‘Truly emotional’: Frozen films director on seeing world she imagined come alive at Hong Kong Disneyland

By 2020, the Journal of Psychology and Theology was publishing “Trauma, eco-spirituality, and transformation in Frozen 2: Guides for the Church and climate change.”

‘The best in years’: teens try out World of Frozen at Hong Kong Disneyland

“That’s the reason, look at those mountains,” explains Michael Moriarty, Hong Kong Disneyland’s managing director, gesturing towards the background peaks of Lantau Island. He’s strolling about Arendelle at its recent opening gala, seven years to the week since the project was revealed to the public.

It also helps that, though it’s not actually freezing, by some meteorological magic Disney has persuaded the nighttime temperature to drop seven degrees Celsius (13 degrees Fahrenheit).

Into the chilly breeze, on a platform specially constructed for song and speeches upon the Bay of Arendelle, step the corporate honchos: Josh D’Amaro, chairman of Disney Experiences, and – a big surprise – Bob Iger, who, rather like Elsa, once ruled Disney until he tried to let it go in 2021 and then, following dramatic plot reversals, was brought back as chief executive to continue the adventure.

Between the men, there’s a woman: blonde, petite, smiley. Her name is Jennifer Lee. She’s the chief creative officer of Walt Disney Animation Studios. She co-wrote and co-directed Frozen, and wrote and co-directed Frozen 2.

Best of all, she’s the original inspiration for Anna, and her elder sister, Amy, is the original Elsa.

Lee’s seen all the site photos and watched all the videos of work in progress, but this is the first time she’s set foot in Hong Kong Arendelle and her voice is breathless with emotion. “A decade ago, at Disney Animation,” she begins, “there was a small group of us dreaming about a story about two sisters …”

Disney believes in having only first names on its badges, so there’s an initial moment of confusion on my part when it turns out the blonde woman alongside Lee, and simply labelled Amy, isn’t Lee’s sister, but Amy Astley, Disney’s senior vice-president, publicity/communications.

Lee finds this funny, and as we trudge off in a PR cohort towards Arendelle’s forest for our interview, she keeps looking back at the Golden Crocus Inn and marvelling that it’s painted the exact colours of the films’ sisters’ gowns at Elsa’s coronation.

Our interview takes place in the Playhouse in the Woods, Anna and Elsa’s “secret childhood hideaway” where, in a few days, paying punters will be able to enjoy what Disney calls an “immersive experience” with two Western, English-speaking actors playing the sisters.

We’re placed in directors’ chairs (“This is lovely,” Lee says) and at least half a dozen media handlers cluster around, immersively, for 35 minutes. Lee doesn’t seem fazed by this, or perhaps she’s already been so overcome – I’d already heard about earlier crying – she doesn’t mind, ahem, the immersion.

“I’m still struggling to find my words because it’s one of the most profound and truly emotional feelings,” she says. “The characters are in a dream world for me, they’re always there. And that you’re literally, viscerally, stepping into it …”

When Lee had been brought in as screenwriter by Chris Buck, Frozen’s director, the project was loosely based on The Snow Queen, one of 19th century Danish author Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales, and the Elsa figure was supposed to be the villain.

Lee took things in a different direction – although the barnstorming, my-way-or-the-highway vibe of “Let It Go” is a remnant of that original ice-hearted ego – and the story ended up more a tender testimony to sisterly love. (Andersen still gets a co-writer credit.)

What does Amy – sister Amy – think of all this? “I kept saying to Amy, ‘You’re my Elsa’ and she was, like, ‘I don’t know what that means.’ Then we did an early screening in New York and she was just … sobbing,” says Lee. “She said, ‘I don’t think anyone could understand – that’s us.’

“We were kids who grew up with a mom who worked a lot, our parents were divorced. Amy was the responsible one, she had all the burdens. She was magical to me. Everything she did I thought was the greatest thing, though I was not quite so magical to her.”

Lee grins. She’s like a good Disney movie herself. She can switch seamlessly between emotions. “I was the wild child. I had all the creativity, like Anna.”

There’s a moment in Frozen 2 when Elsa and Anna’s royal mother gathers her daughters within her arms at bedtime, softly cooing, “Cuddle close, scooch in.” I ask if that was one of her mother’s sayings, and Lee hesitates, surprised.

“Oh, that’s cute … I think … my mom worked so hard. [She was a psychiatric nurse.] It tended to be we’d all get on the couch together, maybe on a Sunday evening … maybe she’d be lying down and we’d have a tumble on her … she worked so hard … but she wanted us close.”

On the whole, however, Lee’s wasn’t a happy childhood. There was the upheaval of her parents’ divorce, the departure of her father, the shift to a new home, a new school.

“Bambi helped me through that grief I had,” she says. Then Cinderella was a bulwark against being bullied at school, and she keeps the original, late-1940s pencil drawings of Cinderella’s wardrobe upgrade in her office, as a visual prompt, one that says you can go to the ball.

Lee is now 52 and for years, she says, she lived in a parallel zone with her own stories, “I think I would have been diagnosed as an ADHD kid for sure. I always had a restlessness. I’d lie down at night and my engine didn’t want to shut off.

“That was the time when I would create these stories, working out the actual dialogue. I’d surrender to these sagas. For me, my imagination was my refuge.”

Which suggests ADHD may be a good thing. “I agree,” she says, “I think what ADHD has allowed me to do, but it’s taken a long time, is that I can make associations and connections with things other people may not see.

“I think the ADHD brain is like Swiss cheese – beautiful, but it has holes in it. You don’t learn everything linearly, there are these little pockets – whoops! – you dip in. But they fill in over time.

“I didn’t step into the doors of Disney until I was 39. I was not ready until then and that’s OK.”

In 2011, Lee was asked by Phil Johnston, who was writing the screenplay for Disney’s Wreck-It Ralph, to give him some short-term help. They’d met at Columbia University in New York, when she was doing a master of fine arts in film, having been an art director at Random House.

By then, she’d experienced significant loss (a boyfriend had drowned), she’d married, divorced and had a daughter, Agatha. What she brought to Disney, apart from a talent for storytelling, was a grown woman’s life experience. Her gig was extended. And in 2012, Frozen came along, the dawning of a new ice age.

Not in a million years, she says, could she have imagined the audience reaction. She’d had no thought of a sequel, never mind a bricks-and-mortar themed land.

“We were just trying to figure the story out, you’re a whole collection of people with nothing but ideas and you’re just immersed in that – the building of it on screen.”

For Frozen 2, Buck and she had asked themselves one question: how does Elsa have her special powers? “And we were like, ‘Oh no! There’s more story!’

“We knew we were hooked immediately.” In other words, they couldn’t let it go.

Hong Kong Disneyland’s recovery slowed by ‘staff shortage, lack of flights’

“Elsa trying to tell jokes is one of the funniest ideas.” Not a natural comedian then? “She tries, the poor thing. I think of her having to face the crowds at Arendelle, an introvert’s nightmare. Things like that are in my head all the time.”

Does Amy feel proprietorial? “Oh no,” and adding, no pun apparently intended, “She’s cool with it.”

It was during preparation work on Frozen 2 that Lee realised Anna was struggling, for the first time in her life, with fear. “She’s nervous because she has everything to lose,” she explains.

“In the first movie, she has everything to gain. But now, she has everything she’s always wanted and she feels the fragility of it.”

You don’t have to be a psychologist to spot a possible connection or to note with interest that in 2021, Lee married British actor Alfred Molina, probably best known as Dr Octopus in Spider-Man 2 (2004), who voices Anna’s father in the film. (Daughter Agatha had voiced the nine-year-old Anna in Frozen’s poignant passage-of-time song, “Do You Want to Build a Snowman?”)

There’s certainly a darker flavour to Frozen 2, and “Into the Unknown”, in this viewer’s opinion, is even more of a blood-stirring Elsa clarion call than “Let It Go”. (The song was nominated for a 2019 Academy Award.)

But Olaf, the daffy snowman, is having an existential crisis. “Do you ever worry about the notion that nothing is permanent,” he asks. Loss is in the air, and there are some finely judged moments of grieving for parents and friends.

In the film’s last few minutes, Olaf says to Elsa, “I love happy endings! I mean, I presume we’re done …” and Elsa replies, “We’re done,” which the naive might have taken as a narrative line drawn conclusively in the snow.

Lee, however, is now making Frozen 3, about which – she gives a knowing nod to communications Amy – she’s not allowed to say anything.

About four hours after this interview, Bob Iger, speaking live from Hong Kong, will tell Good Morning America that there “might be a Frozen 4 in the works” and that Lee’s working on two stories simultaneously.

Social media, of course, is already on the case; an avalanche of opinion that Elsa should be gay is gaining force. “That’s dangerous storytelling,” Lee says. “I hear it occasionally in the studio: ‘I don’t want a character who …’

“But it’s not what you want, it’s ‘Who is this character? What does she need?’ It’s hard because you never know what the landscape is like on social media. You can only know what it’s like in that story room.”

The landscape she’s most enjoying at the moment, however, is Arendelle. “It’s an escape, it’s joyous – I’ll live here!” She’s thrilled Oaken has not only his own trading post but his own roller-coaster (Wandering Oaken’s Sliding Sleighs) which she’d loved.

She gives a huge peal of laughter when I tell her I’d found it terrifying though it was a breeze compared with Frozen Ever After, a boat ride to Elsa’s Ice Palace that involves (spoiler alert) a vertical drop into darkness.

I’d tried both rides a few weeks earlier on Halloween weekend, when Disney had allowed media and employees’ families to spend a few hours in Arendelle. They’re expected to prove popular, which just shows there’s no accounting – unless you’re Disney – for popular taste.

During my time in the park, I’d chatted to several Arendellians, local employees here to bring this world to life, who appeared to be the last beings on Earth never to have heard of Frozen. “You mean people know us,” asked one, nametagged Marvin, “out in the world?”

As the evening sky dims, the castle’s glow shimmers across the Bay of Arendelle. Apart from Wandering Oaken’s Sliding Sleighs’ screaming riders, the gala had been peaceful.

Later, Lee would say about the state of the world and her own childhood, “I look at all the stories in the films, and they can’t do the work for you – none of them can – but they’re all little lights in the dark.”

In the village toy shop I’d bought a postcard of Elsa and Anna, for Marla, aged two and already a fan, in London. Ten days later, her parents sent a video of her scrutinising the royal sisters intently.

After a moment, she runs towards her mother, still clutching it in her hand, shouting, “I’m so happy! I’m so happy!”