By A few new details have come out about Disney’s adaptation of Hans Christian Anderson’s The Snow Queen. The original fairy tale follows a young girl, Gerda, as she tries to save her friend Kai from the corruption of the Snow Queen. You know that part in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe where Edmund starts hanging out with the White Witch and then turns into a massive jerk? That’s ripped directly from The Snow Queen. I had an animated version of the story as a kid that I adored, and though I’m sure it’s absolutely terrible in retrospect, it followed the original tale fairly closely.
Disney’s adaptation, Frozen, which is aiming for a 2013 release date over Pixar’s awesome dinosaur movie, is using the original fairy tale as more of a jumping-off point than anything. The story now follows Anna, whose sister, the Snow Queen, wants to turn the world into an endless winter. Anna enlists the help of a rugged mountain man named Kristoff, a reindeer with one antler, and a “hapless snowman” to play in an animated version of the Winter Olympics and stop her sister.
Basically, the story is not an adaptation at all, unless there’s some hidden messages about winter and cruelty somewhere in there. Disney’s history of turning very dark fairy tales into something a lot more family-friendly seems to be ringing true here, so I’m a little concerned. Then again, Tangled took a new approach to Rapunzel and did a pretty good job talking about parental emotional abuse, so Frozen might be pretty interesting. It’s nice to see another female lead, at the very least.
[Via /Film]