Four years after Frozen stole the hearts of children (and adults) the world over, producer Peter Del Vecho has revealed the film could have been drastically different.
The 2013 mega-hit — which, by the way, was the highest grossing animated film of all time — centres around the story of Princess Anna, who sets off on a whimsical journey to save her sister Elsa from a perpetual winter.
But originally, as Entertainment Weekly reports, Elsa’s character was scripted as an evil villain – albeit with fantastic hair.
“So when we started off, Anna and Elsa were not sisters. They weren’t even royal,” he told the publication. “So Anna was not a princess. Elsa was a self-proclaimed Snow Queen, but she was a villain and pure evil — much more like the Hans Christian Andersen tale [The Snow Queen].”
He says Elsa’s character was originally planned to embody that of a woman scorned, who had frozen her heart to safeguard herself against the pain of future heartbreak — leading viewers to believe she’s the one in the prophecy destined to ruin Arendelle.
“We started out with an evil female villain [Elsa] and an innocent female heroine [Anna] and the ending involved a big epic battle with snow monsters that Elsa had created as her army,” Del Vecho continued.
He added: “The problem was that we felt like we had seen it before. It wasn’t satisfying,” he said. “We had no emotional connection to Elsa — we didn’t care about her because she had spent the whole movie being the villain. We weren’t drawn in. The characters weren’t relatable.”
WATCH: Relive the magic of Frozen with the film’s trailer. Post continues…
After throwing around a handful of other options, the movie’s creators decided to lead with a script which examined good versus fear, instead of good versus evil… et voilà!
“When the final piece of the creative puzzle fell into place, that moment was downright, well … heartwarming,” Del Vecho said.
We see what you did there!
