Disney’s animated film “Frozen” was such a huge success because lead characters Queen Elsa and Princess Anna showcased the power of love and friendship and proved that girls can stand up on their own without needing any handsome prince to save them.

But the original “Frozen” film that producers had in mind featured a completely different Elsa. Peter Del Vecho told Entertainment Weekly that when they started making the film, Elsa and Anna were not sisters. They were not even royalty. Elsa was a self-proclaimed Snow Queen because she is pure evil, while Anna is a pure-hearted heroine who has the ability to melt even the most hardened hearts.

READ: More details about ‘Frozen 2’ revealed

Elsa became evil because she was jilted at the altar, so she froze her own heart and swore never to love again. She creates an army of snow monsters to “bring destruction to the kingdom of Arendelle,” and Anna, together with Kristoff, will be the one to stop her.

Prince Hans, on the other hand, is a two-faced royal who creates an avalanche that will destroy Arendelle. The twist in the movie is that Hans is the one with the actual frozen heart, and Elsa’s heart will thaw in the end, allowing her to love again.

It sounds like a good story, but the one Disney came up with in the end is much better. “The problem was that we felt like we had seen it before,” Del Vecho explained. “It wasn’t satisfying. We had no emotional connection to Elsa — we didn’t care about her because she had spent the whole movie being the villain. We weren’t drawn in. The characters weren’t relatable.”

To make Elsa relatable, Del Vecho said they made her afraid of herself and her powers. “Now we had a character in Anna who was all about love and Elsa who was all about fear. That led to making Elsa a much more dimensional sympathetic character, and instead of the traditional good vs. evil theme we had one that we felt was more relatable: Love vs. fear, and the premise of the movie became that love is stronger than fear,” he continued.

Meanwhile, a lot of people suspected that Elsa and Anna’s parents died in a shipwreck while sailing south to Rapunzel and Flynn’s wedding in Corona.

But Mandy Moore, the actress who voices Rapunzel, told TV Line that the theory is far-fetched. “That's a pretty morbid fan theory — it feels like someone is really reaching to lost territory,” she said. “There is no connection, as far as I know.”

Frozen
Elsa from “Frozen” was initially created to be the animated film’s super villain. Disney
RELATED STORIES