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Most of us are familiar with “Frozen,” the hit Disney movie. If you’ve ever come across this you know that it’s the top-grossing animated film ever. That it’s one of the most popular movies that was ever made. But what a lot of people don’t realize is that “Frozen” was actually on the brink of catastrophe almost until the point it was released.
Most movies within Disney get five years for development. “Frozen” was made in two years because another film had fallen through. And the filmmakers behind Disney – because they didn’t have much time – they started panicking. And when they were panicking that’s when the Disney Method kicked in. What the Disney Method says is: You don’t have to be the most creative person on earth to make a great film. In fact, there is no such thing as a creative person. Instead, there’s just a creative process. There’s a process that makes innovation more productive and faster. And that the core of that is to take things that you already know about and try and combine them in new ways.
As the filmmakers working on “Frozen” were kind of freaking out because they didn’t have much time and the movie wasn’t working and they had all these drafts of a film involving the Snow Queen that didn’t seem to connect with the audience, they started thinking to themselves, “What do we really know about?” Well, what Disney knows about is Disney knows about princesses. Disney has like 50 or 60 years of writing princess stories. So they said, “Okay, let’s take what we know about princesses and we need to find something else.” Now what was interesting about the group that was making “Frozen” is it had an unusually large number of women. In fact, “Frozen” had the first female co-director working on the movie in Disney’s history. And a lot of the people at the table said, “Well in addition to princesses what we know about personally is we know about sisters. We know about relationships. We know about families. So let’s take these two ideas – princesses and sisters and let’s combine them. What if we had a movie where instead of having your traditional princess movie where the princess is a damsel in distress and the prince comes in and saves her, what if there were two princesses and they were sisters and they end up saving each other? What if we drew upon what we feel, what we know to be true about our own relationships with our sisters and we combined them with this imaginary world and we just tried to tell a story that seemed true about how sisters get along?” Once the Disney filmmakers did that, that’s when “Frozen” became “Frozen.” That’s when they suddenly knew how to write these songs like “Let It Go” and then the pieces all fit together. That’s when they created the most popular cartoon in history.