Disney's The Snow Queen

Here's a link to SlashFilm's Exclusive: Disney’s Upcoming Hand-Drawn Movies Revealed, Including The Snow Queen by Brendon Connelly. The article is about Disney's plans to finally make a Snow Queen film and release it in a few years. The music will be by Alan Menken and the film will be hand-drawn animation, like The Princess and the Frog.

Now this isn't so much brand new news as a revamping of old news. The Snow Queen has been in development and on hold off and on at Disney for at least ten years. When I lived in Los Angeles, my husband and I were friends with some of the animators working on it in the preliminary stages while they were working on Atlantis, if that gives you a time frame. Then the lay-offs and move away from hand-drawn occurred and the project went on the back burner.

I will be interested to see how The Snow Queen is developed. The rough adaptation shared by the animators back then barely resembled Andersen's original tale. I was amused no end when the story told to me didn't resemble anything of the original--I think even Kai and Gerda's names were different. There was also much more of a love story in it, of course. Wouldn't be a Disney fairy tale without one...

Once again, I am always bemused by Disney fairy tales. I appreciate the publicity and notice of the tales, keeping them in pop culture and world view. I hate that the Disney version becomes the definitive version to so many people, removing many of the facets I love and making a straight out villain tale, although Snow Queen is much better suited to that storytelling method. Most people are completely unfamiliar with this tale. Some of the other articles about the Snow Queen preliminary art from Disney have commented on how she appears to be the villain and not the heroine. Those of us in the know, know that Gerda is the heroine.

On that note, December has become a month of theme weeks and I have already planned a Snow Queen week around the Winter Solstice. Consider it a boon to those of you who don't celebrate Christmas or perhaps even Hannukah or Kwanzaa or any winter holiday, or summer holiday for my readers on the opposite side of the equator. So stay tuned for many more entries about Snow Queen in a little less than two weeks.