A woman I work with tells me that this movie has been in the works at Disney for over 20 years. Said that she had seen a preview for it on some old VHS Disney tape.
Crazy huh?
Long story short on the below..... it took Disney 60 years to make Elsa and Anna Sisters to make the overall story work.
In 1943,
Walt Disney and
Samuel Goldwyn had considered the possibility of collaborating to produce a biography film of author and poet
Hans Christian Andersen, where Goldwyn's studio would shoot the live-action sequences of Andersen's life and Disney would create the animated sequences. The animated sequences were to include stories of Andersen's works, such as
The Little Mermaid,
The Little Match Girl,
The Steadfast Tin Soldier,
The Snow Queen,
Thumbelina,
The Ugly Duckling,
The Red Shoes, and
The Emperor's New Clothes. Disney and his animators encountered difficulty with
The Snow Queen, as they could not find a way to adapt and relate the Snow Queen character to modern audiences. Even as far back as the 1940s, Disney's animation department saw great cinematic possibilities with the source material, but the Snow Queen character proved to be too problematic. This, among other things, led to the cancellation of the Disney-Goldwyn project. Goldwyn went on to produce his own live-action film version in 1952, entitled
Hans Christian Andersen, with
Danny Kaye as Andersen,
Charles Vidor directing,
Moss Hart writing, and
Frank Loesser penning the songs. All of Andersen's fairy tales were, instead, told in song and ballet in live-action, like the rest of the film. It went on to receive six
Academy Award nominations
the following year. Back at Disney,
The Snow Queen, along with other Andersen fairy tales (including
The Little Mermaid), were shelved.
In the late 1990s,
Walt Disney Feature Animation started on their own adaptation of
The Snow Queen after the tremendous success of their recent films, but the project was scrapped completely in late 2002, when
Glen Keane quit the project.
[25] Even before then,
Harvey Fierstein pitched his version of the story to the Disney executives, but was turned down. **** Zondag and Dave Goetz all had their try on it, but failed. Disney shelved the project again.
Michael Eisner, then-CEO and chairman of
The Walt Disney Company, offered his support to the project and suggested doing it with
John Lasseter at
Pixar Animation Studios, when the studios would get their contracts renewed.
[26]
The project was revived again around 2008 when
Chris Buck pitched Disney his version of the adaptation.
[28] At the time, the project went under name of
Anna and the Snow Queen, and was planned to be traditionally animated.
[29] By early 2010, the project entered
development hell once again, when the studio failed to find a way to make the story and the Snow Queen character work.
[
On December 22, 2011, following the success of
Tangled, Disney announced a new title for the film,
Frozen, a release date, November 27, 2013, and a different crew from the previous attempt.
[32] A month later, it was confirmed that the film would be a computer animated feature in
stereoscopic 3D, instead of the intended hand drawn animation.
[25] On March 5, 2012, it was announced that
Chris Buck would be directing, with
John Lasseter and Peter Del Vecho producing.
[33]
After Disney decided to advance
The Snow Queen into development again, one of the main challenges Buck and Del Vecho faced was the character of the Snow Queen, who in that earlier version of the story was a villain. Buck and Del Vecho presented their storyboards to John Lasseter, with the entire production team adjourned to a conference to hear Lasseter's thoughts on this work-in-progress. Production designer Michael Giaimo, recalled; "That was the game changer...I remember John saying that the latest version of
The Snow Queen story that Chris Buck and his team had come up with was fun, very light-hearted. But the characters didn't resonate. They aren't multi-faceted. Which is why John felt that audiences wouldn't really be able to connect with them." The production team then addressed the film's problems, drafting several different variations on
The Snow Queen story until the characters and story felt relevant. Finally, their decision to rewrite the film's protagonist, Anna (who was based on the Gerda character from
The Snow Queen), as the younger sibling of Elsa, effectively establishing a family dynamic between the characters.