have already passed 10 years since the premiere of ‘Frozen, the kingdom of ice’, the Disney film that ended up becoming the highest-grossing animated film of all time, earning 1.28 billion dollars (later, ‘Frozen 2’ surpassed the record). However, the feature film directed by Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee was about to be very different and now it has been made public its original ending and the reasons why it was decided change it.
The original Elsa was “pure evil” and didn’t work
Peter Del Vechoproducer of ‘Frozen’, has been the one who has revealed the outcome initially planned but it is that to reach that end a very different path was also followed that started from the following premise: Elsa was a spiteful woman after being jilted at the altar on their wedding day. For this reason, she decides to freeze her own heart to never love again, which was coupled with the prophecy that such a ruler would bring destruction to Arendelle.
“In all the movies we work on, at the end the tape itself tells you what has to be, if you’re smart enough to listen to it, it leads you in a different direction than maybe your preconceived idea was.”
“When we started ‘Frozen,’ Anna and Elsa weren’t sisters. They weren’t even royalty. Anna wasn’t a princess. Elsa was a self-proclaimed Ice Queen, but she was a villain and pure evil – more like the story. by Hans Christian Andersen – “We started with an evil villain and an innocent female heroine and the ending involved a great epic battle with snow monsters that Elsa had created as her army…”
In that original ending, Kristoff came to the rescue at the last moment, somewhat emulating the heroic turn of Han Solo in the first ‘Star Wars’ but, when Hans revealed his dark intentions, Kristoff caused an avalanche to stop Elsa’s troops, regardless of the fact that it put Anna and all of Arendelle in danger. That’s when Anna he discovers that Elsa is his only hope and manages to convince her to save the kingdom with her powers.
The twist was that the frozen heart was actually somewhat metaphorical and alluded to Hans, who was actually a sociopath with no feelings. Subsequently, Elsa thawed her heart, allowing herself to love again. Del Vecho confesses that they were not very satisfied with this way of ending the story and gives us his reasons:
“The problem was that we felt as if we would have seen this movie before. It was not satisfying. We had no emotional connection to Elsa. We didn’t care about her because she had spent the whole movie being the villain of her. We were not attracted. You couldn’t identify with the characters.”
True stories to fix the end of ‘Frozen’ and its message
That’s when Buck and Lee, who is also the film’s screenwriter, began to wonder if Elsa really had to be a villain or what if she and anna were sisters. The latter ended up leading to a summit with Disney employees to ask them real experiences with their families in which to be inspired so that the relationship between Anna and Elsa as sisters was closer.
“Relating them led us to the idea that she lived in fear of her powers. What if Elsa is afraid of who she is? And is she afraid of hurting the people she loves? Now we had a character like Anna who was all about love and Elsa who was all about fear.”
“That led to Elsa having a more dimensionful and empathetic character, and instead of the traditional theme of good versus evil we had one that felt closer to us: love versus fear. And the premise of the movie became that love is stronger than fear.”
From there, and from the idea that Anna’s heart had to be thawed, new questions arose: does a true love’s kiss always have to solve the problem? Does it always have to be the man who comes back and saves the girl? Could ‘Frozen’ be different from most stories we’ve seen before?
It was then that the finale that we just saw emerged and that conquered millions of viewers throughout the entire planet. Of course, now that you know what could have been, What outcome of ‘Frozen’ do you think is best?
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