Yes we still don't know in canon if Elsa was present at Anna's coronation but to me it would make zero sense if she weren't there, for legacy reasons and royal ceremony purpose like, of course she has to literally be the one crowning Anna, that's just how it works
And I hear y'all saying it's a shame that she didn't attend the statue unveiling ceremony but tbh I'm more and more convinced that Elsa wasn't there for meta reasons; the writers needed the sisters doing different activities in the epilogue to show that they're separated with their new roles yet acting together in the same direction.
Though think about how Anna had her letter for Elsa in her pocket before she handed it to Gale, which means that in a way, Elsa was with her when she walked down those stairs with a happy sigh 🤧
I myself found strange and kind of daredevil how Elsa choose to run across the Dark Sea when I first saw the teaser. But I found it a bad decision because the risk of doing that was too great, but then we found out she had a very good reason: she had to reach the Ahtohallan in order to find answers about why was Arendelle and the Enchanted Forest cursed and what had to be done to lift the curse upon the two kingdoms. Good reason indeed; daredevil was actually corageus.
But in the other hand, there was the method she used that was questioned. I have found it's considerated pretty.... non smart, by some.
But, the truth is she had no other choice.
To understand why she choose to just ran across the sea, and only using her powers to freeze the water she lays the foot on, and with some swimming, when Elsa is powerful enough to freeze an entire fjord, we have to be aware that there is certain limits to what she can do.
In the previous movie, she turned summer into winter, a extremely hard one. White out and everything.
But you might notice here, all she could freeze on the water of the fjord was the surface.
Turns out the sea never freezes entirely, you might find a large extention of frozen water on the surface or icebergs, but a HUGE amount of moving water won't turn solid. That's why rivers, even small streams, will be the last freezing on winter.
Turning all the Dark Sea into ice was not an option. In fact, imagine she turned into ice a wave that was just about to fall on her. She would have died by broken bones and internal bleeding.
Then, why not just freeze the parts where she was going to pass, you may ask?
This is what happened when she tried.
Explanation: it's not just impossible to freeze moving water, she had to considerate as well it was a freaking STORMY SEA. Do you know how much weight a regular wave has? The spots she freezes would be turn over, or if the ice was large but the wave was just huge, then the force of it would easily break the ice on that moment, as you can see.
That's on the things aplied to the method she used. Now let's get the imagination wild for more options!
Create a bridge? NOPE. Where would she put the supports for it? On the moving water? It would break.
Do something with her powers to the storm? The method she uses to make her snow storms is whe air pushed by snowflakes moving furiously through the air, and the clouds are made of microscopic ice. So, not much for control the weather. If anything, she could added her own element to the storm, and that would only have made it more dangerous.
Make a surf table to surf her way across the waves? That could have worked only if she knew how to surf. Ice-skating is her thing, and I bet it's not all a skill you can use for surf. This applies to all the other aquatic sports that are similar.
Which leads us to the following: Elsa is self-taught, so she can't do anything new if she doesn't know it's possible. She's limited by her imagination.
She wouldn't even have discovered how to see the past in the frozen water if it were not by Olaf's trivia and her experience in the battle against Gale.
Besides, when you're doing something dangerous, it's not exactly the best moment to try experiments.
I Emailed The Sámi Culture Professor Who Worked On Frozen 2
The emails are long, so let me quickly explain the context first. About two months ago in the Frozen fandom there was a lot of discussion about the Northuldra and how accurate their character designs were. Specifically people wondered why Iduna looked so different from the other Northuldra, how much input the Sámi community had in F2, etc. So I decided to email one of the members of the Sámi Advisory group (Professor Veli-Pekka Lehtola) and ask!!!!
My question - Were the Sámi really as diverse as Frozen 2 depicts them (conscerning skin color and other characteristics)?
Answer - Yes. The Sámi come in many different, diverse groups, and while some may be considered "white", there are very real and valid darker skinned Sámi.
He not only answered this question, but gave me many fun facts about Sami history, the writing process/collaboration with Disney, and lots of other stuff like reindeer circles, herding dogs, and even a cut storylines!!!!! Which you can read all about in the screenshots below ->
EDIT - Here is another post I found this morning talking about skin color and colorism in the Sámi community in case any of you would like a second source ♡
On the road to F2 there were tons of leaks and I saved as many of them as I could in the fear that Disney would delete them (because they loved to shut down whole websites because of that back in the day). As a result I have a lot of pictures saved on my phone and looking back on them... some don’t sound quite right because it’s definitely not what I saw in the movie. So here’s everythinggg I have. I did my best to organize stuff a bit but there are so many things it was... hard. Feel free to add more stuff in reblogs, replies and such!
Something to note is that we won’t take into account the “officially” released deleted content, which would include everything that’s in the Blu-ray, because basically everyone already saw that (Home, I Seek the Truth, Get This Right, Unmeltable Me, the Secret Room scene, Hard Nokks, etc). Generally, we won’t be analyzing deleted scenes from the official trailers, either, because of this very reason. Something “official” that we will consider, though, are the deleted clips animators have been releasing on Instagram and other sites, because those aren’t that popular.
Before starting here’s the link to all the deleted F2 lines I could find as well as some other additions. The post itself has even more links to other posts containing deleted content so have fun clicking on links.
Last thing to mention, none of the merch photos here are taken by me. I got most of them from the leaks channel of the Arendelle Kingdom server during 2019. If any image in this post belongs to someone here and you want to be credited please let me know and I’ll edit the post.
This post is long. Like really, really, lagging-my-browser-as-I’m-writing-it long. So grab some popcorn and get comfortable or just take a look at what interests you.
So without further ado, let’s get started!
Deleted Artbook Content
One of the most exciting leaks we got were definitely these sample artbook excerpts. None of these pages made it into the final artbook, though.
This piece definitely belongs in Iduna and Agnarr’s backstory, in which the Northuldra leader wasn’t an ordinary man but a shapeshifter.
The biggest picture in this page points to yet another version of Iduna and Agnarr’s backstory. It’s possible to deduce Bruni hadn’t been fully developed yet or created at all since the fire isn’t pink.
The one on the bottom right seems to be an earlier version of the “forest freed” scene in the final movie, or maybe it happened in another moment altogether.
The most interesting of the three, though, is this one. Nothing in the movie points to the existence of a place like this. It’s interesting to note that this peculiar house looks very similar to Iceland’s “elf houses”, tied to the myth of the Huldufólk, “hidden people”, who were said to be small and live in a parallel world, being able to make themselves visible at will.
These are definitely the inhabitants of the Enchanted Lands, who look completely different than in the final movie with their long cloaks, hoods and staves. They look like mages. Were these the very first concepts of the Northuldra, or another group of characters altogether that ended up being scrapped? Only Ahtohallan knows...
Even though the tree and the vegetation illustration is in the book, there’s one missing and that one is the bottom left. One of the most popular theories in the fandom regarding that illustration is that it was an Arendellian military camp tied to the expedition to the Enchanted Lands. I think what we got in the movie is a watered down version of a much more violent and sinister endeavor to invade the Northuldra. The above mentioned deleted scene of the battle of Arendellians agains Northuldrans is proof of that.
This one shows the Arendellian gang and most likely Mattias looking at the walls of a cave with drawings on it depicting the Nokk among other things that I can’t quite make out. I’ve heard people say that an earlier version of F2 involved the gang encountering Mattias in a volcanic cave and that’s where this scene would go, but I don’t know if those are rumors or there’s an actual source. If someone happens to have knowledge on this topic in particular please let me know and I’ll update the post.
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Incomplete Frozen Fan Fest books and their alternate scenes
As I’ve mentioned in another post, Frozen Fan Fest happened on October 4th, 2019, and it was the official release of the movie’s first merchandise. We were all super excited to look at the storybooks and read the ending!
Except there was no ending and the books ended abruptly right before Olaf’s death, completely skipping over Show Yourself.
You hear that? “Elsa bravely dives into the Dark Sea”. We know the Dark Sea scene was shortened and that’s more proof.
This section of a Frozen 2 storybook explains how it went a bit better. After Elsa was defeated twice by the ferocious waves she climbed up some giant rocks and dove back in. Only Ahtohallan knows how that would be effective in this situation and not a waste of strength, but hey, I’m sure it looked super cool and I’d be down to see it.
”Elsa trudged through terrible winds and thick snow”... um... she didn’t? This might’ve been created when Show Yourself wasn’t a thing yet and her path through Ahtohallan was just that, trudging through terrible winds and snow, and not an inspiring song about self-love and finding yourself. I wonder how that scene would’ve looked.
Maybe we can find something relating to that “unused” section of Ahtohallan in a book called “Anna, Elsa and the Secret River”. Basically Iduna tells them that there’s a secret river out there and after the lullaby Elsa and Anna go nuts and try to look for the river outside. Seems like it was all a shared acid trip because next morning they seriously consider it was a dream.
Maybe here they didn’t realize they were in front of a river, because “Glaciers are rivers of ice” and this is what that Ahtohallan Elsa ventured into originally would’ve looked like? The white river doesn’t know...
This is by far one of my favorite ones. I wouldn’t exactly describe post-Show Yourself as a moment of calm and peace. Maybe peace but definitely not calm. Then it says that the signal meant that “she managed to cross the sea”. That’s a really weird way to describe “horrifying ice statue of colonialist grandpa killing an innocent native man”. I don’t know if they’re hiding the actual plot here of if they hadn’t yet worked out all the details of SY and the moment Elsa found the truth.
Anna has her cloak on as she finds the truth. Readers have no idea what this enlightening truth is because the ice statue is indistinguishable.
As it shows here, the original Iduna being Northuldra reveal was going to happen in a different way. I’m glad we got that final version... Because wow, Elsa and Anna are completely unable to connect the dots here. Anna was smart enough to figure out what to do after receiving Elsa’s message, c’mon! This should’ve been piece of cake...
Iduna called Elsa “Little Snow”. This points to an alternate All is Found scene and we’ll talk about that more in depth later.
Same scene. Translation is:
“While tucking the little princesses in, Queen Iduna sang them a lullaby about a far-away river called Ahtohallan, which holds all the answers about the past.
“Does Ahtohallan know why I have powers?” asked Elsa her mother.
“If it exists, it definitely knows that and much more,” answered the Queen.
So in this earlier version, Elsa has always asked herself if Ahtohallan had the answer to her powers... Doesn’t this make Show Yourself work even better? Here she always looked for that answer and she’d learn that she is the answer. I wonder why they took it out because it makes a lot of sense and would give buildup to Show Yourself.
Here what really matters are the squares with text. Olaf never ran through moss or became covered in it. Olaf never looks down a brook to be met by Nokk’s gaze from below. Maybe it’s an alternate When I’m Older?
And relating to that particular piece of merch:
Seems like in an earlier version, the Nokk was associated with waterfalls.
Everyone shut up there’s SWORD ANNA here. Found in a coloring book. I don’t speak Italian but Google Translate says:
“Anna is a brave one: she does not hesitate to draw her sword to defend her sister Elsa and her friends from any new threat.”
GOOD FOR HER! This is definitely from the version we were shown in the teaser, when Anna wielding an actual sword and slicing someone with it was still a thing. Man, how I wanted that to happen...
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Alternate fully animated scenes found in animators’ posts
After the release of Frozen 2, animators started to post scenes they had worked on and showing the process behind them. Some of them were deleted, are different in the final movie, or have a completely different score accompanying them.
View this post on Instagram
A post shared by Adam Green (@agreenster) on Apr 6, 2020 at 5:31pm PDT
A completely different dialogue during the boat scene. Pretty heartbreaking and it’s even more buildup for TNRT, when Anna was left by literally everyone she loved in the planet.
View this post on Instagram
A post shared by Trent Correy (@trentanimation) on Apr 14, 2020 at 8:50am PDT
Apparently, for whatever reason, Gale was going to appear in the castle first.
View this post on Instagram
A post shared by Trent Correy (@trentanimation) on Mar 29, 2020 at 10:51am PDT
Olaf’s revival was going to be way different, and this implies that his death might’ve been different, too. Maybe his snow just dissipated and didn’t go anywhere? Maybe instead of being neatly placed by a waterfall, it fell all over the Enchanted Lands? I have no idea.
View this post on Instagram
A post shared by Mariusz Furmanczyk (@mariofurmanczyk) on Mar 21, 2020 at 7:11pm PDT
I absolutely LOVE this one, okay, and I have no idea why they’d leave it out. Turn your sound on and listen to the much more tragic alternate score. But more importantly, pay attention when she turns to solid ice: just like in F1 with Anna, her last breath is visible. Beautiful parallels, poetic cinema, and I’m hurt and confused and I want it in the movie. Excuse me while I call the police.
View this post on Instagram
A post shared by Mariusz Furmanczyk (@mariofurmanczyk) on Feb 26, 2020 at 5:47pm PST
Here the only change is the different score as she unfreezes. I love it so much. It’s so tragic, heavy and powerful. You can basically hear the fragility of Elsa’s fate as the ice breaks and she falls. Help. Here, here, and here, you can see other glimpses of this beautiful alternate score. Once again I’m calling the police and telling them Disney hurt my feelings by leaving this out.
I’ve hit the 5 videos limit already, but here is a link to an animation by jdublish. The change isn’t the scene itself but the completely different siren call Elsa hears. Much more ominous and creepy and I also love it, even though I have to admit the final siren call sounds catchier and more iconic. Also, kids under five won’t start crying of fear when they hear it.
Then there were also plenty of changes in the Elsa vs Nokk scene and we got to see one. Thanks to @justlookatthosesausages for pointing this out and letting me use her gif! The original video was set to private for some reason so I can’t post a Youtube link, but this is @justlookatthosesausages‘ gif:
Elsa struggled way more in the original version. Go to her post to see a comparison with the final version.
And now the awaited All is Found alternate scene! Thanks a lot to @lovewillthaw-j who helped me collect all the scenes.
First two scenes from the trailers: the Official one, Elsa looks up and Iduna gazes at the northern lights.
The Japanese one, in which Iduna kisses Elsa’s hands. @catloafs pointed that out after F2′s release so thanks!
And the last two were found by @antoineharrakblog, so thanks for that! Here and here.
BUT there’s no need to click a bazillion links because @lovewillthaw-j‘s post reconstructs in a single video what the original scene would’ve been like. Go watch it!
UPDATE: Additions by @antoineharrakblog. Thanks a lot!
Here we can see that originally, as the elements fled and Kristoff held Olaf, he yelled, “Wow, you’re heavy!”. Don’t know why this would be removed. Maybe they wanted to keep the scene serious? Maybe they needed to shorten the movie so that it didn’t exceed 100 minutes and cut little jokes like that?
And here, showing Elsa seeing how Iduna saved her father, there’s some deleted dialogue: “Get the prince out of here!” “King Runeard, what did you decide?” in addition to a much more tense score in general.
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UPDATE: Screencaps of deleted/alternate scenes
Thanks a lot to @antoineharrakblog for bringing all of these pictures to my attention! Multiples screencaps have appeared in different magazines or books that clearly didn’t make it to the movie.
Anna never makes that movement in the final movie. There’s more proof of an alternate/extended “Elsa and Anna talk” scene.
This is another one. There exists a lower quality version of this picture which I can’t find right now, but it shows that Anna and Elsa are sharing kransekake in this particular scene (the particular food that we can see at the beginning of OFA).
These are all part of the All is Found scene we’ve been talking about. In the final movie we can see that All is Found serves as a sort of “bridge” between the past and the present, as it transitions from Iduna singing the song to Elsa to Elsa in the castle, reminiscing. But originally, Iduna finished singing All is Found in the past. There’s proof of this here.
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UPDATE: Novelization deleted content
This information was provided by @theupsidedownpyramid so thanks a lot! There are some really interesting deleted scenes in the novelization.
In this one, Elsa felt the urge to release her magic after hearing the voice at the end of All is Found.
In the novelization Mattias and Yelena’s (or Yelana? Disney will never decide) relationship was a lot deeper than what was shown in the movie.
For more information and a more thorough analysis, read @theupsidedownpyramid‘s reblog!
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Miscellaneous
So there’s only one image in this section but believe me, it’s so worth it.
An animator casually mentioned that there was going to be a head kiss scene. Process it. Can’t? I can’t either.
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Wow I’m TIRED. I must’ve missed something but that’s all my brain can handle as of now. Thank quarantine for giving me the opportunity to work on this post all day.
Disney committed war crimes when they deleted some of these scenes. I have only one question: Why in the world would they do that? And more information might see the light of day in the future. I’ll never get tired of trying to piece together the convoluted puzzle that is the original Frozen 2.
I will update this post if I remember something else or if someone else has more content to share. Let’s reconstruct F2 together to visualize that movie Disney deemed too cool for us!
UPDATE: Into the Unknown: the Making of Frozen 2 Documentary finally has a concrete release date, June 26th. Let’s hope we can see more stuff then!
Lyrical parallels in ‘Lost in the Woods’ and ‘The Next Right Thing’
First, since I’m going to be comparing Kristoff singing about Anna with Anna singing about Elsa, I’ll preface with incest shippers do not interact.
Despite the songs’ very different tones, it’s interesting to compare Anna and Kristoff’s emotions when they feel like they’ve been left behind by someone they love.
Similarities
Kristoff: I'm left behind
Wondering if I should follow
Kristoff: And I don't know what path you are on
Anna: I follow you around
I always have
But you've gone to a place I cannot find
Kristoff and Anna both portray themselves as the one who follows, not the one who leads. Now the person they put their trust in has disappeared out of sight, and they don’t know how to find them.
Kristoff: Who am I, if I'm not your guy?
Where am I, if we're not together?
Anna: How to rise from the floor
When it's not you I'm rising for?
These lines show a loss of purpose or sense of identity without the person they used to rely on. Anna and Kristoff both wonder ‘What do I do without you?’
Kristoff: Up is down, day is night
When you're not there
Oh, you're my only landmark
So I'm lost in the woods
Anna: I can't find my direction, I'm all alone
The only star that guided me was you
Everything seems out of place and upside down. There’s no clear way to go. Kristoff describing Anna as ‘(his) only landmark’ mirrors Anna calling Elsa ‘the only star that guided (her)’.
Differences
Kristoff: Up 'til now
The next step was a question of how
I never thought it was a question of whether
Anna: This next step
This next choice is one that I can make
Kristoff is now uncertain that the ‘next step’ is the right thing to do, or that he can take it. Anna, however, knows what the correct 'next step’ is - she must only summon the strength to take it.
Kristoff: But I'll wait
For a sign
That I'm your path
'Cause you are mine
Until then
I'm lost in the woods
Anna: So I'll walk through this night
Stumbling blindly toward the light
And do the next right thing
Anna: Then I'll make the choice
To hear that voice
And do the next right thing
By the end of their respective songs, both Kristoff and Anna have decided what to do. Kristoff chooses to ‘wait for a sign’. He trusts Anna to come back to him when she’s ready, and until she does, he’s willing to wait. Anna, on the other hand, can’t stay still and wait. As far as she knows, Elsa isn’t coming back. She has to move forward - and she does. Anna promises to ‘walk through this night’ and ‘make the choice... to do the next right thing’.
Kristoff ends his song on a more passive note, and Anna on a very active one. This is fitting, because Kristoff has recognised he needs to be content to play a supporting role in this particular quest, whereas Anna has accepted that she has to be the one to step up and take control. This culminates in Anna instigating the collapse of the dam, and Kristoff arriving just in time to offer crucial assistance.
I shared this on twitter, but wanted to talk about it here, too. I keep thinking about the campfire scene, and why Honeymaren joining in when Elsa sings the lullaby is so significant.
All is Found is sung together twice before: first when Iduna sings to her daughters, then when Elsa & Anna sing together. It represents their close familial bond & love, but this moment with Maren tells us the lullaby doesn’t belong solely to Iduna, but to her people. What Elsa thought was her mother’s lullaby is now more than that - it’s a part of Northuldran culture that Elsa is able to discover and share for the first time. So this moment transforms All is Found from the personal/familial, into the cultural. When Elsa connects with Maren here, she’s connecting with her lost heritage, and that’s so important. It reflects how many indigenous people often only rediscover their heritage later in life.
Forced assimilation and the stigma surrounding their cultures has led to some indigenous people only being able to reconnect with their culture in adulthood. Iduna, trapped away from her home and hiding her culture even from Agnarr, represents that forced assimilation, and Elsa and Anna, discovering their heritage only now, represent the generational consequences of that. Elsa and Honeymaren singing the lullaby together is Elsa’s first real moment of cultural connection, and one of the hints that Elsa really does “belong up here”, as Maren says.
I also think a song that represented a close familial bond & love being shared again with Honeymaren paints her as someone who’ll become part of Elsa’s family. First it’s mother/daughter, then between sisters... then something else.
That doesn’t have to be interpreted romantically - maybe it’s a moment painting the Northuldra, as a whole, as Elsa’s family. But there’s so much tenderness in every frame and every line, to me it feels like something deep and personal between the two of them.
I think that when this lullaby had only ever been shared with Iduna and Anna - the two people Elsa’s loved most in her life - who she shares it with next means something.
We often see Anna acting like an older sister to Elsa, and this is exactly one of those moments, and it’s such an obvious moment. The anger in her voice... the sternness when she knows her sister is being reckless shows how much, especially in those three years, that Anna has taken care of Elsa. Being an older sister isn’t easy, but Anna seemingly takes that responsibility like it’s nothing.
Hearing her angry tone when she talks to Elsa like that shows how mature she’s gotten, perhaps, a lot more like their mother. Maybe she even acts a lot like their mother as well. Anna usually goofs around, but times like this makes me appreciate that a lot of the times, she is compassionate and shows a lot of care for Elsa, acting like a big sister, when she’s just three years younger than Elsa.
But not only does she have sternness. She’s so kind and caring for Elsa’s wellbeing that she even lets Elsa have a shoulder to lean on and fall asleep comfortably. We don’t see the scene, but Anna even hums her a song and runs her fingers up and down between Elsa’s eyes to make her fall asleep. That’s usually not something a younger sister would do, and the wonderful thing about this is that Anna puts a lot of love for her sister, making up for all the years that they’ve lost.
So it’s no wonder why Anna would act as an older sister - she wants Elsa to have everything that she’s never gotten, and if Elsa has gotten into dangerous situations alone, where’s that ever going to lead them?
And the fact that she seems so attuned to Elsa’s wellbeing, this is the first thing she asks. Anna knows her better than anyone else, but still needs confirmation from other people... but even other people don’t really understand Elsa the way she does.
Being the youngest of my two sisters, I find Anna’s reactions and actions to everything that Elsa has done makes me feel so warm in the heart because it’s rare to see a younger sibling show such compassion and responsibility for the older ones.
Anna is the definition of sisterly love.
Elsa was only given the title of queen due to her parents’ death. She was not prepared.
Elsa fled into the mountains by herself instead of working through the issue at hand as a monarch.
Elsa threw her crown as a symbol of “letting go”
“Yes I’m alone but I’m alone and free.” (While Let It Go was an unhealthy coping mechanism, the meaning behind it is just that Elsa wants to be free, and she doesn’t stop feeling that way even into F2)
She did not want to come back to Arendelle and this only caused her distress after learning that she froze the entire town.
Elsa ONLY came back to Arendelle because she had been captured by Hans.
After three years of being Queen, she was still wildly uncomfortable in her position, often daydreaming and startling easily.
She also still confides in Anna about not wanting to “mess this up” even tho she had already been a strong leader for years.
Elsa says she’s not where she’s meant to be and a part of her longs to go into the unknown and have an adventure
Additionally, her only reason for not leaving was her family. She didn’t even consider her duties as queen.
Elsa made it clear that she does not want anyone relying on her, including Anna.
However, Elsa needs Anna by her side to rule.
Elsa found her true self in Ahtohallan, away from Arendelle. “I’m arriving, and it feels like I am home.” (This directly parallels Anna’s song Home, about her love for Arendelle)
Elsa was Arendelle’s queen for 3 years, and she was great, however she knew right away that Anna would be what’s best for the people, which in itself shows that Elsa was indeed a good leader. She just knew that her needs were not being met as queen, and that would hurt her abilities to be what Arendelle needed.
