Many times it has been told how Frozen originally had a much different story. In Entertainment Weekly’s Untold Stories issue, Producer Del Vecho shared how originally Anna and Elsa weren’t sisters, weren’t royal, and participated in a epic battle.
“With all the movies we were work on, eventually the film tells you what it needs to be and if you’re smart enough to listen to that, it leads you to a different direction than perhaps your preconceived notion,” Del Vecho begins. “So when we started off, Anna and Elsa were not sisters. They weren’t even royal. So Anna was not a princess. Elsa was a self-proclaimed Snow Queen, but she was a villain and pure evil — much more like the Hans Christian Andersen tale. We started out with an evil female villain and an innocent female heroine and the ending involved a big epic battle with snow monsters that Elsa had created as her army…”
The team felt that they were retreading on the territority of classic Disney animation, so they challenged themselves to find a way to punch up the emotional connection with the audience. When the plot was changed, the team knew that had to make the staging work or the film would fall flat.
For more about the many interations of Frozen, check out the full article on EW.com