Eighteen Hundred and Frozen to Death:
Politics and the Threat of Superintelligence in Disney's Frozen Franchise
II. The Carrot or the Stick
It has been said that the Victorian Era invented our modern concept of childhood, (Walther) the very social infrastructure that allows Disney's business plan to even exist. Before the 19th Century, child labor and infant mortality were givens in the West. By the 20th, after decades of technological and social progress, these were generally perceived as great evils to be eradicated, the middle and working classes agreeing that leisure for play and the imagination were as important a debt owed to the young as a good education. Room was being made for the concept of the teenager, as well.
Hans Christian Andersen is one of the authors most credited as having invented the modern narrative that allowed modern childhood itself to be imagined.
It is one of the ironies of the relationship between his life and his art that Andersen, arch-creator of the 19th-century bourgeois idyll of childhood,1 grew up far removed from the charmed nursery circle that stories such as ‘The Steadfast Tin Soldier’, ‘The Little Fir Tree’ and ‘The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep’ encapsulate. Born in 1805 in Odense, a country town on the island of Funen in Denmark, he was the son of a shoemaker and an illiterate washerwoman and spent his childhood in abject poverty. In fanciful form, he retold his mother’s hard life in the story ‘She Was No Good’; Vilhelm Pedersen’s illustration - made in Andersen’s lifetime - faithfully captures its sad details. Andersen’s father, an intelligent, depressive, under-educated man who read his son tales from the Arabian Nights and made him toy theatres, died in 1814 [sic],2 and Andersen became known in the slums of Odense as a lonely, gawky, ridiculous boy who dressed his dolls, wrote plays and sang in a beautiful tenor voice while the other children were street-fighting. His grandfather was mad; his gentle grandmother worked in a lunatic asylum where she and other old ladies in the spinning room recounted old folk tales; his aunt ran a brothel and his half-sister, his mother’s illegitimate older child, was probably a prostitute; later she tried to blackmail him. (Wullshlager, 2005)
Drawing from his own youthful experiences of puppet theatres, reading, and hearing folktales, Andersen would populate his eventyr with sentient toys and other objects. Animals had been anthropomorphized since prehistory, and Aesop was the West’s nursery text in that regard. But recognizing how children’s imaginations gave inanimate objects independent identities and will—this was an achievement of Andersen’s. Perhaps this is why today an Internet of Things can be imagined, and imagined to be desired: As much to do with the magic of the nursery as it is with leisure and convenience.
Frozen (2013), the Disney animation inspired by Andersen’s “The Snow Queen,” reintroduces us to a world where child labor is the norm.
Author's Note: If you haven't seen Disney's Frozen—as I hadn’t yet when 2016 began—please understand that this essay series will freely engage spoilers, and assumes familiarity with the film itself. The first part of this series can be found here.
a. Nameless in Arendelle
Frozen opens with “Vuelie,” a Sami yoik specially adapted for the film, over the titles. But its first scene is of ice miners at work, and they immediately move into their own song.
This song is “Frozen Heart”, and my first impression was that I was watching a light beer ad.
Apologies to everyone who will now experience “Frozen Heart” as an ’80s TV spot, but it‘s been difficult for me to shake the impression. The singing miners do not appear again in the film; but by all rights we ought to witness them kicking back, popping open an ice chest full of frosty green bottles, and then holding the open containers before their laughing mouths, studiously not sipping from them (due to unwritten US network policy on portraying commercial alcohol consumption (Greenberg)) until the camera is off.
—That’s my native sense of sarcasm activating; it’s responding to conflicting expectations of what I am to feel when a hardy working song is presented in media. I’m not roused to work by it, of course: I myself am at rest, being entertained. There’s a reason I felt conditioned to expect that beer was being marketed to me: A hard day’s work encapsulated in a few dozen seconds of laboring men’s song, and the thirst it engenders; we’ve seen it thousands of times.
Then a child marches on screen, with an animal friend, a baby reindeer. The boy seems happy, and shares a carrot with his companion.
He’s not singing, but just his being there throws the beer ad impression for a loop. Kids aren’t in beer ads—not in American culture, anyway. One might well expect bikini models or monster trucks to roll out on the ice. Instead, it’s one child and a pet, navigating the workmen, and struggling to work alongside them. While he imitates their actions, none seem to guide him, or take the slightest interest in his presence—that is to say, none behave as parent, guardian, or even mentor. The men work and sing in concert with one another, but not with or for the boy.
For a 21st Century American viewer, sitting in comfort, expecting to be entertained, this image is subtly disquieting. The same setting that makes me hear a beer jingle is one where modern parents presumably would not want their own small children anywhere near: An obviously dangerous work environment.
A recent study out of Duke University, “Benign Inequality: Frames of Poverty and Social Class Inequality in Children’s Movies,” found that out of the 36 highest-grossing G-rated pictures released through 2013, only 4% of characters therein were of lower class background, compared to 25% of children in the US living in poverty. (Streib, Ayala & Wixted, 2016) More important was their finding in how characters’ classes were portrayed: Children’s films have a bias toward presenting the poor as stereotypes; either contented workers, or lazy and shiftless. Frozen was rated PG, and so fell outside the study, but the Hollywood Reporter noted that Zootopia (also PG, not G) “which outwardly deals with complex concepts of prejudice and preconception, could mean a change in children’s films”. (Galuppo, 2016) If this analysis had been applied to the earlier animated film, Frozen, still in the lead in worldwide box office,3 it would likely have stood out as more closely attuned to the power aspects of class.
For example, the opening scene ends with the boy on his own sled, falling behind the men departing the ice field. In his first line, we learn his little friend is named Sven. Then we’re swept to the other end of the social spectrum, to the royal palace, to meet our star princesses as children, Elsa and Anna. The first word out of each of their mouths, is the others’ name. (Lee, 2013, 2)
It’s easy to forget in multiple viewings, but we are not told the name of ice mining boy.
Even after naming their inanimate snowman, even after the crisis of Elsa injuring Anna leads the royal family into the night-draped woods seeking aid, even after hearing Sven’s name twice more, and hearing from the boy himself that the stony forest folk are called trolls, and even as one adopts him, the boy’s own name is unannounced. The contrast of how these children’s lives are valued by their society couldn’t be in higher relief: It takes a nameless boy all day to scrounge for a small block of ice, while Elsa lets it trail behind her like it was gravel. Naturally he follows it like a road made of gold.
Just as we’re told Elsa’s magic is “born with” her, and has no explanation of its origin, so too the boy was born, with no explanation of his origin. Neither of these factors turn out to be important to the plot—the origin of Elsa’s magic was explicitly removed by the creators as unnecessary to telling the story: “[T]he more you explained the more questions you had about magic and the rules.” (J. August) Thus the minimal amount of backstory that was presented has incited questions from the audience, (Suarez, 2014) because they are natural to ask, especially given the emphasis of familial responsibility in the scene we first meet the trolls:
1. Where are the boy’s parents? and
2. Where did Elsa get her powers? 4
These are the questions the film invites into interrogation— The ice cutter boy is sledding alone through the woods unsupervised, and the king reaches for ancient runic books and maps which show Elsa’s powers have a history.
What’s in play here are the two most powerful elements of humanity fiction can utilize: the empathy and intelligence of the audience. Two of the best qualities of mankind are called upon to operate during this entertainment. And so the audience of Frozen is primed to answer these questions thus—
1. The boy’s parents must be found! (empathy)
2. Find the source of the ice magic! (intelligence)
These qualities are even underscored by the chief troll: “The heart cannot be so easily changed, but the head can be persuaded,” whereupon he begins to literally alter Anna’s memory. Thus, right out in the open, the story commits a grand misdirection of the two questions the audience has been primed to follow— the boy finds a magical stepmother, and the princess is told she must prepare for her future for her “power will only grow”. The first scene with the trolls is all about jettisoning attention to the past, however painful or fascinating it was, and focusing instead on what is to come.
In describing movies made for children, the authors of “Benign Inequality” state:
Frames of the conditions of the upper-class also minimize inequality by suggesting that their class conditions are no more secure than those of the poor and working class. Upper-class characters live in castles or mansions; they often have servants and rule kingdoms. These luxuries, however, invite threats. Three fourths of the movies with upper-class characters involve the focal upper-class characters defending their class position against individuals or groups trying to usurp them. Ironically, upper-class conditions are then framed as insecure, whereas working-class conditions are viewed as highly secure. Nevertheless, social class inequality is framed as mostly benign as those at the bottom barely suffer and those at the top only face only the threat of suffering rather than suffering itself. (Streib, Ayala & Wixted, 2016)
And this looks to be the path Frozen starts down, with Elsa and her parents becoming afraid of her magic and its discovery, while the nameless boy is suddenly adopted by a maternal figure, in the same scene.
Of course, the story sweeps forward so quickly that these interrogations aren’t made on the first viewing. Right up until the song “Do You Want To Build A Snowman?”, there is every indication we are in a realm of pure storybook fantasy. A timeless Neverland or a Nod, with magic sisters and wise old trolls. Why should we assume otherwise? This is another misdirection: The song will shatter that illusion, and drop us hard into historicity (which will be elaborated upon in Part III of this series). But even before we reach it, a nameless boy and his hard labor life already suggests that this is not a world with an easily drawn axis of storybook good vs. personified evil.
So to refocus against misdirection, and to deploy empathy and intelligence back into questions that need to be asked of the non-fantastical world:
1. Why are children working all day in a mine? and
2. Where do royals get their power?
b. What Idealistic Plan
Moviemakers Samuel Goldwyn and Walt Disney were attracted to Andersen’s life story and life’s work in the late 1930s. The rags-to-riches struggle against impossible circumstances, using one’s talent alone as catapult into high society, was a perfect vehicle for Great Depression audiences. As early as 1936, (TCM, 2016) the studios each were considering productions based on Andersen’s life and works, but by 1940 they began to collaborate on an Andersen biopic: Goldwyn would produce the live action story, and Disney would provide animated interludes of some of Andersen’s fairy tales. (Polsson, 2015 citing Solomon, 1995) One of these was to be “The Snow Queen”.
Disney himself may have seen parallels and contrasts with Andersen in his own difficult path to fortune and fame, or at least with Andersen’s many fairy tales of separated family and friends. Perhaps he didn't: We may never know for certain, as apparently, few notes survive of the aborted Goldwyn collaboration. (Taylor, 2013) By 1941 Walt himself became distracted by a divisive animators’ strike, and then America’s entry into World War II. Walt felt betrayed by the strikers, and would not give in to their demands.
My own sympathies are with the general population in labor issues; the current regime of income inequality and injustice is evidence enough for why that makes sense. But, as a creator, I think I see what happened to Walt. When he lost his creation Oswald the Lucky Rabbit to producer Charles Mintz in 1928, he left that meeting reminded that the person with the money held the property, and had the clout. On the way back from New York to Hollywood, he devised a plan to secretly launch a new character, determined to have that clout. Mickey Mouse was the result. (Suddath) Thirteen years later, having rebuilt his business to that spec, he faced a labor strike from within. This time, the workers had the clout. In each case, the issue was economic justice and fair play, but Walt was on the receiving end of the stick each time. It must have felt as though the world was deliberately misdirecting him all along.
Empathy with perspective is important; one can hardly imagine a recent Disney-branded feature animation without it. Thus it’s instructive to read a speech Walt gave, attempting to rally his workers to his side, and imagine how little sympathy it garnered then, or now. According to Michael Barrier, Walt topped off his would-be Henry V speech with this bit of Social Darwinism:
“Don't forget this—it’s the law of the universe that the strong shall survive and the weak must fall by the way, and I don't give a damn what idealistic plan is cooked up, nothing can change that.” (Barrier, 167)
The animators’ strike could only be resolved through a federal mediator, and by Nelson Rockefeller (as Latin American Affairs attaché to the State Department) convincing Walt into going abroad on a goodwill mission, far from his studio. Walt’s brother Roy Disney accepted the strikers’ demands in his absence.
Goldwyn would eventually produce Hans Christian Andersen, a musical starring Danny Kaye, in 1952; no animation or Disney input was involved, and the Snow Queen was cut (though the Little Mermaid made it in as interpretive ballet). Other houses would release their approaches to “The Snow Queen”, perhaps most notably a Soviet production in 1957, which would be a rare import to the West, with different English dubs released in 1959 and 1998.
But within Disney, the closest thing to a return to the story, for decades, would be plans for a never-realized 1970s park ride. (Davis, 71-73) It wouldn’t even be raised back into “development hell” until the late 1990s.
c. That Tired Harness Horse
The image of the “carrot or the stick” is one of simple incentive; there’s a kind of child’s understanding of reward and punishment in the synecdoche.
But use of the phrase is closely bound to modern labor. In examining the origin of the phrase, etymologist Paul Brians found that the Supplement of the Oxford English Dictionary cites primarily class-oriented economic enticements, with attestations as early as 1948.
“carrot, sb. Add: 1. a. fig. [With allusion to the proverbial method of tempting a donkey to move by dangling a carrot before it.] An enticement, a promised or expected reward; freq. contrasted with “stick” (=punishment) as the alternative.” (OED Supplement, as quoted by Brians)
Wikipedia dug up a citation from a Perth, Australia paper from 1947:
How can that tired harness horse, the British worker, be driven a little faster?
Shall it be the carrot or the stick, or some more axle grease on the wheels of the cart?
That is the crux of the problem which faces Attlee and Co. in their discussion on longer hours, more food cuts and incentive payments to step up output—and to convince the U.S. that a thrifty, hardworking Britain deserves the lion's share of Marshall's aid-for-Europe. (Wilkie)
In common usage of the phrase (striking animators to the contrary), labor is expected to feel the stick, not wield it. But what of the carrot? Laborers may not dole it out as an enticement, but they might grow it, and even pass it between themselves. This is presented throughout Frozen by the young ice cutter boy sharing every carrot he earns, literally, with his reindeer Sven.
After all, they both worked for it. Sharing their take is presented as equality between the boy and the reindeer, though it is also presented as a running joke: The reindeer always bites and slobbers on the carrot before the ice cutter eats the remainder. We watch him sharing, as a nameless child laborer, as a nameless vendor in town, and as a nameless hireling in the wilderness, with an animal— that actually has a name. The border between degrees of sentient life, already blurred by cartoon conventions of animal sidekicks, becomes even more tenuous as Sven becomes the iceman’s alter ego: He speaks dialogue as Sven, much as real world pet owners do for their dogs and cats.
So you’d think it would be all contrast, segueing from that kind of working class camaraderie and equality to the lonely isolation of royalty… But there is a notable bit of regalia that holds the same metonymy present in the symbolism of the carrot or the stick.
The Encyclopedia Britannica explains.
Sceptre, also spelled Scepter, ornamented rod or staff borne by rulers on ceremonial occasions as an emblem of authority and sovereignty. The primeval symbol of the staff was familiar to the Greeks and Romans and to the Germanic tribes in various forms (baculus, “long staff”; sceptrum, “short staff”) and had various significances. The staff of command belonged to God as well as to the earthly ruler; there were the old man’s staff, the messenger’s wand, the shepherd’s crook, and, derived from it, the bishop’s, and so on.
The Carolingians first used a long staff but also imitated the short Roman one. Thus, from the 10th century, two staffs were used to consecrate a European king. In most countries the second was replaced by the orb, a sphere that in ancient times represented the cosmos. The only country to retain two staffs was England, where the two became alike in length but were distinguished in being surmounted respectively by a cross and by a dove.
—“
Scepter,” Britannica.com Last Updated 12-17-2014
The authority to use any force, and the ultimate possessor of all material goods— Elsa’s relationship to her symbols of office are not isolated to her angst or her part of the story. They share the spectrum with the film’s use of carrots and sticks.
When she discards her office (including the last part of the regalia, her crown) the pieces of her authority have to be picked up by those around her. Princess Anna, of course, and her whirlwind-affianced Prince Hans, are looked upon as trying to take command of the kingdom in the growing chaos.
But without an agreed upon order, carrots, and especially sticks, start cropping up all over the place.
Some of them even start to act on their own.
d. The Only One Crazy Enough
Elsa unleashing winter, even unwillingly, is the obvious symbol of an uncontrolled autocrat; the Duke of Weselton’s lines such as, “The Queen has cursed this land!” faithfully echo the deep cultural heritage of tales of sorcerous queens and fisher kings. But the imagery of the punishing stick—not in itself a particularly wintry symbol—actively surfaces again and again in the story.
Take Anna’s course, as she pursues the fleeing Elsa. Sticks strike her when she complains of her sister's power, even from her already privileged position as princess.
She goes from taking personal responsibility for upsetting the queen, crying out in the forest, “It’s all my fault!” to immediately prevaricating to herself, “Of course, none of it would have happened if she had just told me her secret. She’s a stinker!” This is met with a branch of snow collapsing, which loses Anna her horse, who runs away. Another tree dumps extra snow on her.
Then we segue to that evening, as she trudges on through the drifts in her ball gown and cloak, whereon she begins to complain again: “Snow, it had to be snow. Why couldn’t she have had tropical magic that covered the fjords in white sand and warm—” (Here she spies a trail of smoke in the distance.) “—fire!” Her triumphant laugh ends abruptly when she falls down a slope into a freezing stream— as a branch snatches her cloak away.
Anna’s place in the social hierarchy of the story will be thoroughly examined in Parts III and IV of this series. For now, suffice to say: Anna’s isolated life surrounded by abundance has left her poorly prepared to understand feeling the rod, and unable to see the power of the dangling carrot.
This brings us to the clash of the classes at Oaken’s Trading Post.
In the instance of Frozen—contrary to the children’s movie analysis of “Benign Inequality”—the story demonstrably presents an upper class whose problems are not worse than lower class ones; rather, mistakes they make threaten themselves and have heavier repercussions on all other socioeconomic strata.
Arendelle is only one day into its summerless crisis; the danger is telescoped for the sake of drama. And perhaps in our 21st Century “just-in-time” economy, the slippage of 24-72 hours could create a rapid cascade of economic failure. But in the real world of the 19th Century, it took weeks or even months to realize the full impact of a missing agricultural cycle.
The worst affected area was southern Germany, where prices increased fourfold within 12 mo, the peak occurring from May through July of 1817. Such rapid and extreme instability in the price of basic foods resulted in a consumption crisis manifest from Scotland to Sicily. The human impact was recorded by many contemporaries. Eyewitnesses wrote of starving people on the Swiss–German border baking “bread” from straw and sawdust; some Bavarians ate their own horses and watch-dogs; in Hungary and parts of northern Switzerland locals ate rotting cereals and carrion meat; and the number of beggars reached “unmanageable proportions” in Italy and Ireland. (Webb)
Since carrots were nowhere to be had, in came the sticks.
By this time, in the canton of Appenzell... thirty or more die every day of hunger, victims of western Europe’s last ever famine. Beggars who venture outside their villages are assaulted with sticks. Those who try to help them are threatened and fined. The starving poor are reduced to dying in their homes alone. (Wood, 2016)
Gillian D'Arcy Wood devotes an entire chapter of his 2014 work Tambora to the “other” “forgotten” Irish famine of the late 1810s:
Starving mobs looted the granaries and attacked food convoys on their way to Dublin for export. Similar violent incidents were reported in Cork, Limerick, and Waterford. ...In Ballina, the army was called in to break up a riot over the export of oatmeal. The soldiers opened fire, killing three of the protestors and wounding many more. (Wood, 2014)
The examples go on and on into the 1820s. But back to our cartoon.
Like any good retail shop, the scene at Oaken’s is full of distractions. Much has been made of Oaken’s family in the sauna (listed as “NAKED FAMILY” in the September 2013 shooting draft) and whether the man therein is supposed to be Oaken’s husband. But other elements such as Oaken’s accent and sales pitch, and Anna’s lack of social skills can also distract from the overt economic injustices the scene otherwise showcases.
Stripped of misdirections, the scene plays out in less than twenty quickly-slaloming points:
- Anna enters. Oaken tries to unload unsalable summer gear.
- Anna remains focused on locating Elsa while buying winter gear.
- Iceman enters.
- Anna inadvertently blocks his access to carrots, until he points it out.
- Oaken asks a question about the weather, and Iceman inadvertently reveals Elsa's location.
- Oaken overcharges Iceman, pleads supply and demand.
- Iceman reveals his profession, pleads his own supply and demand poverty.
- Anna laughs at Iceman, until she realizes how rude/dangerous that is.
- Oaken offers Iceman a free sauna along with his purchase.
- Iceman reveals his limited funds, asks for understanding.
- Oaken offers only the carrots for all of what little money Iceman has.
- Anna presses Iceman on whether the weather seemed magical.
- Iceman tells her yes, revealing he is no stranger to magic, then he threatens Oaken and questions his reputation.
- Oaken is offended and is simply bigger, so throws him out.
- Iceman confesses to Sven he couldn’t get carrots, but then they use Oaken's barn to sleep for the night for free.
- Oaken apologizes to Anna for the violence, and then offers her free food.5
- Iceman sings as Sven, including the complaint “people will beat you and curse you and cheat you”, revealing his own confirmed expectations.
- Anna brings her and Iceman's supplies that she’s purchased out to the barn, and awkwardly bribes/orders him to take her to Elsa's location.
As mentioned above, Anna is too inexperienced to understand the incentives of the carrot and the stick: This is beautifully illustrated when the iceman delays her demand to be taken to Elsa, adding that she forgot to bring the carrots he was after— and she strikes him with the carrots. (!) Then she tries to apologize, followed instantly by trying to act tough and demanding again. The scene ends with the iceman giving a look indicating he’s already doubting her capacities.
The iceman's childhood expectations of steady work have been not been managed well, either. Even from the day before, when he was pictured in a happy cameo in town with Sven. By that evening, his livelihood is destroyed, and he’s reduced to singing misanthropic ditties to himself.
In short, the laborer is not being listened to, his worst expectations have been confirmed, and incentives have all become confused. A failure of the necessary empathy and intelligence that a crisis demands.
This is epitomized by his sled being run off a cliff by Anna in a subsequent chase scene. As he is dragged behind it, Anna calls out his name, “Christopher!”, but she gets it wrong: She must have been told his name at some moment when the audience wasn’t invited, but even so, she wasn’t paying enough attention to remember it properly. So as he is literally being devoured by wolves, we are finally, angrily, introduced to the orphan boy from the beginning of the film.
“It’s Kristoff!”
e. Are You Sure You Can Save This?
I have yet to pin down precisely when anyone at Disney first named Elsa; it’s become such an iconic name in so short a time, it’s hard now to imagine the Snow Queen being nameless for nearly 170 years.
What has been discussed, at length in many quarters, is that the enigma of the Snow Queen’s motivation in Andersen’s original 1844 eventyr confounded some of the best minds that Disney had. A personification of indifferent nature that kidnaps a boy and doesn’t even bother to show up for a confrontation with the hero left her virtually a blank slate. Which is challenging because she’s the title character of a famous classic fairy tale. Most adaptations simply make her a cruel, dimensionless villain, and run with that.
Things began to coalesce for the studio’s attempts at adaptation around the turn of the millennium. While working on Mulan in the late 1990s, Harvey Fierstein offered Disney a treatment for “The Snow Queen”. While this ultimately went nowhere, the Andersen fairy story would not be far from consideration at Disney ever afterwards.
In Disneywar (2005), James B. Stewart recounts a 2003 meeting led by the then-CEO of The Walt Disney Company, Michael Eisner, on the prospects for bringing The Snow Queen to the screen. Eisner’s eagerness to make it a version of The Taming of the Shrew reads as... unpromising.6 But two relevant items stand out: Apparently the meeting also discussed dangling the project before John Lasseter at Pixar, to tempt him into a new deal with Disney. Lasseter was said to “want to do a princess movie”.
The other relevant note was Eisner complaining about the piece not having a memorable ending:
“Sleeping Beauty was 1938,” Eisner says. “The ending was forced. Like Treasure Planet—it just ended. It wasn't funny or clever. Are you sure you can save this? Is Ice Queen better?[”]
“You mean Snow Queen,” Ruggels says.7 (Stewart, 2005)
As it fell out, Lasseter and Pixar were brought into the Disney surround in 2006 after Eisner’s departure; efforts to bring the story to the stage at Tokyo DisneySea and elsewhere were shelved around the same time. For the rest of the decade, despite efforts of talents such as Alan Menken, Glenn Slater and Mike Gabriel, working under the title, “Anna and the Snow Queen”, a serviceable adaptation remained somewhat elusive. In 2011, the studio assigned Chris Buck as director, and Peter Del Vecho as producer, to make yet another attempt. (Hill, 10.2013 & 12.2013)
Jennifer Lee was brought on to rewrite the screenplay in March 2012, while she was finishing writing work on Wreck-It Ralph, the 2012 film about a society of sentient video game characters. In an early 2014 interview on Scriptnotes, Lee described a carrot-or-stick-like dilemma cheerfully placed upon her work on Frozen by computer scientist and Walt Disney Animation Studios president Edwin Catmull:
Ed Catmull when I started on the film he said, “You can do whatever you need to do the film, anything you want, but you’re earning that moment.” …
But he said you can do whatever you want, but you have to earn that moment. And he’s like, “And if you do, it will be fantastic. And if you don’t, the movie will suck.” And that’s the only, he’s like, “Bye,” and it’s so him to say that, but I mention that because part of the reason the first act was so hard was because we were telling a much more complex story than really we felt like we could fit in this 90-minute film.
Lee reported that her first notes on the previous script, even before she was officially on the film, included the suggestion, “Kill the f—ing snowman.” (J. August)
The “Eisner-era” snowman was sketched as a traditional top-hatted fellow epitomized by Frosty the Snowman; even the “Anna and the Snow Queen” script maintained his role as a typical clumsy evil sidekick to an evil Snow Queen plotting doom for the good folk of the kingdom below. (Hill, 10.2013) This “main henchman”’s magic power was using his carrot nose to smell opponents from miles away. (Hill, 12.2013) This was the iteration of the character that Lee first experienced: “...every time he appeared I wrote, ‘Kill the f—ing snowman.’ I just wrote kill him. I hate him. I hate him. ...And I didn’t know why he existed and I didn’t like him.”
A major creative decision that “earned” the ending of Frozen was the decision to not make Elsa’s motivation one of a typical evil queen. “We went down the road of the villain, and it became a little cliché for us… and good versus evil, which is what we weren’t doing,” said Buck. “We were doing love versus fear.” (Hitfix, 2014)
In the end, of course, the snowman would not die.
This “installment” has become a long chapter, so I’m splitting it in half. Thanks for not tl;dr-ing!
More to come. The beatings will continue until the warm hugs improve.
—
Other Installments
I. Overview and Prelude
II. The Carrot or the Stick (1st half)
a. Nameless in Arendelle
b. What Idealistic Plan
c. That Tired Harness Horse
d. The Only One Crazy Enough
e. Are You Sure You Can Save This?
II. The Carrot or the Stick (2nd half)
f. A Wide-spread Discontent (In preparation)
g. (In preparation)
h. (In preparation)
III. Arendelle Looks to You (In preparation)
IV. (In preparation)
V. (In preparation)
Notes
1Emphases in bold, mine throughout.
2The actual date of death of Hans Christian père was April 26, 1816. Wullshlager got this detail right in her 2001 book, Hans Christian Andersen: The Life of a Storyteller, so this is likely a typo. But other sources do get this detail wrong. Myriads of the poor died in the summerless 1816 and in the years just after, their lives and deaths going largely unrecorded.
3Among animated motion pictures, as of July 14, 2016. Zootopia has risen to third in the category.
4This particular cite is from Buzzfeed, but I’ve across these two questions constantly in fan comment threads, due to the potency of the danger they represent to the characters. Suarez lists what she describes as “plot holes”; but only one even approaches the only genuine plot hole I’ve been able to discover in the film.
5Oaken presents Anna with “a quart of lutefisk, so we’ll have good feelings”. (Lee, 44) The ease with which the upper classes receive more than they need or even ask for, compared with the violent treatment of the poor is blatant here. But perhaps Oaken’s faux-dialectical “good feelings” are a sly reference to the “Era of Good Feelings” in the US which paralleled the climate crisis of 1815–early 1820s. This phrase was used by Monroe Administration to play up its non-partisan reconciliative approach in politics, even as drought and mass migration of ruined farmers was forever altering the working class of the United States.
6If you don’t want revealed how the Disney magic is made, don’t read this footnote...
Eisner asks for the Snow Queen synopsis.
“The Snow Queen is a terrible bitch,” Ruggels says. “When her suitors try to melt her heart, the Snow Queen freezes them.”
“Each one should be a phony, but different,” Eisner says of the suitors.
“Then along comes a regular guy,” Ruggels continues.
“This is perfect!” Eisner exclaims. “I’m afraid to hear more.”
“The regular guy goes up there, he’s not that great, but he’s a good person. He starts to unfreeze her...she melts.”
“It's great.” Eisner says. “Finally. We’ve had twenty meetings on this.”
“We’ll have a treatment in two weeks,” Ruggels promises.
“Can we have this for 2006?” Eisner asks.
“No way,” Coats says. (Stewart, 2005)
7I’m not sure if Stewart simply mistyped, or is observing Eisner’s dissociation by dating 1959’s Sleeping Beauty as 1938. But Stewart left off a closequotes from that paragraph, demonstrating that to err is human.
Bibliography
AFI. “Hans Christian Andersen.” AFI Catalog of Feature Films. Retrieved June 25, 2016.
August, John. “Scriptnotes, Ep 128: Frozen with Jennifer Lee — Transcript” johnaugust.com February 1, 2014.
Barrier, Michael. The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney. (University of California Press, 2007)
Binding, Paul. Hans Christian Andersen: European Witness. (Yale University Press, 2014)
Brians, Paul. “’Carrot on a stick’ vs. ‘the carrot or the stick.’” WSU.edu June 17, 2009. Excerpted from his book, Common Errors in English Usage.
Curran, Stuart, ed. “Plays of Frankenstein,” Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, The Pennsylvania Electronic Edition. University of Pennsylvania. July 30, 1998.
Ferreri, Eric. “In the Land of Fantasy, Inequality is Benign.” Duke Research Blog. Duke University. March 7th, 2016 at 4:36 pm.
Galuppo, Mia. “Disney, Pixar Misrepresent Class Struggle in Children’s Films, Study Finds.” The Hollywood Reporter. 3/11/2016 6:54 PM PST
Greenberg, Jon. “Neil Patrick Harris Heineken ad: We can't drink on TV.” Politifact.com. August 20th, 2014 at 9:55 a.m.
Hill, Jim. “Countdown to Disney ‘Frozen’ : How one simple suggestion broke the ice on the “Snow Queen”’s decades-long story problems.” jimhillmedia.com 18 Oct 2013 9:03 PM
Hill, Jim. “How Josh Gad Almost Missed Out on the Chance to Voice Olaf the Snowman for Disney’s Frozen.” Huffington Post. 12/02/2013 10:30 am ET, Updated Feb 01, 2014
HitFix. “Did Josh Gad go method to play Olaf the Snowman in 'Frozen'?” November 27, 2013.
HitFix. “’Frozen’ Directors Christopher Buck & Jennifer Lee Talk Love, Fear, And Fan Theories.” March 18, 2014 1:04 PM.
Hoehn, Douglas William. “The First Season of Presumption!; or, The Fate of Frankenstein.” Theatre Studies, 26-27 (1979-81), 79-88
IMDb. The Snow Queen (1957). Retrieved September 25, 2016.
InqPOP. “A Tale of Two Sisters Will Melt Your Hearts in ‘Frozen’.” pop.inquirer.net (Indonesia) November 5, 2013.
Klingaman, William K. and Klingaman, Nicholas P. The Year Without Summer: 1816 and the Volcano That Darkened the World and Changed History. (St. Martin's Press, 2013) [excerpt at Scientific American]
Lee, Jennifer. Disney Frozen Final Shooting Draft. Walt Disney Animation Studios. September 23, 2013.
Polsson, Ken. “Chronology of the Walt Disney Company” kpolsson.com 2015 February 27
Solomon, Charles, The Disney That Never Was: The Stories and Art of Five Decades of Unproduced Animation. (Hyperion, 1995)
Stewart, James B. Disneywar: The Battle for the Magic Kingdom. (Simon and Schuster, 2005)
Streib, Jessi, Miryea Ayala & Colleen Wixted (2016): Benign Inequality: Frames of Poverty and Social Class Inequality in Children’s Movies, Journal of Poverty, DOI: 10.1080/10875549.2015.1112870
Suddath, Claire. “A Brief History of Mickey Mouse.” Time. November 18, 2008.
Suarez, Ana Luisa. “15 Questions Disney Forgot To Answer In ‘Frozen’.” Buzzfeed. Feb. 16, 2014, at 11:05 a.m.
Taylor, Drew. “Trapped in Ice: Inside the 70-Year Journey Frozen Took to Get to the Big Screen.” SSN Insider. November 26, 2013.
Turner Classic Movies. “Hans Christian Andersen (1952) Notes” tcm.com Accessed May 13, 2016.
Walther, LuAnn. “The Invention of Childhood in Victorian Autobiography.” Approaches to Victorian Autobiography, ed. George P. Landow (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1979)
Webb, Patrick. “Emergency Relief during Europe’s Famine of 1817 Anticipated Crisis-Response Mechanisms of Today.” The Journal of Nutrition. July 1, 2002 vol. 132 no. 7 2092S-2095S
Wilkie, Douglas. “Douglas Wilkie’s NEWS SENSE: UK workers must produce more.” trove.nla.au.gov The Daily News (Perth). 5 Aug 1947.
Wood, Gillen D’Arcy. “1816, The Year without a Summer.” BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History. Ed. Dino Franco Felluga. Extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net. Web. Accessed 2016-05-15. (Thursday, April 12th, 2012, 6:40 pm)
Wood, Gillen D’Arcy. “Frankenstein, the Baroness, and the Climate Refugees of 1816.” The Public Domain Review. June 15, 2016.
Wood, Gillen D’Arcy. Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World. (Princeton University Press, 2014)
Wullshlager, Jackie. Hans Christian Andersen: The Life of a Storyteller. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001)