Oscar-Nominated Songs With Familiar Composers (original) (raw)
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The Nominees Are Blockbusters
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Melena Ryzik explores the Disney animation studios and speaks with the creators of the Oscar-nominated film “Frozen.”
- Feb. 19, 2014
The story in “Frozen,” the blockbuster Disney musical, did not originally center on two sister princesses. Based loosely on “The Snow Queen” fairy tale, it always had a pair of girls at its core, but it wasn’t until several years into the production process, at a story meeting in the company’s Burbank, Calif., headquarters, that someone suggested that Elsa and Anna be siblings.
Suddenly, “everything started to click,” said Chris Buck, a director of the film. They convened what they called “a sister summit,” for Disney staff to kvetch and gush about their family members. “We got a lot from that,” Mr. Buck said.
Still, the older Elsa (voiced by Idina Menzel) and the plucky Anna (Kristen Bell) were not the simpatico kind of sisters. “At the time, Anna was this perfect, perfect princess,” said Kristen Anderson-Lopez, a composer for the film with her husband, Robert Lopez. “And Elsa was really just jealous.”
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PHARRELL WILLIAMS was “challenged to go inward” for “Happy” from “Despicable Me 2.”Credit...Matt Sayles/Invision, via Associated Press
It was only when the Lopezes delivered Elsa’s anthem, “Let It Go,” an Oscar front-runner for best song, that the characters, and the movie’s true story line, revealed itself.
“The minute we heard the song the first time, I knew that I had to rewrite the whole movie,” said Jennifer Lee, the screenwriter and co-director.
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