It’s the glue in many father-daughter relationships, with its earworm anthem and empowered princesses. Can the most successful animated film of all time do it again?
If we go by Disney’s in-house lore, the idea of making a movie of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow
Queen had been kicking around for more than 70 years by the time it was green-lit. Andersen’s chilly fable, brightened for a modern audience with original songs and a narrative spin that put the relationship between two sisters at its core, was renamed Frozen. At its premiere in 2013, Disney’s chief executive, Bob Iger, wept behind his 3D glasses. And why not? Within weeks the movie had made more than $800m in worldwide bums-on-seats. Its soundtrack was No1. The DVD sold 3m copies in a day. Though a sequel has been slow in coming – Frozen II is in cinemas later this month – it has been an absolute inevitability, ever since somebody, somewhere, bought the clinching ticket or disc and Frozen moved past
The Lion King to become the most successful animated film of all time.
I was the father of a new baby girl when the Frozen madness began, back in 2013. In the tiny gaps between ninja nappy-wrapping and sprinting out on emergency Persil runs to the shops, I was vaguely aware of the arrival of a cultural phenomenon. I didn’t know the specifics, nothing of the heroine-princess Elsa, her younger sister Anna, their gang of comic friends or their quest to save a frozen Scandinavian kingdom from ruin. I hadn’t heard any of the songs which, people said, were wilier and more mischievous than the straighter, soapier, we’re-in-love-now ballads that defined
Disney movies past.