The Messed Up Origins of Frozen | Disney Explained - Jon Solo

today's episode was sponsored by Squarespace buy a domain design a website or open an online store all made easy with Squarespace what is going on solo fam my name is John solo and welcome to the first messed up origin episode of 2019 today is January 11th and unfortunately for some of you that means that this winter season is just getting started so with that in mind I figured there's no better time for us to talk about Disney's frozen or the story that inspired it The Snow Queen this story written by Hans Christian Andersen and published in his book of fairy tales in 1845 details The Adventures of a little girl named Gerda when she sets out to rescue her friend Kai from the clutches of The Snow Queen I gotta admit I knew basically nothing about this story going into it I knew that it was the inspiration for frozen I knew the Snow Queen was an evil character and that's about it so imagine my surprise when I found out this fairy tale was seven chapters long and concerned itself with angels demons and even the devil himself after a teaser like that I'm sure you want to jump into the story ASAP and we'll do just that after a word from our sponsor and the people who made this video possible Squarespace if you're trying to open a business or establish your brand online Squarespace is the service you want to use they have an incredibly intuitive interface that lets you design web pages with ease a boatload of themes so you can pick the one that best suits your purpose and the best part is it's all done online with nothing to download or install ever I love and trust them so much I use them to host our website messed up origins com and on the one occasion I needed some help I reached out to their 24/7 customer support line and had my issue resolved in minutes if you want to try out the service yourself which I highly recommend to any of my fellow creators out there you can sign up for a two week free trial at squarespace.com and when your site's ready to launch go to Squarespace comm slash John solo to get 10% off your first purchase and now solo fam I say it's time we get started first we're gonna do a very short recap of frozen to jog your memory and then we'll break down the Snow Queen smash that like button and hit that subscribe button it's time to dive in frozen tells the story of Princess Elsa of arendelle who has magic that allows her to create and control ice and snow she used to use this magic to play with her sister Anna but when she accidentally hits her in the dome her parents take her to some magic trolls to have her memory of Elsa's powers a race also spends the next several years in solitude trying to control her powers and completely ignoring Anna even during the hardest of times fast forward the coronation day when Princess Elsa supposed to become Queen at the post ceremony bash she gets into an argument with Anna over her wanting to marry Prince Hans of the Southern Isles and accidentally reveals her ice powers to all of arendelle Elsa runs away out of fear of being branded a monster by her people and on adventures out to find her and end the eternal winter that she caused with some help from an ice Harvester named Kristoff his reindeer Sven and a talking snowman named Olaf Anna finds Elsa hiding out in an ice castle in the mountains when Elsa learns that she froze arendelle she panics saying she can't undo it and accidentally freezes on his heart while honest being transported to arendelle to receive the kiss of true love from Hans and melt the ice and her heart Hans is out with some soldiers to capture Elsa and bring her home some time later Elsa wakes up imprisoned and Hans reveals to Anna that he doesn't actually love her he's just trying to usurp the arendelle thrall he leaves on it to die of her frozen heart but Olaf rescues her and takes her outside to find Kristoff who he's just revealed is in love with her meanwhile Elsa's broken out of prison and is being hunted down by Hans who she still believes is on her side Hans tells Elsa that she killed on making her lose all hope and collapsed to the ground and just before he delivers the killing blow Anna comes out of left field to intercept it with her new ice body this act of true love ends up being the Cure the honest frozen heart needed as well as the key to controlling Elsa's powers Ana's body thaws out she punches Hans in the face summer returns to arendelle and they live happily ever after many people consider frozen to be one of Disney's greatest and most progressive movies of the past decade but did you know that it wasn't the studio's first attempt at putting The Snow Queen story on film under the orders of Walt Disney himself in the 1930s animator Mark Davis went to Scandinavia to look for more stories for the studio to sink their teeth into and he stumbled upon the tales of Hans Christian Andersen by 1939 Walt had given their next film the title of The Snow Queen and a production number the movie was planned to be a biopic on how Christian Andersen's life with animated sequences scattered throughout however for reasons still unknown to this day the project was dropped and no creative work for it has ever been found in the Disney archives in fact the only HCA story that was produced around that time and four years after was the ugly duckling which was made for the silly symphony series Anderson's The Little Mermaid was also being adapted into an animated feature in the 40s but that too got left on a shelf for 40 years until John Musker and Ron Clements came along while frozen story was a much more simplified version of Hans Christian Andersen's with quite a bit more humor mixed and there's a multitude of connections you can make between characters and events I'll be breaking down everything that I can find but as usual don't be afraid to comment down below with anything I might have missed so the first chapter or what HCA refers to as the first story has one of the most interesting premises I've ever read in a fiction book I realize that's a bold claim but when you hear it I'm sure you'll agree it opens by introducing us to a troll but not just any troll the most evil one of all the devil himself one day the devil decides to make a magic mirror the reflection of anything that's good and beautiful in this world will shrink to nothing and all that's bad and evil will grow when reflected in the mirror or just rolling hills look like spinach and people's reflections were so distorted they hardly recognize themselves the devil was a headmaster for a troll school and his students said the mirror was a miracle because now mankind could see the world as it was truly meant to be seen they traveled around the earth showing the mirror to everyone they could but after a while humans weren't a good enough target they decided to carry the mirror to the heavens to show the angels and even God but as they carried it upward the mirror would get heavier and heavier and to make it weirder it even shake with laughter just before they reached the heavens the mirror slit from their fingers and plummeted all the way down to earth where it shattered into millions and billions of pieces you might think that was a good thing because now the mirror was destroyed but believe it or not this caused even more trouble than it ever had before those billions of fragments were carried around the world by the wind and sea and each tiny piece carried the properties of the entire mirror if a piece in someone's I would change the way they saw the world forever and if it landed in their heart it would turn to ice you can already see where Disney got the idea for differentiating between hits to the head and heart in the beginning on us hit in the head and thanks to the trolls magic her view of the world changes forever and later on she's hit in the heart and turns entirely to ice while some of them use fragments were pretty large and used for things like glasses and window panes there was still billions of microscopic fragments flying around the following six chapters show what happens when they infiltrate even the most pure of human beings children the rest of the story follows a little boy and girl named Kai and Gerda their families live very close to each other to the point where their houses are basically touching and they think of each other as relatives during the spring summer and fall the families would have their flower boxes positioned so they connected from house to house instead of parallel on the windowsills in kind Gerda would sit on the makeshift walkway right under the rose trees that grew in each box Kai's grandma loved telling the children's stories in one night she tells them about the swarming white bees outside and their queen she always flies right in the center of the swarm where the most snowflakes are she is the biggest of them all but she never lies down to rest as the other snowflakes do know when the wind dies she returns to the black clouds many a winter night she flies through the streets of the town and looks in through the windows then they become covered by ice flowers later that night when Kai's getting ready for bed he looks out the window through the peephole he melted in the ice the snowflakes that were falling in front of him began piling on top of each other until they grew into the shape of a woman she was beautiful but made entirely of ice and when Kai looked into her eyes he saw no peace or rest in her stare the next morning began with some frost but by noon the weather had changed and melted it all away one day while kai and Gerta were reading under the rose bushes he cried out that something had pricked his heart and something sharp was in his eye hmm I wonder what that could have been the pain disappeared pretty quickly but Goethe was left crying out of sympathy for her friend when he turned to her and demanded to know why she was crying he said that she looked ugly when she cried and that he was fine so she should stop as you can tell Kai's view of the world is already being affected by the Devils shards he just called his best friend ugly then he proceeds to insult the garden around them and kick their flower boxes his behavior became worse and worse throughout the year he appeared to grow up very quickly became very standoffish and continued to make fun of poor girl the following winter he went to the town square to hang out with the other boys who were tying their to the farmers wagons that were passing nearby while they were hunting for joyrides to go on a big white sleigh pass through town and kite eyed his sled to it he noticed it was accelerating but whenever he went to untie his sled the driver who was all dressed in white would turn around and give him such a kind smile he would leave it along when they went past the city gates he actually did untie his sled but it just kept following the sleigh as if it were being pulled by magic I can't decide if that would be amazing or terrifying eventually they did stop in the driver who kinda realizes is The Snow Queen tells him to hop in the sled and get warm under her coat she then gives him a kiss on the forehead that says cold as ice and for a second Kai felt like he was going to die but that feeling as well as the cold faded quickly and was replaced with power when she kissed him a second time he forgot all about Gerda and his family and The Snow Queen no longer appeared to be made of ice but instead was just a beautiful human she told Kai she wouldn't kiss him a third time or he might die then they flew her sleigh into the air just over a raging snowstorm below and kai fell asleep at her feet out of curiosity did that scene remind anyone else of when Edmund meets the White Witch and Chronicles of Narnia snowy atmosphere young boy cuddles up next to a strange lady in white to keep warm she enchants him to trick him into working with her the pieces are all there she's more cold than done feeling as opposed to pure evil but the surface level similarities are there and I doubt that's a coincidence now let's not forget little Gerda who Kai left behind what happened to her while she put on her detective cap her Nancy Drew fan club t-shirt and started sleuthing around town over the next few days she asks around to see if anyone seen kai but he's totally m.i.a since he rode that sled out of town so the general consensus is that he drowned in the nearby river I guess back then children going missing wasn't quite the cause for alarm that it is nowadays so no one even tried to fish him out or even look for her it was a long and sad winter but spring did show up eventually and Gerta was sitting there alone among the flower boxes wishing that Kai wasn't dead after hearing this wish some sunbeams above said they don't believe that Kai is dead and some nearby birds said the same thing this was all it took to convince Gerda who snuck out the next morning to ask the nearby river if it had swallowed kind she even offered it her favorite red boots if he was returned safely she throws her boots in the river but the river washes them back is its way of saying I don't have your friend sadly Gerda wasn't fluent in River speaks so she just thought she didn't throw the boots far enough she got in a rowboat to take him out further when suddenly the river's current pushes her downstream after a few hours she arrives at a strange little house in a cherry orchard and when her boat washes ashore she starts calling for help an old woman comes out of the house wearing a broad-brimmed hat with flowers painted on it and invites her to come inside once they're inside Gerda gives the woman the deets about her adventure to rescue kai meanwhile the old hag is brushing Gerdes hair with a magic brush that causes her to forget Kai more and more with every stroke yes so it turns out this old broads actually a witch who has always wanted a daughter so she doesn't want Gerda going anywhere she uses her magic to hide her rose bushes from the girl so she wouldn't be reminded of kai then she shows her the garden which had every kind of flower from every season in bloom as you would imagine Gerda loved the garden and would spend hours every day playing among the flowers listening to the stories they had to tell for months on end until one day she realized the old lady had a single red rose painted on her hat and net reminded her of Kai the little girl ran to the garden and realized that red roses were the only flower that were missing and she fell to the ground sobbing and how she had been manipulated one of her tears just so happened to land exactly where the red roses were buried causing them to return to the surface unlike the other flowers which could only tell Gerda irrelevant stories the Roses had good news they had been underground where the dead reside and kai was not among them upon hearing this she thanked the Roses and ran out of the garden so fast she forgot both her shoes and her coat she ran as far as she could then sat on a rock to rest and realized the landscape had changed from summer to fall back in the garden it was always summer Gerda then realized she'd already wasted enough time the old lady's house and got back to her feet to search for Chi in the big scary world and now we're on to chapter 4 when was the last time we covered a short story on this channel I literally don't remember so Goethe's been walking in the snow for quite some time when she runs into a helpful crow whose fiancee knows all the latest gossip the crow tells Gerda he recently saw a little boy walking through the forest that may have been KY but by now he's given up his old life to be with a princess this is troubling news for Gerda to hear but she can't say for certain whether or not that boy sky so she asks the crow to take her to the princess's castle he leaves to ask his fiance because apparently she liked to hang out around the castle and was better informed on such matters he returns a few hours later with some bread for Gerda to eat he tells her that while she definitely won't get into the entrance of the castle there is a back door that leads to a stairwell that leads to the Royal bedroom and his fiancee knows where the key is the crow and Gerta sneak onto the property meet up with the fiancee who already has the key and enter the stairwell they pass by several corridors before reaching the Royal bedroom where the mysterious princess and Prince are sleeping in white and red lilies respectively Gerda crept up to the princes bed and shrieked with excitement when she saw was KY only that shriek woke the Prince up and when he opened his eyes Gerda realized that it wasn't kai yeah kind of weird how that parts written you might be thinking that Gerda and the crows are in for it now they just trespassed on Royal grounds broken entered the royal castle ian woke up the prince and princess from their slumber but it turns out these Royals aren't the typical evil king and queen that you've seen fairy tales they ask her what she's doing there and she tells her story through tears and sobs and not only does she earn their sympathy they actually reward the crows for helping her they give them positions as royal court crows and first dibs on all leftovers pretty sweet deal the prince let Gerda sleep in his bed that night and the next morning he and the princess helped her prepare for her journey to find Kai they gave her new boots a moth and some warm clothes a carriage of pure gold into coachman as well as servants riding on the back and two soldiers riding in front although they wanted her to stay the royal couple and crows wished her luck and saw her ah so this is kind of awkward but apparently travelling abroad with a golden carriage basically screams robbed me to any near dwells in your proximity well Goethe was traveling at night her carriage was shining in the moonlight and that attracted the attention of some nearby robbers a group of miscreants attacked the carriage all at once and dispatched of the soldiers servants and coachman and by dispatched I mean they killed Goethe also came close to being chopped up and eaten by a bearded woman but at the last second that woman's daughter jumped on her back and bit a chunk out of her ear the girl demanded that Goethe be kept alive so she has someone to play and sleep with and then took her muffin dress not her muffin dress her hand mop and dress just to clarify the robber girl commandeered the carriage in Road with curta inside Goethe took this opportunity to tell the girl about her adventures to find Kai and the girl responded that she won't let the robbers kill her however if Goethe makes her mad she'll kill her herself with a big ol knife if there was ever such a thing as a shanty castle that's what the robbers lived in the walls were cracked the windows were broken wild looking animals roamed freely around the courtyard the girl showed Gerda where they'd be sleeping in the corner of the hall with her pet animals one of which was a reindeer whose throat she threatened to slit every night because she thought his terrified expression was hilarious this reindeer was the inspiration for the spent character only instead of his owner talking for him he could talk for himself though you probably could have guessed that since birds and race of sunshine also talked Goethe and the robber girl went to bed and Goethe repeated her adventure so far as a bedtime story when the girl fell asleep some wood pigeons flew into the hall but no one seemed to notice because all of the thieves and robbers and miscreants and vagabonds and what-have-yous were sitting around a campfire drinking and singing the pigeons who heard Gerdes story said they saw kai flying around with the ice queen they had just come onto their eggs when she flew over the treetops and blew a layer of ice over all the new hatchlings freezing and killing all of them the reindeer chimes in here and says they're definitely headed north to Lapland because that's where the Queen's castle is at that point Goethe mumbled and sorrow to herself and the robber girl told her to quiet down or she'd cut her stomach open I know what a fun sleepover the next morning Goethe tells the girl what the pigeons told her and she helps her come up with an escape since all the men had left the camp for the day goethe just has to wait until the bearded woman drinks until she passes out then because the reindeer was captured from Lapland he can take her there and navigate it for her the girl gives Gerta some food gear to keep warm and she takes off only to arrive in Lapland later that day with the Northern Lights shining over her and the reindeers heads the reindeer and Gerta make a stop at a crappy little cottage with a door so low you had to crawl to get through it inside was a lone Lapp woman frying some fish the reindeer told her Gerda's story but first he told her his story because he thought it was more interesting the woman gave Gerta some food and a note to give to her finnish friend because she lived closer to the ice Queen's palace and could help them more they took off for the woman's house right away and while the journey wasn't easy they did make it once again the reindeer introduced them both telling the woman his story and then Gerdes it's funny that he does that because his story is so irrelevant to accomplishing their objective I think he's just a little jealous of the attention that Kurt is getting the woman then reads the note that her friend had written for her she takes out a roll of animal skin with some strange letters written on it and spreads it out across the table and studies it so intensely that beads of sweat are dripping down her face after a few minutes she pulls the reindeer to the side and says okay here's the situation guys got a shard of glass in his heart and - in his eyes and as long as those remain there he'll never be human again and he'll forever remain at the Ice Queen side the reindeer asks the woman if she can give Gerda the power to remove the shards and she responds that she can't make her more powerful than she already is it turns out that Goethe's true innocence makes it impossible for men and beasts to resist helping her but she can never learn of this power because she no longer be innocent the woman tells the reindeer to bring Gerda to the Queen's gardens two miles away and drop her off at the bush with the red berries and as much as it pained him to abandon her he did what he was told and returned to the woman unfortunately he left little Gerda without her shoes or mittens she ran as fast as she could through the frozen gardens towards the Queen's palace where the snow guards were waiting for her some of the guards were Bears made of snow others were bunches of snakes others were ugly porcupines which I believe is where they got the idea to put spikes down marshmallows Goethe stopped running and started praying for protection from the beasts so it was so cold she could see her breath and while she prayed the white smoke she blew out grew and turned into angels wearing armor and carrying Spears the angelic protectors destroyed the ice Queen's monsters and Goethe continued onward toward the castle the final chapter opens with a description of the ice Queen's castle made of ice and wind it was miles wide and felt empty vast and cold in the center of that massive snow Hall was a cracked frozen lake that the Queen called the mirror of reason and in the middle of that Lake was her thrall kai was sitting alone in that same empty Hall by now his skin was black and blue but he took no notice because his heart had frozen into a lump of ice he sat there playing what he called the game of reason which was nothing more than arranging ice blocks into various patterns the Queen had told him if he could arrange the ice pieces to spell eternity he'd be his own master and she'd give him the whole world and a new pair of skates but his mind was so clouded he couldn't remember what word he had to spell for those wondering where the Snow Queen is she had just left that morning to Mayer the volcanoes Vesuvius and Etna encode their peaks and ice I don't know what exactly that's supposed to accomplish but that's where she went Gerta enters the castle and finds kai sitting in the hall she runs up to him puts her arms around him exclaims in excitement but he takes no notice of her this broke her heart and she started crying but similar to the ending of frozen those tears fell on his chest and their warmth melted the ice shards in his heart I started coming to realize that he was reunited with his best friend Gerda and was so overwhelmed with happiness he started weeping which washed the mere shards right out of his eyes this was such a magical moment that the shard sky was arranging on the ground started dancing around and Happiness and when they laid back down they spelled the word that he was trying to spell Goethe kissed him on his cheeks and the colour came back to him she kissed his eyes and they became like hers she kissed his hands and feet and the blue colour left them and the blood pulsed through his veins he was well and strong now The Snow Queen could return it did not matter for his right to his freedom was written in brilliant pieces of ice the two walked out of the palace and the reindeer was waiting there with his friend to gave them rides to the finish and lap woman who gave them close food in directions for the journey home then the reindeer dropped them off at the border of Lapland where the grass was green and spring was returning it was there they ran into the robber girl who was now traveling on her own and brandishing two pistols sir to ask her what happened to the royal couple and crows and she said the royal couple went travelling into foreign lands but sadly the male crow died and left his wife a widow not everyone gets a happy ending unfortunately the robber girl gave them a ride back to their hometown on her horse and they made it back in no time upon returning home Gerda and KY realized they weren't children anymore their journey had changed them and helped them grow they greeted their grandmother and said on their old stools right outside the open window like the good old days as the details of their adventures in the ice Queen's palace faded from their memories there they sat the two of them grownups and yet in their hearts children and it was summer a warm glorious summer day in that ladies and gentlemen was Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen and the inspiration for Disney's frozen after reading the story for the first time I was actually kind of surprised at how little The Snow Queen character had to do with anything she was basically just a secondary catalyst the first was the enchanted mirror falling and breaking which set the story's events in motion but her kidnapping kai is what started Gerda's adventure it's no wonder Disney chose to change her from an antagonist to a protagonist as a villain she felt sort of generic and despite them writing several versions of the story where she was evil all the way through the writers thought the idea of showing how someone like Elsa could live with these powers would be more interesting they modernized the original theme of love conquers negativity - love conquers fear and what came out of that was a pretty good story interestingly it wasn't Disney's only attempt at adapting The Snow Queen fairy tale her character is also the antagonist in season four of the TV show once upon a time they tie various elements of the story into the plot - for example else's mom is named Gerda and revealed to be the Snow Queen sister and when the Snow Queen comes to Storybrooke she tries using the magic mirror and the spell of shattered sight to try and brainwashed the town's residents into hating and ultimately destroying each other but now I want to hear what you guys thought of The Snow Queen did you like the plot did you pick up on any connections but I did and let me know in the comments down below also if you enjoyed this episode make sure you smash that like fun with all your heart if your heart isn't made of ice that is so we can reach our goal of 10,000 likes on the first episode of the year and if you haven't yet make sure you subscribe and ring that Bell to have more messed up content delivered to your sub box every week I know we took the past few weeks off but that was because of holidays and sickness I apologize won't happen again anytime soon if you want to stay updated on what projects I'm working on next day and some behind the scenes previews then follow me on social media it's there you can offer video suggestions to me directly and ask me questions once again I got to thank today's sponsor Squarespace for making this video possible sign up for a two week free trial at squarespace.com and when your site's ready to go public go to Squarespace comm / John solo to get 10% off your first purchase I'll be seeing you all next week with another episode of messed up origins until then thank you all so much for watching my name is John solo and remember cha cha first [Music]

Channel: Jon Solo

Views: 1,415,326

Rating: 4.9544764 out of 5

Keywords: Messed Up Origins of Frozen, Frozen, Snow Queen, snow queen story in english, snow queen story, hans christian andersen, messed up origins of the little mermaid, anna and elsa, anna and elsa videos, disney explained, disney explained jon solo, jon solo, jon solo mulan, messed up origins of alice in wonderland, frozen 2 trailer, olaf frozen, anna and elsa parents death, original frozen story, frozen deleted scene, messed up origins jon solo, frozen 2 official teaser trailer

Id: wul-2ffEC9s

Length: 25min 21sec (1521 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 11 2019