-oriented story, focused on asking how Elsa acquired her magic powers.

Ahead of the sequel's release, we read a wide range of interviews with the team that made it, and culled their most insightful comments. Read on to learn about how the film's narrative and visuals were conceived.

With the original film's immense success came huge pressure to take the sequel in certain directions. The team made a concerted effort to ignore that. As co-director Jennifer Lee tells Slashfilm, “If we don't do it true to where the characters are right now, who they are, you'll feel the lack of authenticity.”

At the outset, Lee spent months writing journals in the characters' voices, as a way to explore how they might develop after the first film's happy ending. The results were revelatory, Lee explains to Collider:

Every detail of the characters was revisited, not just their personalities but also their physical appearances, as costume designer and visual development artist Brittney Lee describes to Blackfilm:

During script development, another talking point was the ways in which - and the extent to which - magical elements would feature in the story. As Lee tells Collider:

Research took the team to Norway, Finland, and Iceland. The landscapes of Scandinavia inspired locations in the film like the Dark Sea. The general sense of adventure - particularly during a hazardous hike in Iceland - fed into the narrative, as Lee recalls to Screenrant.com:

More than in the original, nature itself is personified and integrated in the storyline. Normand Lemay, the head of story, discusses the film's enchanted forest with Comingsoon.net:

Kristen Bell, who voices Anna, singles out another aspect of the film's characterization. As she tells The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon:

The team stresses that this production called for close collaboration between departments, not least because of the unprecedented challenges posed by elemental characters like Nokk the water horse and Gale the wind spirit. Screen Rant quotes animation supervisor Svetla Radivoeva:

Steve Goldberg, vfx supervisor, elaborates on Gale's design in an interview with Befores & Afters. He says that the team developed a new tool for Maya, which they named Swoop:

Goldberg also talks about the approach to Nokk. The character was developed in tandem by the art and vfx departments: the former focused on designing something that looked beautiful and fit the story, while the latter ensured that the water that makes up the Nokk's body moves in a plausible way. He outlines the vfx team's approach to water dynamics:

Erin Ramos, another vfx supervisor, notes that the water simulations on Frozen 2 are far more elaborate than in Disney's 2016 feature Moana. As she says in the Screen Rant article:

Technological progress enables more photorealistic natural effects than ever before. But Frozen 2 doesn't aspire to be Jon Favreau's The Lion King: its characters are relatively cartoonish, and this imposes rules on the rest of the design, as co-director Chris Buck tells Slashfilm:

Animation supervisor Trent Correy echoes Buck's comments, telling Screen Rant that realism wasn't always the guiding principle: