25 Things You Didn’t Know About Frozen

Frozen is the Disney sensation which had little kids everywhere singing ‘Let It Go’ at every waking hour of the day! Despite parents being driven up the wall by the film’s success, Frozen is fondly remembered as one of the greatest animated films of all time. It grossed over $1.3 billion at the box office and introduced a whole generation of kids to the magical story of Anna and Elsa.

Elsa’s secret hidden powers drive a wedge between her and her little sister Anna, but in the end – after a few dramatic twists and turns – the two siblings reunite and Elsa returns to rule the city of Arendelle. The movie is notable for tricking audiences into believing that Prince Hans was one of the good guys, while the lowly iceman Kristoff (and his lovable pet reindeer Sven) turns out to be the real ‘prince charming’.

Meanwhile one of the most hilarious characters in the movie has to be Olaf the snowman! He just wants to experience the summer, but doesn’t realise quite how awkward that might be in light of the fact that he’s made up entirely of snow. Fortunately Elsa gives him his own flurry at the end of the movie so Olaf can survive when the sun is shining.

If you loved Frozen as much as we did, then below are 10 fascinating facts you definitely didn’t know about the movie. Enjoy!

25. Walt Disney started working on Frozen in the 1940s

Frozen is one of the biggest Disney films of all time.

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And it might have something to do with the fact that the House of Mouse’s founding father actually came up with the loose idea for the movie all the way back in the 1940s! That’s right, Walt was way ahead of his time when it came to developing Frozen for the big screen.

In 1943, Disney set about adapting Hans Christian Andersen’s story The Snow Queen into an animated feature film. However, the project was shelved for decades and he never lived to see it turned into a Disney movie.

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So why did studio executives decide to pick Frozen up again, so long after it had been abandoned? It all has to do with the success of Tangled.

Frozen might never have been made at all if 2010’s Tangled hadn’t proved to be such a big hit with cinema goers.

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Walt definitely knew that he was onto a winner with Frozen!

24. ‘Let It Go’ was written in less than a day

Part of Frozen‘s appeal comes from all of the catchy tunes that are featured in the movie.

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Some of our personal favourites have to be “Do You Want To Build A Snowman?” and Olaf’s hilarious little number “In Summer”. But far and away the most popular song of all is “Let It Go”.

Elsa famously sings “Let It Go” when she realises that she doesn’t want to hide away her magical powers anymore, and just wants to be free of the past. She makes some pretty cool snowman during the song and even a giant ice palace (more on that below!).

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And what’s more, it turns out that Frozen’s most famous song was actually written in less than a day! Husband and wife duo Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez revealed that they made the demo in a day after walking through Prospect Park in Brooklyn.

Apparently they were so taken up with the song that they started dancing on picnic tables and singing it out loud to really get a feel for Elsa’s newfound freedom!

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And here’s another fun fact: Anna’s duet with Prince Hans on “Love is an Open Door” is the first time that a Disney princess has sung alongside a villain. Cool!

23. Animators needed a brand new software to create Elsa’s hair

Frozen is a spectacular bit of Disney animation.

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From the dresses to the mountain scenery to the cute reindeers, it was definitely quite an undertaking for the animators over at Disney. But strangely enough, one of the hardest things to bring to life was Elsa’s snowy white hair!

It looks so life-like in the movie because in total, over 420,000 CGI hairs had to be created! In fact, the animation team had to bring in a brand new software called Tonic just to make sure they got the look 100% right.

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If you want a bit of perspective on that, there are only 100,000 hairs on the average human head, and Rapunzel in Tangled only received 27,000 CGI hairs, despite having much longer hair.

As well as the hair, the snowflakes took a lot of time to develop. The animators created a new snowflake generator program to help them along, which built 2,000 different kinds of snowflake.

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This helped to make the movie look as realistic as possible. Amazing!

22. Several names in the movie are a tribute to Hans Christian Andersen

Hans Christian Andersen inspired the film with his story ‘The Snow Queen’.

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Although the producers ended up changing quite a bit to appeal to modern audiences, they still wanted to pay tribute to the Danish author in the final cut of Frozen. And they ended up giving him quite a cool (if slightly hidden) shout out.

If you put together the names of four of the main characters in Frozen, then it actually spells out Hans Christian Andersen: Hans-Kristoff-Anna-Sven.

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We see what they did there! We’re sure that Andersen is proud of the adaptation and its popularity in modern times.

In the original story, the two main characters are merely friends (a boy and a girl), not sisters, and there is an evil Snow Queen character who acts independently of the two friends.

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We like what they did with Elsa’s character anyway – it’s definitely a refreshing change from the usual Disney princess types.

21. There’s a hilarious crossover with Arrested Development

We’re big fans of Arrested Development and we never noticed this before!

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There’s actually at least three hilarious shout outs to the wacky sitcom which featured the Bluth family and their adventures. While Frozen runs to 102 minutes in total, it manages to fit in a whole host of funny crossovers with Arrested Development.

One of the most obvious is during the scene when Hans and Anna are talking to each other, and she says that they ‘finish each others sandwiches’.

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The composer working on the song admitted that this was an ‘unconscious callback to Arrested Development‘ which producers loved so much that they decided to keep it in the final cut of the movie.

There’s also a moment when the old duke does a hilarious dance routine which seems to pay homage to the infamous ‘chicken dance’ running joke on Arrested Development.

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And when the evil Duke yells out “She’s a moonster!” it sounds a lot like Buster Bluth and his infamous line in the sitcom.

20. Sven is actually based on a dog, not a reindeer

Sven is definitely one of the cutest characters in the movie.

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He’s a loyal friend to Kristoff and has a unique personality all his own. Apparently though, rather than modelling Sven’s movements on a real-life reindeer, they decided to base him on one of the producer’s pet dogs instead!

The animation team did bring in a reindeer initially, but apparently it refused to budge! Instead they used Executive Producer John Lasseter’s dog to try and capture some of Sven’s movements.

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That’s not the only fun fact about everybody’s favourite reindeer either…

Sven was originally supposed to be called Thor, until the production team decided against it in light of Chris Hemsworth and the popularity of the Thor franchise.

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Plus they needed someone else to spell out ‘Hans Christian Andersen’.

19. It was the first feature Disney film to be directed by a woman

This is kind of unbelievable, but it’s 100% true!

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No other Disney film had ever been directed by a woman until Jennifer Lee came along in 2013 and took over the reigns of Frozen. Wow! This is quite the achievement, considering that Disney has been going since the early 30s.

Not only that, but Lee actually became the first female director to gross over $1 billion at the box office. Lee has been breaking film-making records all over the place!

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Frozen hasn’t done too shabbily in the box office stakes, and it turns out that the animated film is actually the most popular animated movie of all time.

It’s raked in a staggering $1.07 billion to date, and epic movies like The Lion King and Toy Story fall way short of that figure.

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We’re bet the executives at Disney were rubbing their hands together when they saw the numbers rolling in!

18. It took 50 people to animate one 36-second scene

We’ve already seen that Frozen was quite an undertaking for the animation team.

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But one particular scene required a lot of effort in order to pull off. Remember the segment which shows Elsa creating her amazing ice palace in the mountains? That created some sleepless nights for animators at Disney.

In fact, over 50 people ended up working on the technology for the scene where Elsa builds the ice palace. Not only that, it’s been reported that one single frame of the sequence would take over 30 hours to render.

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This is amazing considering the fact that the whole of the ice palace sequence only takes up about 36 seconds in the entire film!

It was definitely worth it though, and the animators at Frozen received plenty of awards for their groundbreaking work on the movie.

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Nice one guys!

17. There are some hidden Disney characters that you might not have spotted

Did you see all of these hidden Disney characters the first time around?

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The House of Mouse is notorious for inserting characters from other films into its movies, and Frozen is definitely no different – it contains more than a few hidden Disney characters for super fans out there to enjoy.

For example, during Elsa’s coronation, you can clearly see Rapunzel and Eugene from Tangled walking into the castle. And they aren’t the only two characters who appear during this scene.

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Tiana from Princess and the Frog is also present when Elsa addresses the crowd of nobility. You need your glasses on for this one though!

Disney executives definitely didn’t want to let the chance to include some iconic princesses get away from them!

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We’re just looking out for the next Disney film to feature Anna and Elsa in the background…

16. Elsa was originally supposed to be the villain of the movie

Yikes! This is big news, but it’s not that hard to imagine either.

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Originally, Disney’s evil villain was supposed to be Elsa herself. The storyline was supposed to follow Elsa as she intentionally cursed Arendelle with an eternal winter – much like the original Snow Queen.

And what’s even more surprising than that is the fact that the change to Elsa’s storyline was only made at the last minute!

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Disney was still including descriptions of Elsa as “the cold-hearted Snow Queen” as late as May 2013. Wow! In the end, we saw the sisters make friends and instead it was Prince Hans who turned out to be the bad guy.

Speaking of Hans, he was voiced by Santino Fontana in the movie. Fontana originally auditioned for the male lead in Tangled and was rejected.

But producers then immediately asked him to star in Frozen instead. Good deal!

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15. Kristen Bell and Idina Menzel read their scenes together

This might not sound that interesting at first…

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But apparently it’s extremely unusual for voice actors to record their scenes together! Producers wanted to add as much chemistry as possible between the two ‘sisters’ and asked them to read all of their Frozen scenes together.

It seems as though the producer’s choice actually led to a real-life friendship between the two actresses as well! Bell and Menzel have performed some of their iconic songs together on stage several times.

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And if social media is anything to go by, then the pair aren’t ready to let go of their ‘frozen friendship’ quite yet!

In 2016, Menzel organised a charity benefit, and she called on her co-star to help her belt out a few tunes from the Disney classic. Bell later posted an Instagram post with the following caption: “Singing #frozen songs with the effervescent @idinamenzel at a benefit for her @abroaderway foundation :)”.

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Aw! We’re guessing they were excited to collaborate on Frozen 2 then.

14. Elsa’s ice palace is based on a real hotel in Québec

The ice palace took a long time to plan and execute.

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But luckily the team working on the hotel managed to bag themselves a nice little trip to Canada for some ‘inspiration’ regarding the look and feel of Elsa’s amazing mountainside ice palace.

The production team went on a trip to a special ice hotel in Québec entitled the Hotel de Glace, and it was this particular establishment that helped lay the foundations for Elsa’s palace.

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And the hotel owners weren’t just going to let that connection slip them by! They created a special Frozen suite complete with a Disney-style bed fit for a princess:

The trip to Canada wasn’t the only perk that the Disney team got to enjoy. They were also treated to a break in Jackson Hole, Wyoming…

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But rather than chilling out, this was used to experience the effects of deep snow on clothing.

13. Josh Gad improvised most of his lines

Olaf is definitely a fan favourite in Frozen.

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His cheeky sense of humour, combined with his complete lack of understanding about what happens to snowmen in summertime, really helped Olaf shine as the much-needed comic relief in the film.

However, did you know that Gad actually improvised most of his lines in the film?! That’s right – all of those hilarious quips you hear in the movie are actually him messing about Robin Williams style.

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Gad did this because he was trying to make the producers laugh, but most of his ad-libbing ended up making it into the final cut of the movie!

And that’s not all…did you know that during Olaf’s infamous rendition of “In Summer”, there’s actually a really cool crossover with Mary Poppins?

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When he dances with the hat and cane, Olaf is imitating Bert’s Penguin Dance.

12. There are lots of shout-outs to Norway in the movie

It’s safe to say that Frozen is heavily inspired by Norway.

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First of all – Anna’s horse is named Sitron, which in Norwegian means ‘lemon’. Aww! The entire look and feel of the landscape surrounding Arendelle is also heavily based on Norwegian countryside.

The Disney crew got to take a trip to Norway and took in some of the beautiful lakes and fjords in the area beforehand in order to animate the landscape in a realistic way.

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Notice how much it looks like a Scandinavian paradise? There are also references to Viking culture and other aspects of Norwegian life.

At one point in the film, we see Anna’s father looking at some ancient Nordic runes. To help get this right, the team actually hired an expert to teach them more about runes.

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Jackson Crawford is a professor of Old Norse and Scandinavian mythology at UCLA and he came in to speak to the animators at Frozen.

11. Anna and Elsa are now hugely popular baby names

This one isn’t totally surprising…

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However, given the fact that many parents were growing tired of just how obsessed their kids were becoming with the animated feature, they’re not giving themselves an easy time by naming their daughters after the two Disney Frozen princesses!

Basically, since the movie’s release, the names Elsa and Anna have become hugely popular names for baby girls the world over. In 2013, ‘Elsa’ broke into the top 100 most popular names for the first time ever!

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Coincidence? We think not! Anna has always been a widely-used name for girls but it jumped up several places after the realse of Frozen.

To be honest, we can’t think of two better role models to name your daughters after!

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They’re complicated and intelligent and definitely have more personality than some of the earlier Disney princesses…

10. There’s a very interesting safety warning included in the end credits

We’re guessing only the biggest Frozen super fans noticed this one…

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If you stayed in the cinema to watch all of the credits roll down the screen, then you might have noticed a bizarre disclaimer put in by the Disney corporation, right towards the very end. It’s a safety warning about eating your own boogers! Check out the image below if you don’t believe us:

After Kristoff’s assertions in the movie that ‘all men eat their own boogers’, Disney decided to cover their backs in a cute way by inserting this little disclaimer into the end credits!

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And what about all of those random names listed above the safety warning? Turns out that they have a really cute meaning behind them (cuter than the ‘safety warning’ anyway!).

Apparently those are all the names of the crew member’s babies that were born during the making of Frozen. Awww!

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Frozen must have taken a long time to make…

9. Two Boston firemen once sang “Let It Go” to a young girl trapped in a building

This is a great example of how Frozen has been helping the emergency services…

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During an elevator ride in Boston, Kristen Kerr found herself trapped just above the second floor of a building along with her infant son Jackson and her slightly older daughter Kaelyn.

Firefighters immediately showed up to rescue the family, but apparently when they got there, Kaelyn was so scared of the situation that she refused to budge.

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Firemen John Keough and Scott Myette were both fathers themselves and started chatting to the family through the audio system in the elevator. Eventually they got to talking about Frozen…

That’s when the two firefighters decided to randomly belt out a rendition of “Let It Go”…which immediately made Kaelyn relax!

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They were then able to carry her down the emergency staircase.

8. Rosemåling is now hugely popular thanks to the release of Frozen

Rosemåling is the old Norwegian art of flower painting.

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It’s a beautiful style of artwork that originated in the Norwegian countryside and features flowers combined with geometric shapes and lines. This style of art can be seen on many of the characters’ costumes in Frozen.

If you look carefully at Anna and Elsa’s beautiful dresses, then you can see rosemåling designs covering the fabric in a lot of cases.

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As well as baby names, it seems as though people the world over have really embraced this aspect of Norwegian culture ,and now rosemåling painting is a global phenomenon.

Some of the designs in the movie can be seen on Hans waistcoat and Anna’s ballgown dress, as well as Elsa’s Snow Queen style.

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It’s no surprise that the style has since become a hit with artists the world over!

7. Limited edition Frozen merchandise is already worth thousands of dollars

If you’ve got your hands on one of these dolls, then definitely don’t ‘let it go’!

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Apparently Disney released some limited edition figures of Elsa and Anna, and the dolls are already worth over $10,000 on Ebay. In Harrods, London a special release doll set was issued worth £500, but desperate parents managed to bump the price up to over £6,000.

Parents are getting so crazy about tracking down different items for their dolls that they’re having to go online and spend thousands of pounds to keep their kids happy.

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Some people have reported buying doll accessories for their Anna and Elsa figures for between £10-£15, only to see them pop up on Ebay for five times that price a short time later!

If you’re stupid enough to pay it though, then we can’t really blame the sellers for cashing in!

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The Frozen doll craze has since been compared to the Cabbage Patch Kids in the 1980s.

6. Oaken the shopkeeper is (probably) gay

Remember Oaken, the jolly old shopkeeper in the middle of the snowy foothills?

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Of course you do! He had a great outfit and owned a very cute shop after all. But did you know that there’s a rumour floating about with regards to Oaken’s sexuality?

You might remember that Oaken shows off a photo of his family photograph, which features four healthy looking children with another man. All of them are in the sauna pulling a silly pose (see the picture below).

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Well some people noticed this unconventional family situation and decided to ask Disney whether the man in the photograph was Oaken’s husband.

Disney refused to confirm that Oaken was 100% gay, but they did release a statement which seemed to suggest that they knew exactly what they were doing with the big reveal.

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Oaken adds a nice bit of diversity to the movie!

5. The character of Kristoff was influenced by the Sámi people of Norway

Kristoff is an iceman in the film, a profession that not a lot of people had actually heard of.

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Apparently ice cutting used to be a real job in Norway, and Kristoff’s character is actually heavily influenced by the indigenous Sámi people of northern Norway!

We see a shot of some ice cutting right at the start of Frozen, and this used to be a real job in both Scandinavia and the USA. The ice harvesting industry was a big business and supplied ice for both domestic and commercial purposes.

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The Sámi people used to engage in this trade, but their best-known supply of income comes from reindeer herding – which is why we see Kristoff accompanied by his trusty steed Sven!

For environmental and cultural reasons, the reindeer herding industry is confined to the Sámi people, who still use reindeer for their fur and meat.

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That’s a pretty cool inspiration for one of Frozen‘s nicest characters!

4. One Florida cinema accidentally showed porn during a screening of Frozen

Oops! We’re bet the cinema owners were left a bit red-faced after this one.

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The Regal Cinemas Park Place Stadium 16 in Pinellas Park, Florida was forced to stall for time during a screening of Frozen due to some “technical difficulties” which actually delayed the start of the movie.

Managers decided to play a filler cartoon to try and keep the audience happy, and that’s when things went very badly wrong! Instead of an animated feature, a 2-minute sexually explicit scene was played instead.

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Apparently the theater in question showed the red-band trailed for Lars Von Trier’s infamous Nymphomaniac, which contains graphic depictions of oral sex (amongst other things).

One parent told Fox News: “It seemed like forever when you’re trying to, you know, cover a little guy’s eyes. I didn’t have enough hands to cover his ears too and he got the sound down real good.”

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Whoopsy. No doubt there were a lot of parents forced to have “the talk” a few years earlier than planned.

3. Elsa was supposed to be based on Amy Winehouse

This is crazy! But also kind of makes sense…

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Frozen‘s Elsa was originally supposed to be based entirely on the late troubled singer Amy Winehouse! Back when her character was supposed to be evil, animators were really inspired by Amy’s iconic beehive.

They even drew a few sketches of what evil Winehouse snow queen would look like, which you can check out below. And to go along with that vibe, Megan Mullally from Will and Grace was originally supposed to voice Elsa.

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She was all signed up to star in the movie until producers decided to go a different way. Mullally wasn’t the only veteran actress considered for the role either.

Believe it or not, Bette Midler was another early inspiration for Elsa, who they wanted to be more of a sassy and confident heroine.

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At one point she was supposed to resemble Midler’s personality.

2. The crew used 312 character mock-ups in the movie

We’re still trying to grasp just how much effort went into the making of Frozen.

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But some of the figures surrounding the movie’s production will continue to blow you away. It seems as though the creators were really detail-oriented, if their love of character sketches was anything to go by.

It might have had something to do with the fact that Elsa’s character in particular actually changed quite a lot during the making of Frozen.

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But one animator revealed that the crew ended up producing over 312 different character mock-ups in total.

That’s more than any other Disney film in existence! Wow…

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No wonder Frozen was also the most successful Disney film ever.

1. The longest frame in the movie took 132 hours to complete

We’ve already seen just how complicated the ice palace scene was.

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But it turns out that the longest single frame in the movie took a whopping 132 hours to create. We’re talking about the moment when Elsa strides out onto her new balcony to survey the scene around her.

This scene was so complex because it included her infamous hair strands (all 400,000 of them), plus her glistening dress, the shimmering ice and also factoring in how the light moves on all of these items from second to second.

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They also had to draft in Dr. Kenneth Libbrecht, a renowned snow expert, to help them out with the snow scenes.

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