History of Elsa

The development of Elsa’s character is a diverse and long one. We know that Frozen, in it’s original form, has been sitting in animation purgatory for almost 70 years before being brought back to the light.

The origins of Elsa can be traced back to two characters from Frozen’s source, Hans Christian Anderson’s The Snow Queen. Yes, that’s right, two not one. Elsa is actually the combination of the Snow Queen and the character Kai (source). If you really look into the comparison between the Snow Queen and Frozen, which I am not going to get into too much in this post, you’d realize that both story lines are way more similar than meets the eye. The basic plot of the Snow Queen - Gerda goes on a quest to save Kai from the Snow Queen - is not much different from Frozen - Anna goes on a quest to save Elsa from herself (remember, Elsa is Kai and the Snow Queen). Not sure if that was intended or if I am just looking too much into things though.

We really don’t know too much about Frozen’s development though. We we get tidbits here and there, but the developers are really bad at sharing and seem to enjoy trolling people with useless things like the “The making of Frozen” song from the DVD/Bluray and the animation process. Instead I’ll try to piece together what we do know in one master post.

One thing that Lee was nice enough to share with us was the Frozen had 8 official drafts (source) plus a lot of changes in between. I desperately wish to get a hold of all 8 of them. That’s not really helpful in trying to fit the pieces together unless we actually had the scripts, but it’s still nice and interesting to know.

That being said, I can’t really break Elsa’s development down into stages, but I will try anyway. So far I have Snow Queen/Early Days, Blue-Skinned Elsa, onionElsa, and the Final Elsa. Please keep in mind that these stages are mostly based on appearance. I will cover personality stages separately because it’s sometimes hard to fit the appearances up with personality and there’s probably a lot of overlaps.

Introduction

Before we get started, I would advise reading the Development section on the Elsa Disney wiki page (link). It covers the most basic stuff and a few things that I will be repeating here. You don’t have to read the whole page, just the section, and it’s just to formalize you with the most basic of things. If you already knew that Elsa was a villain, which is likely if you are following me, than you could probably go ahead and skip it.

Appearance: Snow Queen/Early Days

I’m not sure if any of these count as part of the 8 drafts, but apparently back in the very early 2000’s there was several versions of the Snow Queen preserved in notes, drafts, and sketches. At this time there was really no Elsa since Kai and the Snow Queen were separate characters (Art of Frozen pg 10).

Eventually, they decided to move away from the Snow Queen and make the Snow Queen and Gerda into sisters. Supposedly, the decision to move away from ‘The Snow Queen’ was made before Jennifer Lee came onto the project. I can’t confirm when they decided to merge Kai and the Snow Queen, but if I had to bet, it was when they decided to make them sisters (speculation).

Appearance: Blue-Skinned Elsa

At one point in Elsa’s development, Elsa had blue skin and (sometimes) blue hair. I speculate based on the the fact that compared to onionElsa concept art, blue-skinned Elsa concept art is much less refined and thus much earlier in the development of Frozen.

Besides the concept arts of Elsa with blue skin, there isn’t much more we know. That’s where artist, Claire Keane, comes into save the day. Thanks to her blog posts, we now know that early Elsa’s designs (circa 2011) had been based on Amy Winehouse (source).

She was also modeled off of Bette Midler as well (source)

Appearance: onionElsa

At some point, Elsa lost her blue skinned, but retained the pointed up hair you’re seeing a lot. Most people probably know this concept version of her as evilElsa or earlyElsa. I’ve explained onionElsa and why I call her that before and you can find it here. This would be help to read before continuing.

I speculate that the black hair was a carry over from her blue skinned version, but was eventually dropped for the blonde hair. My main support for that is:

Elsa ended up platinum blonde If you look really closely at the end of this video, it appears that Elsa is in her blonde haired onionElsa form.

Most onionElsa concept art appears much more refined and I would guess that Elsa retained this design until shortly before rendering began. Considering onionElsa was for the most part a villain/redeemable villain and that “Let it Go” was the game changer for Elsa’s character being a villain, I’d guess that onionElsa may have been in use as late as 2013. (It should be noted that Frozen was completed in only 9 months and apparently Idina’s singing of “Let it Go” forced the crew to drop the redeemable villain part very late in development - like 2013 late).

Appearance: Final Elsa

Appearance wise, Elsa’s final form didn’t change much aside from her french braid and wardrobe as you can see from the pic above. The biggest changes come in the form of personality. I can’t confirm this, but I’ll guess that Elsa lost her short haired look after the villain idea was dropped completely. I’m also convinced that Elsa gained her final look very late because most of the concept I’ve seen shows Elsa in another form.

Anyway, we pretty much know what happened from here. Though at one point someone decided to make that retarded looking early render of Elsa and slap it on all the merchandise. You know which one I’m talking about.

Personality: “Cool With Me”, “We Know Better”, and “The Spring Pageant"

I think the best way to capture the development of Elsa’s character is through the songs. "Cool With Me” was a song that didn’t get mentioned in the OST. I never heard of it myself until I saw it an article a few months ago (source).

It was basically the pre-“Life’s Too Short” song which was also the pre-“For the First Time in Forever reprise” and was sung after

Originally, Elsa was a villain and ends up kidnapping Anna during her wedding and summoning her to the palace where Elsa ends up intentionally freezing Anna’s heart so she would empathize with Elsa’s plight.

Elsa’s development has gone from a villain character, to a redeemable villain, and finally to a misunderstood deuteragonist. I actually like to think that Elsa actually started off as a neutral character if you take into account that the the original Snow Queen was more of a neutral character than a villain. Anyway, I really cannot separate villain Elsa and redeemable villain Elsa. I really don’t have any thing to go on here. So for the time being, I’ll just consider them to have the same intentions and plans. The article referenced above actually provided a lot of insight on what made villain Elsa tick. But what was “Elsa’s plight” exactly? Well according to Lee, she wanted to get “revenge against her sister out of jealousy” (

source

). Now, that of course leaves more unanswered questions, but the songs provide more answers still.

The second half of “We Know Better” (see this

post

) provides some insight here. The lyrics in the second half show that Elsa’s powers aren’t kept a secret and that neither Elsa nor Anna are being kept behind closed gates. I like to think this song was around with “The Spring Pageant” which also shows Elsa outside of the castle gates. Finally, we have concept art from Claire Keane to support this, see below and above.

There’s never been anything said about it, but you can pretty much infer what’s going on from the pics and the lyrics in the second half of that song. Elsa’s an outcast, a freak, because of her powers. Anna is the perfect princess with friends and no responsibility (though the lyrics in “We Know Better” seems to suggest she does have more responsibility than is suggested by the song “More than just the Spare”) while Elsa has the responsibilities as the heir and the prophecy looming over her. No wonder why Elsa snapped and wants Anna to sympathize with her.

Now there could have been other intentions or states of villainy, but we don’t know them as of now and that’s all I can really say about Elsa’s personality development as a villain. I can’t even say if she was a redeemable villain or if her reasoning were still the same when she was one. I couldn’t even place which character design fits this whole phase exactly. Kleane’s pics seems to suggest it started with blue-skinned though.

Personality: “Life’s Too Short” and “Life’s Too Short (Reprise)”



Eventually we get into the territory of when Elsa froze Anna’s heart accidentally rather than intentionally. If it wasn’t for the reprise, I wouldn’t know where to place this song, but thanks to the reprise I could safely say that Elsa was in her redeemable villain phase. But how it relates to “Let it Go”, I couldn’t tell you. The storyboard that we’ve seen actually shows final Elsa which surprised me because I thought it would have been in onionElsa’s form (

source

).

Personality: “Let it Go”

This the obligatory, “Let if Go” was originally a villain song until Idina Menzel sang it part. To be honest though

,

they were already having trouble with the redemption part so the singing of “Let it Go” was probably just the the final nail in the coffin. I’m starting to think Elsa was already in her final form when this song was introduced rather than the onionElsa, which they may have done to help with the redemption/making her more likable for redemption (speculation).





Final Thoughts

As I’ve warned above, this is all mostly speculation that I’ve pieced together from the few stuff we did know. I could be some where in the ball park or I could have missed it completely. If anything, at least I’ve informed you of the official stuff via the source links.

That being said, this entire post is subject to change as I learn new stuff. It’s a work in progress. If you feel I’ve gotten something completely wrong or am spreading misinformation, please let me know and I’ll correct the mistake. Also if you know something I don’t, please don’t hesitate to tell me. I know there was some kind of program in Japan that talked about Frozen’s development, but I haven’t seen it.

I will keep a copy of this on a permanent page on the front page of my tumblr.