27 November 2013: Frozen is released.
ADVERTISEMENTHappy 10th anniversary to Frozen!
It’s been a pretty crazy decade for Disney, the company behind the film. Back when Frozen was first released, it had been nearly three years since the company had acquired Marvel and the joint venture’s latest release was the second Thor film. Less than a year after it had acquired Lucasfilm, the release was also prior to the new glut of Star Wars content that would also define the company’s output for the next 10 years.
In many ways, Frozen was almost the final note in an era of Disney as a simpler company that focused on releasing beloved new animated films.
Walt Disney Animation Studios – the studio responsible for Frozen – had just put out three original titles in the form of The Princess and the Frog, Tangled, and Wreck-It Ralph.
For Frozen, the film came about following Chris Buck’s return to the company as a director. Buck had directed Tarzan, released during the company’s renaissance years. Buck pitched an idea of an animated film based on Hans Christian Anderson’s ‘The Snow Queen’ story.
‘The Snow Queen’ had long been considered by Disney as a source. First by Walt Disney himself in 1937 and then multiple times throughout the years since but the project had never come to fruition.
The final film feels like a nod to Walt Disney Animation Studios’ classics. From its Christian Anderson source (like The Little Mermaid), its blue-tinted colour palette (as in Cinderella) to its princess-led musical numbers (Idina Menzel’s ‘Let It Go’), this was Disney firing on all cylinders.
It worked. The film made a worldwide box-office total of $1.3 billion (€1.2 billion). In 2013, that made it the highest grossing film of the year, the fifth highest of all time and the highest-grossing animated film of all time. Frozen went onto win Best Animated Feature and ‘Let It Go’ won Best Original Song at the Academy Awards.
What makes Frozen feel a little bit like an end of an era is that it seems after this massive success, Disney’s priorities permanently shifted. Although not entirely original owing to its fairy-tale origin, the company seems to have forgone the huge efforts to create new animated stories since.
Walt Disney Animation Studios has continued to put out new films semi-annually with highlights including Moana and Encanto, but the wider Disney schedule switched to sequels. The film to topple Frozen off its top spot as highest-grossing animated film of all time was Frozen II, while Pixar has increasingly found success in sequels to their amazing early 2000s output over more interesting newer work like Soul.
Sadder than the glut of sequels though is the new obsession with remaking their classic animated films.
Properly kicking off with a Cinderella remake in 2015, they have regularly released multiple remake films, the facades polished with the guts eviscerated. That Jon Favreau’s soulless photorealistic re-animation of The Lion King is now the highest-grossing animated film of all time, goes someway to explaining the pain of looking back at Frozen.
It was a simpler time then. A better time. I suppose I should just let it go, though.
