A significant portion of Frozen 2's story delves into the difference between fairy tales and myths, which splits Anna and Elsa's as Anna is a fairy tale character and Elsa is a mythic character. The team responsible for shepherding this facet of Frozen 2 shared some details regarding how they designed and told the princesses' stories during a recent Q&A session.
At an early press day for Frozen 2 at Walt Disney Animation Studios, Screen Rant and other entertainment outlets sat in on presentations from the animations and artists themselves; they explained what they did to bring Anna and Elsa's latest journey to life on the big screen and even shared a few behind the scenes facts about the production.
After the presentation, they - Marc Smith (Director of Story), Becky Bresee (Head of Animation), Marlon West (Head of Effects Animation), Hyun-Min Lee (Animation Supervisor - Anna), Griselda Sastrawinata-Lema (Visual Development Artist), and Wayne Unten (Animation Supervisor - Elsa) - answered a couple of questions from the attending journalists.
Do you factor in the actors that are voicing the roles? And when you're designing the physicality of them, are you thinking of how the lines are going to be delivered when you're programming how they're moving?
Hyun-Min Lee (Animation Supervisor - Anna): So when... Wait, that's like a huge part of it, too. We... Well, when the actors themselves, when they're recording, they're just standing in front of the microphone, usually. But we still get a recorded footage of them recording it. And there's a lot in how they're their stance is standing, or how their facial expressions are working. And because we were also animating to the pre-recorded track, when we're listening to it, we listen to the track, like, hundreds and hundreds of times to listen to all the inflections and the little breaths and intakes, and all the emotions in every single part of the dialogue. So, I think when we do get to see them actually recording those lines, it gives us a lot of good ideas and references for the subtleties that goes into actually seeing that in their face when the characters are saying it. And so, it's definitely something we study a lot.
In the first Frozen early press day, you guys talked about how you watched Idina Menzel sing, and how you actually did the breaths with her, and you could really see that in film. Is that something you did with the dance as well?
Wayne Unten (Animation Supervisor - Elsa): Yes! I mean, for the songs. We definitely... It's funny, 'cause like Hyun-Min saying, she's in front of a microphone. And a lot of it we can't see because there's the recording booth, but you can tell what the body's doing. And so we can use those accents to help sort of drive… like this moment where we might need an exit in our animation. She may be doing something completely different in the animation. But there's something physical that happens when just producing the sound. So you can kind of like, key into that a little bit...
Becky Bresee (Head of Animation): Yeah, it's balancing the mechanics of what's going on, what the breath and the body with the emotion of the scene...
Wayne Unten: Yeah...
Becky Bresee: So there's kind of a balance. 'Cause if you make it look too much like Idina, it might be just too... too much, you know? Because she's doing a lot with her body as she's singing and all of that...
Wayne Unten: Yeah, one of the things that we wanted to stay true to was, what is the moment. Like, we didn't want to... of course we want it to be believable. 'Cause if it's just, you know, the mouth is moving, but then you don't feel it, then it draws the audience out. And, at the same time, if we went too far with that, and too far with singing, then that could also draw the audience out, and take them away from the story. So it's really it's about... thinking about the audience, in a way. Like, it's kind of like this trust. We're telling a story, and we don't want them to be taken out of that story.
I had a question about Elsa's costumes. We talked about Anna a little bit. But, in the first movie Elsa makes that dress out of ice. And I'm noticing in this, in the ocean scene, that her body suit kind of melts into crystals along her skin. So is she supposed to have created her clothing still in this one? Or is it just kind of a new design? How is this supposed to work?
Griselda Sastrawinata-Lemay (Visual Development Artist): I think you will have that answer later on, and we believe the costume designer's can answer that for you much better than I do.
Hyun-Min Lee: Anticipating...
Griselda Sastrawinata-Lemay: In short, yes.
So this is a follow-up to the first one. We see Elsa using her powers more, coming into her own. Did you all take any inspiration from Frozone, from Incredibles 2. Like, how he's using his ice powers more, blast-y. Did you talk to the Pixar team about how he uses his powers...
Marlon West (Head of Effects Animation): We never speak to them. [Laughs] All kidding aside, you know, even before the first Frozen, Frozone, Iceman I mean, there were other characters that shot... ice out of their hands. So our job was to really kind of separate Elsa from them. You know, she has a lot of signature design in her snow. The snow kind of gears up. And her magic kind of gears up before she blasts. And things like that. So, we were much more preoccupied with helping the story and the production design, and support Elsa; who she is throughout these two films, you see Elsa as a child creating magic one way. You see her in the first film almost involuntarily creating it. In this film she creates things. Huge pieces of magic like, quickly. So we actually think less about the specifics of snow and ice when creating things for Elsa because she... it's almost like a mental thing for her. She envisions something and it's created. Not, yeah. We really kind of lean away from other characters that are actually also kind of ice based.
Wayne Unten: Yeah. Yeah. Like, there's other emergency magic that she has.
Marlon West: Yeah.
Wayne Unten: In the dark sea sequence where we kinda see in the trailer. And you'll see more in the film. Trying to remember what you guys have seen.
Marlon West: Treading lightly.
Wayne Unten: But... One of the things that we did when we first started talks with the animators on this film, was just I brought up different clips of different superheroes, and said we're not doing this. We're really looking at what we had established on the first film. So Elsa is graceful. She's... in a way she's been kind of groomed to be the queen. But there's this nice grace to her. Her fingers, for example, when she's casting the magic, there's a nice flow to them. Instead of a claw type of thing. We did something like that in the first film. But that was only, really, to illustrate a point that... Remember in the first film, Hans says don't be the monster that they fear you are. And we had had that moment where she was being attacked by those guys. And, you know, she was kind of doing a monster type claw. So we stayed away from that. And again, like the Martha Graham, pulling from that. The inspiration from that. It works in line with how… again, she is graceful.
Like you mentioned Frozone. I wanted to make sure that we weren't repeating the things that they were doing. And I think it was pretty easy because Elsa, we've already established her as a character, and who she is. But still, wanting to study, just see what they're doing. And it looked like they were doing something more like a speed skater - which in a lot of the moves where he's active. And I think when he's battling a lot of the villains. It does feel much like a speed skater. So it looks like they were pulling from that. I can't say for sure, but it definitely feels like it. And we're pulling more from Martha Graham and modern dance.