Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1175944
FROZEN 2 www.postmagazine.com 20 POST SEPT/OCT 2019 and Iceland for some inspiration by surrounding themselves with the environments and some of the regions' folklore, fairytales and mythologies. According to Buck, in Frozen, the world had just opened up for the characters. "They were trying to figure out who they were," he says. "But it feels like they've graduated college now. They're getting their lives together. We wanted to know what that means for each of them." The sequel does, in fact, pick up three years after the conclusion of Frozen. Elsa is queen and Anna is happy to have everyone she loves — Elsa, Kristoff, Olaf and Sven — under one roof. The bond between sisters is strong — and anchors the story. But, according to the filmmakers, there is an underlying current of unrest and angst. Elsa is the only one who keeps hearing a voice in the distance, calling out to her through song. Ultimately, it leads to a great adventure for the characters — one that Disney promises will bring clarity to everything we know about them. Idina Menzel, Kristen Bell, Jonathan Groff and Josh Gad return to Arendelle as the voices of Elsa, Anna, Kristoff and Olaf, respectively. Evan Rachel Wood (HBO's Westworld) joins the cast as Queen Iduna, Anna and Elsa's mother, and Sterling K. Brown (This Is Us, Black Panther) portrays Lieutenant Destin Mattias. Also returning is the hit songwriting team of Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez with seven new offerings, and most of the same creative team from Disney. Lee and Buck have co-directed the film once again, as well. MEETING CHALLENGES The demands for this film were high. Animators, visual effects artists, the filmmakers and editor, set designers, etc., all had their challenges. There were new characters to develop, including several that are a bit unconventional, such as a mythical water spirit (a horse) called a "Nokk," the water itself (beautifully created, yet darker than in Moana), and even the forceful winds named "Gale" that the char- acters meet once inside a magical, enchanted forest. Even the color palette in the film has changed, since it takes place in fall, leaning more towards oranges, yellows and reds, even showing much more of the village itself, and giving the environment team a few things to think about. "The challenge was to give the audience some- thing new and exciting," says Buck. "Once we went with this idea of our characters growing up and maturing, we then went with the idea of setting [the story] in the fall and letting the nature and environment support what's going on inside our characters, so as the year is maturing with autumn, our characters are maturing also. Even with fall, there's some grittier feel to it, things get a little more vivid and real, and that's what was happen- ing to them, too." "In Frozen 1, we did use the village, nowhere near as much as we are in Frozen 2," says David Womersley, art director of environments. "So we had to change the colors. Or we felt we should change the colors because we have these rich alter- nate colors now with the trees. The original colors we had on the buildings themselves were these very rich jeweled colors." This, according to Lisa Keene, production designer, looked great with snow, "but didn't look so great with autumn" (laughs). "We gave Arendelle, the whole Arendelle, a paint job basically," adds Womersley. ADVANCEMENTS IN ANIMATION The animation team, lead by Becky Bresee (head of animation) and Tony Smeed (head of animation), had a number of sequences and characters to work out for the new film. But advancements in technolo- gies and techniques certainly helped. "Everything's gotten better at the studio," says Del Vecho. "We have stronger technologies, ad- vancements, our artists advance, everything is great. The story [they] came up with expands the world of Frozen. It's not only a different look, but just the idea that there's magic in nature and now nature becomes a character — those are all big challenges, one that the crew was very excited about solving. This is a big movie, though, in scope and scale, and it is bigger than Frozen I." "The thing about animation, the most expressive thing are the eyes and the face and for a writer, the subtext is critical and reading subtext on the faces, the nuances, and the rigs have gotten so fantastic, the subtlety of what they can do, the expressions, it blows me away," says Lee. "Things did change, the rigging did get better," says Bresee. "We had to rebuild all of our characters. There were little things that were hard for us in the first movie, that were helpful to put in the rig for the second movie. It was intended for the characters to look exactly the same, but obviously there are little differences, one of the bigger things was Hyperion, our renderer changed. So, for instance, in the first movie, if there was a big crease when they smiled, you keep the crease, it would have to be defining and crisp because when it rendered, it would soften. So you were always doing rendering tests. On this film, it was kind of the opposite, cause Hyperion did so well in picking that stuff up, you almost had to soften things in order to balance it out. They look slightly different in very subtle ways, but yeah, it's meant to kind of have a through line from the first movie to the second." "Each film builds on the last film, so the things that have happened over the course of the last several films, since Frozen, have become better," says Smeed. "Things like topology, the way the face is built in the cross sections of the mesh and how it's laid out on the face. We've discovered new ways to make that, make the face flow better when we're going in and out of expressions. Which is why we Much of the story is told through the characters' eyes and facial exressions.