“Frozen” is one of the few Disney films–or animated films for kids–that empowers girls and women,and focuses on a story of sisterhood and friendship before romance. That is refreshing–and clearly has meant a lot to countless families, considering it’s been a top performing film since its release in 2013.
According to Entertainment Weekly, however, the film wasn’t always going to be that way. Disney’s Peter Del Vecho described how the writers and producers went through many story and character changes–for instance, Elsa was supposed to be evil–and not actually Anna’s sister. That’s a game changer.
“Elsa was a self-proclaimed Snow Queen, but she was a villain and pure evil — much more like the Hans Christian Andersen tale. We started out with an evil female villain and an innocent female heroine and the ending involved a big epic battle with snow monsters that Elsa had created as her army.
Making [Elsa and Anna] related led us to the idea of her living in fear of her powers,” he explained.”Now we had a character in Anna who was all about love and Elsa who was all about fear.
That led to making Elsa a much more dimensional, sympathetic character, and instead of the traditional good vs. evil theme we had one that we felt was more relatable: Love vs. fear, and the premise of the movie became that love is stronger than fear.”
Oh and you know, the fact that girls don’t need to be saved by a man. Women can save themselves. The romance factor was also changed, it was more important in the original version–and thank God that was changed, because how boring is that storyline for the 89898th time.
