To Thaw the Frozen Heart
From Animation Magazine, December 1998
Wife and Husband Brenda Chapman and Kevin Lima are the new Powerhouse Couple in Disney Animation, having worked together on such animated features as
The Bamboo Princess,
Ferngully: The Last Rainforest,
The Lion King, and
The Swan Princess. More recently the couple produced the popular television animated series
Princess Squad and
Hero Squad. And Chapman and Lima most recently co-directed the reason why we are here today, Disney’s Holiday animated feature
Heart of Ice, based on Hans Christian Andersen’s
The Snow Queen, which released in movie theaters last month. And for any readers who haven’t yet seen it, be warned, as we will be discussing some critical plot points. Ahead thar be Spoilers. Ye have been warned.
Yea, not quite this…
AM: Brenda, Kevin, welcome to Animation Magazine. We absolutely loved
Heart of Ice (see our review in the November edition). From what we understand, it had one of the longest production runs in the history of Disney!
BC: Well, that’s the understatement of the year! (laughs) There was talk about adapting Hans Christian Andersen’s
The Snow Queen since before the release of
Snow White. They considered a deal for a hybrid animated feature with Sam Goldwin, who would do live action sequences on an Andersen biopic while Disney animated his stories. But then World War II happened and Goldwin went on to do the Andersen biopic with Danny Kaye, no animation, while Disney did wartime propaganda cartoons. They tried to reboot it again in the ‘70s as a theme park attraction, but ultimately it lasted until the 1990s when Harvey Firestein, who’d been doing voice work as a Telly the TV in
The Brave Little Toaster, pitched the idea again, not knowing that it had been attempted before.
Early Snow Queen concept art from the 1970s (Image source “disneyparks.disney.go.com”)
AM: And that got the snowball rolling again.
KL: More or less. Glen Keane had begun pre-production and had done some initial storyboarding when two things happened: first, Glen was promoted to Creative Vice President of Disney Animation and delegated the project to Brenda, and second, we got word that Martin Gates was in production on an animated version of
The Snow Queen for Penguin.
BC: Yea, that one caught us flat-footed. At first, we wondered if our eternal frenemies at Pearson had stabbed us in the back, but it turns out that they’d beaten us to the punch fair and square, Gates having pitched the idea in ’91 to Pathé before Pearson gobbled them up.
AM: And we hear that you needed to rewrite everything.
BC: Frankly, it needed a rewrite anyway.
KL: A bit of a fixer-upper, you might say.
BC: The original Andersen story is practically unadaptable for modern audiences, loaded to the gills with medieval-like elements and lots of 19th century quasi-Christian folklore like a troll named The Devil building a magic mirror hoping to prank heaven, which starts all the fun. Gates just made the Snow Queen herself into a, well, a Disney Villain and ran with that, basically following the Classic Disney formula.
KL: We nearly dropped the project, but then Brenda fell in love.
BC: I had this flash of inspiration to make it a mother-daughter story and a bit of a feminist retelling of the original Andersen story. You see, the earlier treatments with Glen were a sort of
Taming of the Shrew idea as each suitor tried to woo the Snow Queen, sort of taking the “snow queen” metaphor for an asexual woman literally. I had the insight to make it about the queen herself and about Gerda and her family, taking the events of the original story and tweaking them.
AM: And this led you to start with Gerda and Kai’s childhood with their single mother.
BC: Yes, we start with Gerda and Kai as children, and they live with their mother Liva and grandmother Amelia in a modest cottage near the village of Kleinholm. The father was recently lost in a blizzard returning from a hunt and Liva is going into town to find a job. But rather than accept a job as a washer woman, she has ambitions to be more. She’s fully literate and intelligent, but keeps running into a brick wall of sexist rejection and told to find a job as a washer woman.
AM: Yes, the divine Bernadette Peters as Liva, singing “Will No One Hire?”
BC: Yes. Finally, she meets Baron Bendt von Teuffel, the lord of the village, who “recognizes great power” in her. He appears to take her in as a secretary, but instead he shows her the mirror.
AM: The mirror that only reflects the worst in people. The distortion effects that showed Liva herself as a monster were CG, we assume?
BC: Yes, done with some of the filter and skew effects. Naturally, thanks to the magic of the mirror she now sees herself as a monster. Bendt is hoping to turn her to darkness and become his servant and help him use the mirror to turn the hearts of men in a scheme to take over the Kingdom. But she sees the ugliness in him too and shatters the mirror, causing the dark powers to enter her, but also causing a shard of it to penetrate her heart, turning her dark and cold. Panicking, she runs off, never to be seen again.
KL: And that leads Gerda and Kai, who were told that their mother ran off, presumably to the Big City, to make their pact over the roses, swearing to always be there for one another. With that set up, we time-skip to Gerda and Kai as teens.
AM: That was a heart-wrenching scene, particularly with the song “Where Roses Bloom” sung over it. Which brings us to the soundtrack. The great Stephen Sondheim[1].
BC: Stephen was amazing, of course. I still can’t believe that Bernie managed to convince him to do it! When I made the request for Sondheim, pretty much as a shoot-for-the-moon unlikely best case, I assumed he’d say “no” but maybe have a suggestion, but apparently, he was at the time working with Jim [Henson] and Penny Marshall on the
Into the Woods adaption[2] and was willing to give it a try after hearing from Freddie Mercury about his experiences working with Disney, and after seeing what we did with
The Hunchback of Notre Dame. “I wish you’d approached me about that film,” he told us. Stephen, of course, had his list of demands. He’d write the music and lyrics and while he left the plot details and overall story to Kevin and me, he did insist on full control of the themes and a big input into the characterization, as in his music the themes and lyrics and characters are fully integrated and define one another. He also went beyond the usual handful of song breaks and was an active part of the storyboarding, with the musical aspect never really ending, just going into intermittent dénouement, and mixed seamlessly into the dialog and choreography and scene transitions. He was practically a third director at times!
AM: We hear that Sondheim is very…particular.
BC: (laughs) Good word there. Yes, he has a very set vision, but he’s amazingly wonderful to work with and very open to making sure that our vision was a part of it, and really worked with each actor and singer to in some cases customize the song to the strengths of the star. Of course, even then our poor actors had a bit of a time with the weird meter and cadence and tongue-twisting lyrics, particularly Lea [Salonga] who’d never done Sondheim before, but they all were glad for the opportunity.
AM: We assume a Broadway version is imminent?
KL: (laughs) Can’t say much, but there have been talks.
Scratch in his True Form (Image source Disney on Pinterest)
BC: Stephen of course brought Bernadette with him, also Tom Aldredge as Bendt and Brent Spiner and Danielle Ferland to play his shape-changing troll sidekicks Scratch and Bite. They had a lot of fun with “Come and See”, where Tom went full carnival barker trying to convince everyone to look into the new, bigger mirror that he has constructed, and Scratch and Bite take various human forms as shills. There was a lot of pressure to cut the song since it served little narrative purpose, but thankfully they let it slide when kids in the test group were glued to the live-action performance.
AM: It was a fun way to start the second act, so we’re glad they kept it.
BC: Us too! Well, that song set us up for a return to Gerda and Kai, now teens voiced by Lea Salonga and Richard Dempsey, and Gerda singing her “I Want” by way of her part of “Last of the Autumn Roses”, which of course also has Kai and Grandma Amelia, the incomparable Angela Lansbury[3], joining in the song with their lyrics. It’s there that we learn that while all the world sees Gerda as this perfect, flawless, pure-as-new-fallen-snow girl, she’s in fact full of doubt and anger and has a jaded view of the world, but puts on the façade that she believes that they all want to see.
AM: The “they see in me/the girl that they all want to see/but inside me/a once-raging fire now smolders/colder/the coldness it seeps/inside of me/the ice starts to stab ever deeper” lines.
KL: Yes, that one was total Sondheim, the “pure and perfect” Gerda from the Andersen tale deconstructed as a normal girl forced to assume the role chosen for her, but in fact far more complex than that. And you can absolutely thank Stephen for the way that the three roles are playing into and off of and over each other: Gerda is depressed and cynical, still reeling from her mother’s abandonment and wanting to “find her/and show her/this freezing heart/that she gave me” even as she lives the lie of innocence and purity. Kai is the naïve and star-eyed dreamer who sees “nothing but beauty” in the world, much to the cynical Gerda’s annoyance. Grandma Amelia is warning them to be careful of “dangers that lurk/and dangers that strut/the demons and trolls/and the Snow Queen”. Grandma is extra worried, particularly since they’re going to town to trade the harvest excess and the last of the roses for provisions for the coming winter.
AM: Which is where the Snow Queen is first mentioned and described by grandma as a threat.
BC: Naturally. “A heart of ice and snow/coldness in her veins”, and so on. Kai doesn’t believe in the Snow Queen, of course, and thinks it’s something his “worried” grandma came up with to keep them from venturing out “like mom did”, which he finds endearing but makes Gerda sigh. And grandma has reason to be suspicious in that regard, because Gerda’s “I Want” revealed that she plans to run off to the big city to find and confront her mother, ironically about to abandon her family to confront the mother who abandoned her.
KL: And the animation was a serious challenge since we basically follow the song trio as it becomes a duo in a sort of “animated oner” as Gerda and Kai leave on the wagon pulled by their far-too-smart reindeer Bae – Frank Welker, of course – and their duet blends into the reprise of “Come and See” as they get to town.
“What up, Bae?” (Image source Pinterest)
AM: And the trusting Kai wants to see the amazing mirror, of course!
KL: Of course, but then, of course these blending songs are joined by another chorus as the Snow Queen arrives, leading to “The Snow Queen” song. And not only was the timing of all of those merging and interplaying songs a beast, but we had to match up all of those complex lip movements and body language and flow and virtual camera movements, and coordinate with the ice and snow that followed in the Queen’s wake…whew!
AM: I guess calling it a challenge is an understatement.
BC: We ended up having the cast just perform on a stage and recorded and digitally rotoscoped it! It felt a bit like cheating, all said.
AM: Well, all said, the animation is spectacular, and rotoscoping isn’t cheating in our book. But then with the Snow Queen appearing, also tellingly voiced by Bernadette Peters, the action starts as she easily bests the guards sent to engage her, freezing them in a block of ice or sending ice shards after them. So much beauty and menace in the way the light catches or transits through the crystalline ice. And then more such stuff when she shatters the second mirror. The mix of the hand-drawn and CG sequences were superb.
KL: Well, thank you, of course!
BC: By this point we’ve already seen something was amiss in town, as the second mirror was turning people dark and argumentative. But with the mirror exploding, suddenly people are hit by its shards, all but Gerda, of course, who shelters with Bae behind the overturned cart. The shards go into the citizen’s eyes and hearts, making them coldhearted and pessimistic. Kai, of course, peaking up over the cart, gets shards in his eyes and can now only see the bad in the world. We had to mix the CG and drawn animation very carefully to make it look right. Gerda rushes to him, but he wants nothing to do with her and insults her badly, calling her out on her pessimism and cynicism and how “she left him too” in spirit despite her promise, even as he “now can see/the world that you see”. Instead, he is called by the Snow Queen, who takes him away with her on her sled of ice as Gerda pursues pointlessly on foot.
Vintage art by Elena Ringo (Image source Wikipedia)
AM: The way the language of the merging songs was cut up and seemed to fly apart reminded us of the ice shards, like the song was breaking too. Deliberate, we assume?
BC: Absolutely. Only Sondheim could have pulled it off!
AM: And then, after a spate of dialog, it’s on to “Go Forth”, sung to Gerda by Bendt and his two trolls, who have taken the form of crows at this point. He calls the Queen his “enemy oldest/a heart that is coldest” and that they have “goals in alignment for now” and even offers to take her “under his wing” should she succeed.
Quite a bit like this, actually! (Image source “characterdesignreferences.com”)
BC: Yep, we thought that it would be fun to have the villain recruit the hero as a script-flip on the typical Disney formula. She’s crying and looks to a ship in the harbor bound for the City, as if planning even now to run away. But Bendt convinces her to travel to the Snow Queen’s palace and gives her a sword to slay the “Evil Queen” and rescue her brother.
AM: And this starts the adventure, riding Bae
into the woods…
KL: (laughs) Yea, I see what you did there! And yes, we made that joke in production, and tried to get Stephen to make some musical quotes for the scene, but he refused. Instead, “Rescue the Prince” is quite the adventurous song as she goes out into the frozen wilds.
BC: But that adventurous tone soon deliberately dragged through the montage of physical challenges, dropping from major to minor key, and finally fading out as Gerda collapses, exhausted at the half-frozen river. She’s then confronted by a giant of ice that chases her away and warns her to go no further. This becomes the dark point and her reprise of “Where Roses Bloom” becomes a forlorn song as she contemplates giving up and running away to the city, since “he left me with her/like she left me and him”, even as the trolls-as-crows try to goad her on, chanting in the background for her to “go and kill the Queen!”.
(Image source “filminspector.com”)
AM: And then she sees the frozen rose.
BC: An obvious visual metaphor, but it works! She sees it and is reminded of her promise to Kai as a kid, so she picks it, places it in her lapel, and crosses the frozen river and confronts the ice giant, but rather than kill it, she throws down the sword and surrenders, demanding that it take her to the Queen.
AM: Much to the annoyance of Scratch and Bite, of course.
(Image source Kelsey Hood on Pinterest)
BC: Needless to say. So the ice giant takes her to the Snow Queen’s frozen castle, past an army of ice creatures, singing a slower, darker reprise of “Rescue to Prince” as she goes, the ice giant, voiced by Thurl Ravenscroft, singing counterpoint, with Scratch and Bite singing from a distance, afraid that the plan is about to fall apart and that their master will be angry at them.
AM: And then to the Queen herself.
KL: Yes, the big confrontation. She is taken before the Queen and sees Kai, who sits by the Queen’s side, a dark smile on his face. Animation wise, framing the 2-D characters within the 3-D of the palace structure proved to be fun as we worked it out, as you didn’t want the 2D figures to look flat, as it were. Shading and light did wonders there.
BC: So, this scene was the key to the film. We have your standard “Bond and Blowfeld” situation with the hero chained in ice and the antagonist looking down on her figuratively and literally. But the subtext of the dialog, which is feeding into the song “Heart of Ice”, because with Sondheim lyrics
are dialog, is laden with multiple meanings. The queen is confronted for her evil, while she in turn confronts Gerda for taking sides with “that troll” Bendt von Teuffel. This exchange, with Kai’s dark judgements thrown in to question the hearts of everyone, leads to what Kevin called the “Darth Vader moment” when Gerda figures out that the Snow Queen is her mother, Liva!
(Image source Screen Rant)
KL: Quite the surprise for those young ones who didn’t see it coming, or anyone not paying attention to the fact that Bernadette was playing both parts, though to be honest Stephen does like to ironically cast the same actors in two ironically contrasting roles, like having the same actor playing both the Big Bad Wolf and Prince Charming[4] in
Into the Woods.
BC: And with the realization that the Queen is their mother, the Queen has Gerda taken away and put in the ice prison. But Scratch and Bite resume their troll forms and break her out, handing her the sword, again urging her, in a second, even darker reprise of “Save the Prince”, to slay her mother. But she instead tosses aside the sword and goes to find Kai. The “Save the Prince” reprise morphs into a hopeful but melancholy reprise of “When Roses Bloom” as she confronts him, and he is about to call the guards on her when she hands him the once-frozen rose, which has thawed out from her warmth. As they duet, he sheds tears, which wash away the shards, returning him to normal, more hybrid CG magic by Kevin and his team.
AM: And of course, the Queen walks in, and the sight of her two children embracing melts the heart of the Snow Queen, and her cold blue pallor warms back to her normal tone and she joins the embrace and kisses both on the forehead.
BC: Of course! It was our all-new really-old take on true love’s kiss from the platonic, familial perspective. Not a romantic kiss or romantic relationship in the film!
KL: In the end, Liva has a frozen heart worth mining.
AM: And that’s when Bendt arrives for the final battle.
BC: Of course! You have to end with an exciting climax! So Bendt appears, now in his true demonic form and wielding the sword that he’d given Gerda to kill the Queen, which erupts in flame and which he uses to easily slay the ice giant, who melts as he is stabbed. The Queen in turn gives her children armor and weapons if ice. An army of trolls appears and battles her ice creatures, Gerda and Kai battle Scratch and Bite, and the Queen has a magic duel with Bendt. We had a lot of fun with the fight choreography much as we had with the song choreography, all set to the fully instrumental “Fire and Ice”, which took musical cues from Finlandia in a reference to
Musicana. Eventually, needless to say, they vanquish the trolls and Bendt is left frozen into a statue.
AM: And all return to the village to live happily ever after, of course.
KL: Yes, after Gerda, Kai, and Liva use the power of love to free the hearts of the citizens, they, needless to say, elect Liva as their new Baroness.
AM: And the big celebratory ice show, where you got to demonstrate the full range of kaleidoscopic effects in the new DIS mark IV and AVE virtual environment, of course!
BC: Oh, definitely! We wanted to push the limits of the technology, which we did using a lot of the emerging virtual camera technology developed with the next generation AVE. We were still not quite ready to do a full 3D CG film with people. Hair remains a serious challenge. I’d have loved to have Gerda’s hair blowing and bouncing in the winds in fully rendered CG, but that’s probably a few years out. My good friend Joe Ranft, who runs the animation group formerly known as 3D, did some test animations, but the hair just looked awful, though the skin effects and movements are looking significantly better than they did with Jack on
Secret Life of Toys. And damn…I so wanted to do the first all-CG Disney Princess!
KL: Brenda…let it go.
AM: And all of that innovation and the numerous takes and live performances and Sondheim didn’t come cheap.
Heart of Ice became the first animated film to cost over $100 million.
BC: Yea, Finance wasn’t happy with us on that score and I hear the cost was causing issues on the board during the whole Shepherds thing…oops, sorry, Jim!
AM: That said, things look positive. We’re still just a couple of weeks into the theatrical run as of this printing, but already the box office has been huge. We predict another big hit for Disney Animation, possibly the biggest numbers for a Disney film in a while[5]. Critics are enthralled, there’s awards buzz already[6], and children and parents alike are reacting strongly to the familial love as opposed to romantic love aspect.
BC: Well, little girls really reacted to it in a way that they typically don’t with romantic love, which they can’t really understand yet. But every girl has a relationship with their brother and mother and the like, so that connected better than kissing the prince and getting married ever could.
KL: And little boys too. The common adage that girls will see a film led by a boy, but not vice versa, is finally being exposed for the BS that it is.
AM: And that brings us to the end. Thank you both for speaking with
Animation Magazine.
BC: It was my pleasure!
KL: Mine as well!
AM:
Heart of Ice is playing in theaters now.
The Snow Queen (1995)
From “Eight Mockbusters of the last 25 years Actually Worth Seeing,” CulturePolice.co.uk Netsite, June 26th, 2012
What it cashes in on:
Heart of Ice…sort of accidentally, after the fact
Notable actors: Dame Helen Mirren, Hugh Laurie, Rik Mayall
Whom to blame: Marvin Gates
Why it’s worth your bloody time:
It’s the “mockbuster” that’s not really a mockbuster! So, you there in the comments already typing away, yes,
The Snow Queen predates the film it’s accused of copying, making it the exception that proves the rule! But ironically after only scraping together a few million in theaters when released in 1995, it found new life in video stores and shady retail stores when Disney’s mega-hit
Heart of Ice was released three years later.
And it’s a pretty bloody good animated feature, really, even if it’s perpetually overshadowed by the Disney film it’s still being mistaken for by clueless grandmothers everywhere, with Disney Brats bawling when they unwrap the Christmas parcel the world over.
With the divine Dame Helen Mirren in the titular role, it’s got star power on top of quite good animation and a good if largely formulaic story. And in a shift from both the original Hans Christian Andersen story and the later Disney film, the Queen is a stone-cold diabolical bitch and a half, a true villain of the Maleficent and Cruella mold who eats up the frozen scenery like it was her own personal ice cream bowl. And the heroic little girl, named Ellie in this version, is out to rescue her brother, named Tom, from the Queen. But the bitch has taken a few tips from Lex Luthor and has arranged the whole kidnapping as a ruse to lure Ellie into a trap, where she’ll use Ellie’s pure heart to make an elixir of life!
Dame Helen, you willey, evil bitch! Please marry me.
The Snow Queen was a flop at the Box Office, but became an accidental hit on home video three years later, shoring up the struggling Marvin Gates Animation Studio. It also spawned a series of low-budget sequels starting with 1996’s
The Snow Queen's Revenge and two more quickies shat out in the aftermath of
Heart of Ice that hardly bother mention. Of course, for Cheese Aficionados, do see the sequels for the horror of it all, but no, Dame Helen is not there, though Hugh Laurie is there on the first one.
But even non-cheese heads will find lots to like in
The Snow Queen as a good, if not exactly spectacular, animated feature, which marks one of the few feature film animation releases by a wholly British team. And for this parochial bastard, that’s worth a lot right there!
[1] Requiem in Pace, Mr. Sondheim!
[2] Medieval peasant’s hat tip to
@nick_crenshaw82.
[3] RIP Angela! Never a teapot in this timeline, but in our hearts none the less.
[4] One of my biggest issues with our timeline’s 2014 film version of
Into the Woods was having different actors for the two roles (Johnny Depp and Chris Pine). Having both parts be played the same actor
is the bloody point in the casting, the two faces of predatory toxic masculinity as it were.
[5] Will ultimately be re-released in the Spring of 1999 and ultimately break $635 million at the international box office, Disney’s biggest animated hit in a while. It most directly faced
Beauty and the Beast and
East of the Sun and West of the Moon on the animation front and likely would have broken $800 million or more had it not faced the competition.
[6] Will win the Best Animated Feature Academy Award and Best Comedy or Musical Golden Globe, along with a nomination Best original Song for “Where Roses Bloom” (losing to “Butterfly of the Soul” from
My Tennessee Mountain Home), and numerous Annies. In a strange internal honor, it will be retroactively added to the WED Signature line in honor of the film’s artistic merit, in large part due to the Sondheim score, making it by far the most profitable WED-sig title.
