Interview With The Frozen Fever Creators Chris Buck & Jennifer Lee #FrozenFever #CinderellaEvent

Last week while I was at the Cinderella Event, before watching Cinderella the new Frozen short, Frozen Fever was played. Frozen Fever is a cute short including all the beloved characters from Frozen. It happens to be Anna’s birthday and Elsa wants it to be perfect but she has a cold and every time she sneezes snow creatures are created and havoc ensues. I took my kids to a screening just a few days ago and they LOVED it as will you. I also had a moment to sit down with the creators (who are also the creators of Frozen) and find out how they are doing and what inspired this adorable short.

So it’s been a year. How are your lives now?

CHRIS BUCK : How are our lives now? Let’s see…

JENNIFER LEE : We thought they’d be less busy, but they’re not. So…

CHRIS BUCK : I still buy shirts at TJ Max. Hasn’t changed…

JENNIFER LEE : I still find myself going I have to buy another dress? So. So yeah. So nothing’s changed, really.

CHRIS BUCK : No. I mean, it…We, oh, since we first last talked, it’s been overwhelming, the year. We still get Youtube sent to us. I mean, I got one just yesterday…

JENNIFER LEE : Mm-hmm.

CHRIS BUCK : It’s actually very funny. Um, so I just, it’s, it’s been overwhelming. It really has. And I think the, you know

JENNIFER LEE : …still a surprise every day. It’s still…

In the Frozen Fever short, Elsa sneezing is the cutest thing ever. How’d you come up with that idea? Or who came up with the idea of her sneezing and snowmen come out?

JENNIFER LEE : One of our story artists, he was one of the head story artists on Frozen Fever… I mean Frozen itself. And we were brainstorming all, whatever could be, you know. Blue sky. Anything. And, um, we kept….. It would be nice to focus on Elsa more, and… ‘Cause she’s the one that people wonder What’s she like now? I mean, we end the film. We had this tragic character. We end the film, she’s free, but we don’t know. And, but we’d love to play with her magic in a different way, and he just said what if she’s a cold, and the cold wreaks havoc. And we, we just went crazy. I mean, … It got ridiculous at some points.

CHRIS BUCK : …you know, she would have this … stuff, but then suddenly, like, spikes would show up…

JENNIFER LEE : Create something else. And a sneeze does this, and blowing your nose does that. Like, we had all of these crazy… Does she know? Does she not know? So there were …. You know, still hours of what do we do? What if? But it was the idea itself was so simple, and fun. We just…

CHRIS BUCK : And it gave us license to have fun with Else.

During the interview we found that Chris and Jennifer are working on the Broadway Frozen musical and had a lot of input in the Frozen Fun feature at California Adventures. And they have no idea what’s next. They did discuss some of the inspiration in the location of Frozen.

CHRIS BUCK : …was… Mike was just going through, uh, books, and, uh, as many of the books he was going through, he’d seen a lot of, uh, internet stuff, too, but… And, and he was posting all these pages on Scandinavian, you know, beautiful scenery and architecture, and almost all the post-its were Norway.

So he said okay. Well, you know, we need our, our trip to Norway. Now we don’t say that it’s set in Norway. But, um…..It helps to have, um, something specific to kind of draw from. So it makes the world very believable. And their ideas in Norway, we’d never have come up with on our own, the, the stave church, which was very beautiful.

JENNIFER LEE : …real warmth and intimacy to the, to their, to the villages, and then when you get out to the vast Fjords, the contrast is great. And so it really, in the wood, it just lent itself to this beautiful extremes.

How much of it was really based on Hans Christian Anderson… Is it loosely based? Is it…

JENNIFER LEE : Yeah. I mean, we knew the Snow Queen is very, uh, was a compelling idea, but, you know, in the, in the, in the book she’s a… She’s evil, and you know nothing about her. She’s very one dimensional, and, and represents evil, and, and, uh, and in the original, uh, tonally, though, …..there’s a lot of similarity. And there’s a, the theme… We found the theme through the book. The theme and in the book it’s sort of, um, uh, love versus negativity. But we translated that in more extreme to literally to fear. So that was… That came from the book, and, and, um, and then it was just a lot more about, uh, sort of this, the setting, and, and things. But, but it’s a very different kind of a story, and, um, one that is beautiful in prose. But, you know. It’s, it’s not necessarily the most cinematic in terms of structure and, and things like that. So we wanted to have really three dimensional characters, and, and go deep into them. So we, we made it our own.

So from beginning to end, how long did it take to make the short?

JENNIFER LEE : Yeah. When did we…..June?

CHRIS BUCK : When we started the idea of Elsa getting a cold and all that. Just…So pretty much June through…

JENNIFER LEE : Through two weeks ago.…apparently. We’ve been called out for saying it’s a few months later. It’s 11 months….. Okay. It’s 11 months later. I’ll just say it. I mean. We’re animators. We…

CHRIS BUCK : Production-wise, like when we started animation or layout, it was probably August, wasn’t it?

JENNIFER LEE : …most of the, the writing and, and working with the songwriters was June through the end of August. And then…

In Frozen Fever Elsa sings “A Cold Never bothered me anyway” …what was the inspiration for that?

CHRIS BUCK : They did that. It was great. I think….Correct me if I’m wrong, but I know that a lot of kids, when they sang Let it Go, they sang that. They sang…

JENNIFER LEE : They sang a cold…

CHRIS BUCK : A cold never bothers me anyway…So they sort of… I think it might have been riffed… riffed off of that. And they …. You know, kids sing it so, like, that is the lyric. ‘Cause it’s like a cold, and their lives is so debilitating, and so big that it’s, like, that’s not gonna bother me. I’m gonna get through this! So, it’s so cute when they do it. And I think of it as a little bit of a nod to that, too.

You can only see Frozen Fever before the movie Cinderella in theaters March 13th.