Do You Want to Build a Movie? An Oral History of Frozen

If you’d told any of this to Jonathan Groff in 2013, he’d have done a double take. “I have to say, there was not this sense when it was being made that we were making a blockbuster movie,” says the actor, who costars as Anna’s strong but sensitive love interest, Kristoff. “That was not the expectation. Tangled was the animated film before Frozen, and that had done well, but it wasn’t a huge box office hit. So it felt like they were making another fairytale movie, and we’ll see how it goes.”

That wasn’t precisely how it felt for the rest of the film’s cast and creative team, particularly cowriters and codirectors Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee. Frozen’s massive success came after a frenzied, sometimes tortuous development and production process. Entire script drafts were written and tossed as the film’s deadline—accelerated by an entire year partway through the production—approached. “I know there was actually fear in the studio that second to last screening, fear about our movie,” says Del Vecho.

Then, miraculously, everything fell into place. At the film’s final screening, Lee remembers, songwriter Kristen Anderson-Lopez was shocked: “She walked out and went, “When did this get good?”

When did it? We sat down with all of Frozen’s major players—including Idina Menzel and Kristen Bell—to find out.

In the beginning, there was Elsa. In 2008, Buck—the director of Disney’s Tarzan—successfully pitched the studio a loose adaptation of Hans Christian Anderson’s fable The Snow Queen, which follows a determined young girl named Gerda as she tries to rescue her playmate Kai from the titular chilly witch. The studio had attempted to adapt the same material several times before, though none of them had come to fruition. From the start, Buck’s version was going to be about a woman who isn’t saved by a handsome prince. He changed Gerda’s name but kept her as the story’s protagonist, even inserting it into the title: Anna and the Snow Queen.

Chris Buck (codirector and cowriter): It opened with Elsa’s wedding, and she was jilted at the altar. She ran out of the church, ran up to the mountains, and made a wish on a star so that she would never feel this pain again. The wish froze her heart, so she would never feel pain—but she also couldn’t feel love again. She couldn’t feel anything. She was basically a villain. Anna and Elsa, they knew each other. They lived in the same village. Believing that Elsa was not a bad person, and was not evil, Anna was the one that was going to save Elsa.

In 2009, Disney held a preliminary table read for Anna and the Snow Queen featuring Megan Mullally as the titular villain, Josh Gad as her evil henchman—a wisecracking snowman named Olaf—Santino Fontana as a townsperson, and Ginnifer Goodwin as Elsa’s naive foil, Anna.

Josh Gad (Olaf): At that time, the story was vastly different. It was a story about an evil queen named Elsa and a young heroine named Anna. It was much more, I would say, like previous Disney films—just more traditional storytelling. [Olaf] was like a Iago [from Aladdin].

Santino Fontana (Hans): Jamie Roberts was casting Tangled, and she came and saw me in Billy Elliot, and I met with her, and then I didn’t end up getting that job, of course. And then she called me back for this movie. I can’t remember the character’s name, but it was a completely different setup—I was a tour guide in a magical snow land or something.

Gad: And the movie disappeared.

Fontana: They shelved that movie. She told me, “Did great, but it’s not moving forward with anyone. The movie’s not happening.”

The studio did indeed shelve the movie. But Disney revived it a year later, following the success of Tangled, another fairytale-focused story that became one of the highest-grossing films of 2010. Still, though, Anna and the Snow Queen wasn’t gelling—even after they found their Anna and the title was changed, Tangled-style, to the more evocative, less princessy Frozen.

Kristen Bell (Anna): I had auditioned for Tangled. I mean, spoiler, I didn’t get it. But Jamie [Sparer Roberts], the casting director at Disney, had pulled me aside after my audition. She said, “I think I want you to meet Chris Buck, who’s directing our next movie, which will be in a year or two.”

We sat, we had bagels together, and he told me about Anna and the Snow Queen, and said, “I think you’re right for it. We’ll give you a call.” And then, sure enough, about six months later, I got a call that Chris wanted to start on the movie.

Chris Buck: It just didn’t work. We had a screening or two [based on the revamped script], and it just wasn’t jiving yet.

Peter Del Vecho (producer): No one could really relate to Elsa, because she wasn’t human enough. She was too distant.

Buck: We even had designs where she was blue at one point.

Then came a crucial brainstorming session where someone in the Disney inner circle—nobody can remember quite who—made a suggestion: What if Anna and Elsa weren’t acquaintances, but relatives? What if they were sisters?

Bell: What that does to a script is it makes it much more real. There aren’t really that many villains in life—not as many as there are movies. But there’s a lot of drama between sisters. There’s a lot of turmoil when love is that deep. I have two girls right now, and they love each other ferociously, and I watch them say the nastiest things to each other.

The sisters idea clicked the movie’s plot into place, and was also instrumental in attracting another pair of collaborators: songwriters Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez, who had originally entered the Disney fold when they wrote the songs for the Finding Nemo musical that still plays regularly at Disney World.

Robert Lopez (music and lyrics): That’s when we came aboard. They pitched me the whole story, such as it was, and showed me some of the images that they were playing with. The only thing that ran through my mind was, “I cannot wait to tell Kristen about this.” They had these pictures of young Anna and Elsa: Elsa was throwing up some snow magic, and Anna was running around in circles. It just reminded me of our daughters, and Kristen also has twin sisters who are much younger than her. I knew that it would be something Kristen had a lot to say about.

Making Elsa similar in age to Anna had a second positive domino effect: prompting the team to cast Tony winner Idina Menzel as the film’s second lead.

Del Vecho: When we were auditioning for Elsa, we asked Bobby and Kristen, what are some songs that we could suggest people sing when they come in? And they listed several songs, many of which I didn’t know. So I went on YouTube for those, and they were all Idina Menzel songs.

Idina Menzel (Elsa): I went in for Tangled and put my voice down. I didn’t get it because I fell between the cracks. My age was wrong to be either the evil mom or Rapunzel. So then, the casting director admittedly bootlegged that recording of me and kept it on her phone for a long time. We knew that they were going to be casting for this new movie they were working on. And so she talked me up, and played my little recording from Tangled.

Bell: There were other names thrown out that were circling the Snow Queen role that were not Idina’s age demographic. So, the second it was Idina, they decided it would be sisters.

Del Vecho: We hadn’t cast [Bell and Menzel] yet, but we asked them to come for the table read. None of the songs have been written yet, but we wanted to show the power of it being a musical, the power of these two women singing.

Jennifer Lee (codirector and cowriter): So they sang a song together.

Buck: “Wind Beneath My Wings.”

Menzel: It was actually Kristen’s idea to do “Wind Beneath My Wings” as a duet. We learned that in my house at the piano and then figured out what our little harmonies would be. And then we sat around [then-Disney Animation head] John Lasseter, each of us, and we read through the script and then sang the song together. And that’s how we got the job.

Buck: Bob [Lopez] and Kristen [Anderson-Lopez] were there, and they’re like, “Oh my gosh—good luck to us,” because that song was so powerful coming out in both of their voices.

The rest of the cast began to take shape. Fontana was brought back to play Hans, an apparent Prince Charming who woos Anna before revealing himself as Frozen’s actual villain. Another Broadway veteran was cast as Anna’s second love interest, mountain man Kristoff.

Jonathan Groff (Kristoff): I sang a Stephen Sondheim song from my audition: “Everybody Says Don’t” from Anyone Can Whistle. And I remember feeling like I’m never going to get this. A couple of months after the audition, I got a call saying that I was in the final three. They take your audition and they pair it with Kristen Bell’s voice, and whichever voice of the three of us paired the best with Kristen was the person that was going to get the job.

Lee: Chris said, “Well, there is this guy who came in, Jonathan Groff. He’s not what we were thinking at all, but you need to hear him.” And they played Jonathan’s voice, and I went, “Oh my God. It’s like butter.” Everyone was swooning—men and women, everyone. His voice was incredible.

Gad, who’d broken big as the star of The Book of Mormon on Broadway since the days of Anna and the Snow Queen, was once again cast as Olaf—though he almost had to drop out of the movie.

Del Vecho: He was doing a movie for a competitor, and the competitor told him that if he does our movie, he’ll be let go. And I remember calling Josh, and saying, “You need to do both.”

Gad: I was attached to a Dreamworks animated movie called Me and My Shadow. And at that time, Jeffrey Katzenberg had a very healthy rivalry with the Disney company, and he basically created a Sophie’s choice for me where I had to choose between projects.

Del Vecho: They even put restrictions on what Josh could do: he couldn’t publicize [Frozen], he couldn’t do press. And we said, okay, we’ll agree to that. And that other project, I think it got canceled.

Gad: To the best of my knowledge, what happened was they had released a couple of movies that were more adult-skewing that didn’t work. Their strategy became, I think, more kid-oriented stuff. It’s a bummer because it was beautiful. But on the flip side, I don’t think I ever would’ve done Frozen had it not gone that way.

Though the cast was in place, the film’s script was still far from its final form.

Anderson-Lopez: The first thing we wrote was an eight-minute opening number called “We Know Better.” It went through [Anna and Elsa’s] whole childhood, up to the point where they had gone in a different direction. Like many eight minute opening numbers, it never made it into the movie.

Groff: I remember I was a hoarder at one point. I had this giant sleigh, I had all these tchotchkes—just random socks and suitcases and objects. It was a sleigh full of junk, basically.

Anderson-Lopez: Originally, Anna was almost a bridezilla—a Glinda kind of character.

Bell: Anna had an air about her that was not familiar to me. I remember that there was a point in the script when Kristoff brought her flowers and she was trying to be very nice, but telling him it was the wrong color yellow. And that is not something I can relate to, having being handed flowers and telling someone it’s the wrong color.

She was very nice, but she was more of a perfectionist. And as with many Disney characters, she was bubbly and outgoing, but there wasn’t a sense of vulnerability to her. So, I couldn’t find my way into the character. And when I was recording, I said that numerous times. I don’t know what gave me the moxie to say that. I was like, “Do you think she would really remind him again that the flowers were the wrong color?”

Groff: There were fight scenes between me and Hans at one point. They were trying to find the tone. They were trying to find the heart.

Lee: We did know Hans was going to be a villain, but we just hadn’t decided when. There was a big snowman battle that was really overwhelming to think about.

Menzel: I would show up, and I’d see the designs of the Blue Elsa on the wall for a while, and that was exciting. And then six months later, you come back like, nope, no blue.

Everything came to a head in the spring of 2012, when the creative team learned that Disney was moving up Frozen’s release date—and the film would be coming out a year earlier than they’d originally planned. Then they held a screening of their work-in-progress that met an icy reception.

Bell: This just wasn’t the right recipe. It wasn’t as special as it could be.

Lopez: That screening—it was such a horrible moment, because the whole thing collapsed. Chris had said, “Listen, everybody. It might be rough, it might be a bloodbath, but at the very least, we’ll all go to Dairy Queen. We do this after every screening. We go to the mall, and it’s just down the road, and we’ll go to Dairy Queen and we’ll drown in our sorrows.”

Anderson-Lopez: “We’ll all get blizzards.”

Lopez: Yeah. Then, after that screening, he was like, “Guys, I don’t think we’re going to Dairy Queen.”

But something positive came out of that disaster: a set of notes on the movie by Jennifer Lee, a screenwriter who was then working on the script for the 2012 Disney feature Wreck-It Ralph.

Lee: I wasn’t very nice about some things. I wrote “Kill the snowman,” because I just didn’t like the personality.

Buck: Well, he was annoying.

Gad: I recently presented an award for her, and she revealed for the first time at that ceremony that that was her note, to kill the snowman. I was like, “Oh God, I had no idea.” But I think that there was rightfully a feeling that it was a little annoying and generic

Lee: He was persnickety and mean. Because this is when Elsa was a villain. And Anna, I felt, was… This mountain man’s teaching her everything. The women were against each other, too. And I think I just felt… Personally, I kept saying, if you really want to make this about a different kind of true love and compassion, then it’s hard because they’re against each other.

Del Vecho [speaking to Lee]: You weren’t on the movie yet, but you gave notes, and we could tell that the type of notes you were giving was the movie that Chris wanted.

Lee: Yeah. I mean, it wasn’t just mean.

Buck: No, that was the thing. You think your notes were rough, but that’s exactly what the movie needed.

Buck and his team decided to change course entirely, rewriting the movie from the ground up. They officially recruited Lee to cowrite the script—and, eventually, to co-direct the film as well, making her the first woman to helm a Disney animated movie.

Buck: Especially when you’re a solo director, and you don’t have that other person to sort of bounce things off of—there was something in my head I wanted, but it wasn’t on the screen yet. And I wasn’t sure how to get there yet. There were fragments of ideas, but nothing was there yet.

So I came and sat on your desk, and asked if you would be interested in writing [Frozen]. And you had never written a musical before. I know that was a concern. We said, “We’re going to do a two-day offsite. Just come to the offsite and see what you think.” And on our first day, there were lots of ideas being thrown around, and then we broke for dinner. And Jenn [Lee] didn’t come. You charted out the movie, and when we came back from dinner, you said something to the effect of, “I think I can write this too. I think I can see it now.”

Ed Catmull (former president, Walt Disney Animation Studios): One of my greatest memories was of an offsite for the film when everything clicked into place over several hours. There was no sense of ego, just of solving the story problems. You live for these kinds of moments.

Del Vecho: That was the day where Kristen [Anderson-Lopez] just said, “I have one word for you: Trolls.”

Bell: Because the script was being written from the ground up and it was already cast, Jenn met with us numerous times to talk about our characters—what we wanted from them, what we could bring. And it was probably the most fun I’ve ever had developing something, and maybe the only time I’ve ever truly developed something. I can’t believe they let me make Anna as weird as she was.

Buck: A lot of those characters are balanced because Jenn and I would talk so much, and obviously have different perspectives on them. Or I might have certain ideas on the women that might be somewhat cliche or stereotypical, and Jenn would always say, “We could do something a little better, a little more interesting.”

Exciting as it was, a page-one rewrite also meant the creative team and cast were in a mad scramble to finish the movie—which was scheduled to be released just 18 months after the screening that blew up Frozen.

Bell: I’m pretty sure we recorded that first movie completely, the first script that we scrapped. We spent a year and a half doing it.

Fontana: I never got a full script of Frozen. I didn’t know the full story until I saw it for the first time.

Gad: I knew nothing about what the hell the movie was. I was coming in there and I was doing my sessions, but I wasn’t recording with Kristen or Idina and Jonathan.

Groff: As the actors, we were just like, who am I now? It was just constantly laying down different things.

Gad: There was this travelogue series, and they would get celebrities to go to different places. They sent me to New York, and I invited Bobby Lopez, who I’d worked on Book of Mormon with, to go on a carriage ride with me in Central Park. So as the cameras were up, it was like, “How’s Frozen going?” Because he was much more involved in the day-to-day than I was. He goes, “It’s kind of a mess.”

Groff: We could pop in and out. It was sort of like when parents don’t notice their children growing because they see them every day, but this was the opposite: You could see them all dying internally because of how hard it was.

Menzel: You come in, they’re like, we wrote this scene because you inspired us. And then I say, well, wait, is there still a big snow monster guy? And they’re like, well, we changed that. And because I’ve been involved in so many original musicals that take so many years to develop, I’m kind of comfortable in that process. You’ve got to just be patient and know when you’re around greatness. You just have to trust.

Bell: I’m an eternal optimist. Doubts don’t serve me. I was just like, “Well, we’re going back in today. I’m going to fix something else.” I think that worrying is praying for something bad, and I’m not interested in wasting my time there. So I was very much just riding the wave.

Buck: When you’re in development for a while, you’re like, “Come on, come on, come on, come on.” When you have that deadline, it seems the magic is that decisions get made.

It helped that after the offsite trip, the movie would soon gain a new fulcrum: a ballad for Elsa called “Let It Go.”

Anderson-Lopez: We made an outline at this two-day retreat. One of the things on the outline just said “Elsa’s Badass Song.”

Lopez: Kristen was the one that came up with the title. She said to me, “I think the song should be called ‘Let It Go,’ because she’s letting go of her past and she’s letting go of her power.” I told her, “Don’t pitch it just yet, because I feel like maybe that’s on the nose,” and she went ahead and pitched it at this meeting anyway—rightly. And everyone just sat up. I was like, I guess that’s the title.

Menzel: I think I was in New York City, in my apartment when I first heard the song, and I thought it was great. I remember feeling like it sounded sort of like an Avril Lavigne kind of song.

Anderson-Lopez: Idina’s voice definitely informed our decisions to start in a very low place. When Idina sings really low, it’s really warm and intimate. But then as she gets higher and higher, it starts to get more and more epic, a superhero lifting off the ground.

Menzel: I’m playing a very young girl. I wanted to keep her sounding innocent. Put me a little lower, I sound like I can be singing in a lounge with a cigarette in my hand. And if you put me a little higher, I sound a little bit more innocent.

So I asked them to take it up—which, it was high already. I remember Kristen Lopez was like, “that would be great, but how are you going to sing that note at the end?” And I said, “well, let’s just try it.” And I was just feeling really good on that day vocally. So I nailed it, and everyone was really impressed. Cut to every city I sing that song in for the rest of my life: “oh my God, why did I put it in this key?”

Catmull: With any film, you hope for some song that expresses the most important emotions of the film, a song that powers the movie. When Kristen and Bobby wrote “Let it Go,” we knew we had that song. By the end, you really understood the problem and the driving emotion of the film. You can’t always find something this good, but when you do, it is gold.

Lee: As soon as we had “Let It Go,” we knew Elsa couldn’t be a villain. She was too sympathetic.

Menzel: I think it was a real defining moment for the character, and for the whole story, and for the sisters and their journey when we decided—oh, this is someone we feel for.

Groff: “Let It Go,” it was very clear that that was going to be a fucking thing. I remember thinking, oh my God—as a young gay child, this song would have been my anthem. I would’ve been in a gown at four years old, screaming “Let It Go.”

As Elsa entered her final form, so did Anna.

Lee: I think the thing with Anna that was really challenging was, I think too many times people think a character flaw means they have to have a personality disorder or something. And her flaw, it really… It took repeating over and over again to say, if we really want this ultimately to be about the power of true love, this has to be an analysis of what true love is. And so you have to have a character who wants love.

Bell: When you walk past someone on the street who looks like a Disney princess, you know them by their posture, the way that their hands look a little bit like a dancer. There is a type. [She sits up straight.] And then there’s my type. [She slumps.] You know what I mean? I desperately wanted to see someone different. So I threw it all out the window and just tried to make Anna as playful and authentic as I felt I was trying to be when I was a kid.

Lee: I think she’s a genius. What we talked about a lot is, in fairy tales, you need an optimist. But you didn’t want Anna to be goofy and not very bright. She’s got a fun personality, but you wanted her to be really intelligent, very thoughtful. And Kristen was incredible as a partner.

Bell: I’m not an improviser, but there were moments that showed themselves as I was recording. Like, Anna’s consistent, “wait, what?” is something I say daily, because I’m just talking so much that I get confused. And that became a signature phrase of hers.

Buck: That even became one of our crew T-shirts.

Del Vecho: When they took a year out of the schedule, we printed T-shirts for the crew saying “Frozen, 2013,” and on the back, it said, “Wait. What?”

Lee: For me now, if we’re a year out from the movie and we don’t know what it’s about, I would be like, this is not a good place to be. And it’s not a good place to be. It was just the process. Every time we got a scene we knew was right, it felt good. We were setting expectations that we are all familiar with, and then flipping them, but not from outside in—it was from the characters out. It was organic as opposed to an agenda.

But even once things were moving, Frozen came down to the wire.

Bell: The last thing that I recorded was the song with Santino [“Love Is an Open Door”]. I was eight months pregnant.

Fontana: I did a matinee as the prince in Cinderella [on Broadway]. I flew to L.A., I recorded with Kristen, flew back that night, and did a show the next day. Kristen is a short lady—a beautiful short lady—so eight months pregnant on her is a thing. She was like, “My lungs have nowhere to go.”

Bell: I was 47 pounds heavier. My lungs were the size of a fireplace mouse.

Anderson-Lopez: The metaphor I’d like to say about animated musicals is that it’s building a very complicated IKEA shelf. You have to line things up, but leave things really loose, and it doesn’t look like a shelf. Sometimes it never looks like a shelf. But sometimes, at the very end, you get the screws just right, and it’s no longer lopsided in any direction. It definitely felt like we did the last screw right at the last minute before the movie opened.

Lopez: We solved the beginning last, which is a very common thing, developing an original show.

Del Vecho: The first version [of “Do You Want to Build a Snowman?”] was sad the whole time.

Buck: It was a very sad song. And I know I was like, “We can’t open the movie like this. We have to have some joy.”

Lee: Then we killed the parents just to make sure we had some pain.

Buck: It’s Disney, after all.

Lee: Ed Catmull would always watch the screening and he’d go, “You haven’t earned it yet. You haven’t earned it yet.” And then the last screening we showed him, he came walking up and I’m like, ugh. And he’s like, “You’ve earned it.”

The team had created a full-fledged, classic-Disney-style musical, centered on two female protagonists who learn that true love isn’t romantic—it’s the indelible bond between sisters. But you wouldn’t know that from the film’s trailers, which sold Frozen as an adventure comedy and hardly featured Elsa at all.

Anderson-Lopez: We were told, and we always are told, that people don’t know they’re going to like a musical until they see it. I do think that a specific demographic is very afraid of musicals. In order to get them to show up, you kind of bury the musical in the snow, literally.

Lee: I’ll say this now, because I’m in this role. [In 2018, after Lasseter left the studio following allegations of misconduct—which he called “missteps”—Lee would be named chief creative officer of Walt Disney Animation.] It was very hard for me, because it was a film about sisters, and I’m a woman filmmaker. It was less the musical part, because I understood sometimes people will say, “Oh, musical? No,” versus giving it a chance. But I struggled with how much [the marketing] didn’t feature the women. I want to be respectful to the team; marketing wasn’t my job skills or training. But also, it was something as a woman filmmaker that I found hard to navigate at first

Buck: It was difficult for all of us, because we’re trying to promote the movie—yet we couldn’t say it was about sisters. We couldn’t say it was a fairytale. We couldn’t say it was a musical. We couldn’t say it was a princess.

Lee: You can often look to the past, but you can’t look to the future. And I think it was hard to know what was going to resonate. There was a lot of caution. We were hoping if you make dimensional characters, no matter who they are, people will relate to them. And so I think Frozen was… You can’t draw conclusions on one movie ever, but Frozen at least, I think, supported that.

Groff: It was totally a Trojan horse. I really remember thinking like, oh no, what they’re promoting is not what the movie is. Even the first poster was us just our heads popping out of snow. I think because Ice Age was such a huge sensation at that time, they were trying to lean into the comedy of the snowman and the reindeer. They were totally tricking everybody to come and see a classic Disney fairytale movie.

Frozen opened in wide release November 27, 2013, to positive reviews and $93.5 million—a more than respectable sum, but not enough to beat The Hunger Games: Catching Fire at the box office.

Christophe Beck (composer): If I recall correctly, it was a bit of a slow burn, right? It didn’t break or shatter records when it came out. But it started shattering those records the way it stuck around.

Del Vecho: We were never number one, but just word of mouth made it stay in the theaters. I think all the flipping of the tropes made people start talking about it. They wanted to go back and see it again with their friends

Soon enough, Frozen fever had swept the globe. “Let It Go” became a ubiquitous anthem. A shortage of Elsa dresses led desperate parents to consider buying secondhand ones on Ebay for $1600. Merch sold so fast that the Disney Store in Times Square limited patrons to buying only two Frozen items at a time. There was Frozen toothpaste, Frozen tissues, Elsa noodle soup.

But at the heart of it all was the movie, which lingered in theaters into the spring—when it became the first Walt Disney Animation Studios production to win the Oscar for best animated feature. “Let It Go” also won an Oscar for best original song, clinching Robert Lopez’s first EGOT. Though viewers may scarcely remember that, considering what happened right before the award was announced, when John Travolta took the stage to introduce a performance from Idina Menzel.

Kristen Anderson-Lopez: We were sitting next to our agent and the now head of Disney music, Tom MacDougall, who had been in the trenches with us with all the production. It wasn’t his first time at the rodeo, so he knew how to slip a flask in. But I said, “I want to keep my head clear. I want to remember this night. I may never get back to the Oscars again, so I’m keeping clearheaded.” Then, when [Travolta] went on and he said, “The wickedly talented Adele Dazeem,” we all went, “Ah!” I was like, “Hand me the flask.”

Bell: Can you even believe? We did not know what happened. We all looked at each other, like, “What? What?” But she handled it like a champ.

Gad: Poor Johnny, he was doing his best. We all have screw-ups, but God, it’s just the fact that he savored every syllable that makes it so rewatchable and so funny. It’s the line reading of “wick-ed-ly talented” that gets me every time.

Bell: I would’ve walked out and been like, “What did you just say?” Turned it into some bit or something, and then missed my entrance. But Idina is one of the most tried and true performers that exists. She knows her skill sets so well. You can’t really ruffle her.

Menzel: There was, I think, about eight bars before I actually had to open my mouth and sing. Eight bars is probably about, I don’t know, 12 seconds. And so in 12 seconds, I thought: what the hell did he just say? Oh no. Why did he just say that? This was my big opportunity. I’ve always wanted to sing at the Oscars. Oh, shut up Idina, get over yourself. Stop pitying yourself and sing this freaking song.

I had a bunch of little tricks that I do when I feel like I need to focus, and then that just pulled the rug out from under me. But yeah, ultimately, it was one of the best things that’s happened in my career. I think that anyone that didn’t know me at the time was like, who is this girl they’re all talking about? And all the people that knew me were up in arms and felt bad for me. So a lot of love was sent my way, and a lot of people got to know who I was. And so actually, it was a great thing for me personally.

Anderson-Lopez: She had to be unflappable in the face of the most flappable thing that had ever happened, but she pulled it off. And right after that, the award was announced, and then it was just all a blur.

Ten years, one sequel, two already-announced future sequels, several TV and streaming specials, a Broadway musical, and one Hong Kong Disney Frozen Land later, the cast and creative team are still wrapping their heads around the Frozen phenomenon.

Fontana: It was five days over two years, or something like that, of work. It’s like being the sperm donor to a child who becomes president. Every airplane I’m on, there’s a kid sitting next to me and they’re watching it. Or Halloween the other day—I can’t tell you what it’s like walking down the street when little girls walk past you in an Anna and an Elsa costume, and you have this huge secret.

Bell: There were two Halloweens where my daughter wanted to be Elsa. And I thought, “Perfect. I’ll be Anna. This will be great. This will be so like, meta.” And she was like, “No, I need you to be Elsa too.”

Catmull: It was very interesting to me in surveys taken after the movie was released that mothers wanted their daughters to be like Anna, but young women related more to Elsa.

Lee: I feel like she’s this perfect, empathetic rebel. I keep trying to think of myself when I was young. Like A, magic, I’m in. B, this woman is like, “Yeah, sometimes the world doesn’t get me.” I would’ve at four been like, “Yeah, my teacher doesn’t get me.”

Menzel: Honestly, I think that music is an intangible thing. It just sort of permeates our soul. It kind of gets inside of us in a way that’s hard to explain. And I think the little kids, they hear it, they feel it.

Fontana: I’ve been in a lot of therapy. Every child wants to be attached to somebody to help them through life—and this girl has immense, immeasurable power, and no one to talk to about it. I mean, we’ve all been there.

Beck: Growing up, you don’t know who you are yet. And that takes time and it takes maturing and it takes getting to know yourself, and all this in a pressure cooker of social anxiety and feeling like you somehow don’t quite fit in. Elsa’s journey to self-discovery is such a universal experience.

Gad: She has all the chips stacked against her, and she looks at this thing that she’s hated for–that is considered a flaw, this thing that makes her an other. And she says, “I’m going to make that flaw my strength.”

Groff: As a gay guy watching it, I’m Elsa. I think as a young girl watching it, you’re Elsa. My friend’s son, who as far as we know is just a normal straight boy, is in an Elsa gown. She allows us to all release our inner beast.

Anderson-Lopez: Elsa has a size to her feelings that I think is different.

Bell: Elsa is a feeling. It’s pretty cool.

Anderson-Lopez: I hope it was empowering to my daughters to say, “You don’t have to just sing a sad song on a log. You can sing a sad song on a log. But if you’re really going through something and your feelings feel big, you go up the mountain, and you build yourself a castle. You make yourself a beautiful blue ice dress.”

Menzel: I would love for Elsa to find true love, sure. But I love the new precedent that was set with Frozen—that a Disney movie doesn’t have to be about a princess finding her prince.