Frozen director Chris Buck has confirmed a fan theory linking its two hero sisters to Disney's 1999 movie Tarzan.

Fans of the studio's 2013 hit have long speculated on a possible link between the stories, which both feature leading characters orphaned by a shipwreck.

In the computer-animated musical fantasy, sisters Elsa and Anna lose their parents during a storm at sea.

What fans have long suspected, and has now been confirmed, is that the sisters' parents may not have died at all - that they survived the disaster and gave birth to a third child on a desert island off the coast of Africa.

In an interview on MTV, Buck confessed he discussed the sisters' back story with his co-director Jen Lee.


"Jen and I were walking to a meeting, and I just started to tell her the entire story. I said: Of course Anna and Elsa's parents didn't die," he explained.

Image: Disney has announced Frozen 2 is already in the works

"Yes, there was a shipwreck, but they were at sea a little bit longer than we think they were because the mother was pregnant, and she gave birth on the boat, to a little boy."

The little boy, according to Buck, would eventually be orphaned himself - and raised by gorillas to become the "king of the jungle".

"They get shipwrecked, and somehow they really washed way far away from the Scandinavian waters, and they end up in the jungle. They end up building a tree house and a leopard kills them, so their baby boy is raised by gorillas," he said.

Although the bloodline isn't ever mentioned in the story - or present in the official script - Buck said that "in my little head, Anna and Elsa's brother is Tarzan".

"That's my fun little world," he added.

"That's the spirit of Disney."

A sequel to Frozen is in the works but is unlikely to be out until at least 2019.