Frozen (Disney film)/Trivia

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Development Hell: The film languished in development hell since the 1930s, all the way back when Walt Disney himself wanted to adapt The Snow Queen. One of Disney's original ideas was a live-action/animated hybrid biopic about Hans Christian Andersen, with the MGM-produced live action segments interspersed with animated sequences based on Andersen's fairy tales. For one reason or another, the studio found it immensely difficult to adapt the Snow Queen tale and make it relatable to modern audiences, and Walt's original pitch eventually got scrapped when World War II came along and the studio busied themselves with wartime propaganda. A couple or so failed attempts later, one of them being a traditionally-animated version entitled Anna and the Snow Queen (the title of which would eventually be recycled as the title of the final film's Japanese dub), and we eventually end up with a very loose re-imagining of HCA's fairy tale with only tangential ties to the source material.
  • Hey, It's That Guy!
  • Hey, It's That Voice!
  • Mexicans Love Speedy Gonzales: Despite negative reviews by critics from the country, the film did very well in Norway and was popular among the Sámi people thanks to the details of the culture it presented. The Sámi community was consulted during production of the sequel, which was also complimented with a special Northern Sámi dub produced in collaboration with the International Sámi Film Institute.
  • Shout-Outs:
    • "Marshmallow", the giant snowman created by Elsa to defend herself, is a reference to the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
    • Olaf's dance with the seagulls is a shout-out to Bert's dance with the penguins in Mary Poppins.
    • The first "sand man" he passes in the same number is clearly inspired by the classic "Coppertone" girl ads.
    • The map that falls out of the book in which the King looks for the location of the trolls is clearly inspired by the map of the Lonely Mountain found in The Hobbit.
    • There is a Merida doll in Anna's bedroom.
  • What Might Have Been: Deleted scenes and storyboards for the movie show a much darker, even sadistic Elsa. Said scenes show her using ice magic to force information out of soldiers who dare to set foot on her palace grounds, a la Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique. Whether the omission was a smart idea or not is debatable; some fans and critics actually claim making her morally ambiguous (even briefly) would have showed how she was revelling in her newfound freedom after discovering her power.
    • One early draft even had Elsa as unmistakably evil, casting her as the villain of the story. Her Evil Plan would have even included kidnapping Anna at her wedding! Of course, assuming this version still had Anna marrying Hans, she might have inadvertently done her a favor there.