Frozen: The Making of a Disney Animated Classic Part 4

Frozen: The Making of a Disney Animated Classic Part 4

Elsa’s Ice Palace

As the design team worked on creating Arendele, they also had a very important task to accomplish, to build Elsa’s Ice Palace. A part of the design team started working on some sketches for Elsa’s Ice Palace; they gave the castle a really detailed appearance and each had a different upbringing, but Chris Buck (Frozen Director) had the idea of having the palace being created out of a snowflake, and from that snowflake, everything would come out and become a magical spectacle. In one shot for the creation of the palace, there were actually 45 things happening in that single shot, curls appeared from one curl and that curl created another, and that kind of built the palace up, just like a puzzle. It took nine months, for the Let It Go scene to be born, and at the end it turned out to be success.

The Story Of “Let It Go”

The story actually begins with Elsa’s upbringing. At first the only problem in the making of the film, was Elsa. What was she going to be? What was her role on the story? Well at first, as I mentioned before, she was brought up as an Evil Blue Queen with coat made of live weasels. When the musical writers, Robert Lopez & Kristen Lopez, started to compose songs for the film, they were writing a villain song for Elsa and so they started to get into the head space of what a person would feel like if they were that isolated, and so they knew that at that moment she would go through a transformation, from repressed, to letting her powers go. Once they started to write about the reality of being isolated, they knew they had something to say, to express. Robert Lopez said that the song, basically wrote itself, and later on, they sent the demo out for approval. People loved it so much, they had to rewrite the whole movie.

Once the song was written, they knew what Elsa was going to be, how she was going to be portrayed. When you see, the song in the film, the only thing you can see beyond the animation, is the message of liberation, freedom, and acceptance.