'Frozen 2' Plot Revealed: Here's What Anna And Elsa Are Searching For
Elsa tries to escape an island by icing her way over crashing waves. Anna takes a dramatic leap of faith across a dark chasm. Kristoff and Sven lead a large herd of reindeer toward an unknown destination. What the heck is happening in the teaser for Walt Disney Animation's Frozen 2?
Despite this being the sequel to the highest-grossing animated movie in history, the actual plot for this follow-up has largely been kept under wraps. But a new report has revealed the main thrust of the movie, and we'll get into the details below. Fair warning: spoilers ahead.
On an episode of the Fine Tooning podcast, bloggers Jim Hill and Drew Taylor (who have broken several Disney-related stories over the years) laid out what they know about the Frozen 2 plot:
"It is about Anna and Elsa searching for what actually happened to their parents...they're going to go beyond Arendelle."
This is the first time we're hearing this detail. In the 2013 original film, Anna and Elsa's parents die in a boating accident:
Or so we think. Maybe that accident wasn't an accident after all – could Frozen 2 be a detective story with the girls trying to solve their parents' murders? Or maybe the parents survived the shipwreck and have been stranded somewhere, unable to return to their daughters.
DreamWorks' How to Train Your Dragon movies dealt with similar subject matter when the protagonist Hiccup shockingly met his mother in the second movie after he spent the first twenty years of her life thinking she was dead. Do Elsa and Anna get a tip that their parents are still out there somewhere? Are their mother and father in some kind of trouble? Is the whole thing a trap orchestrated by some sort of villain, the parents are still dead, and the sisters learn by the end that all they truly need is each other? There are several possibilities within this framework.
When I spoke with co-writer/co-director Jennifer Lee last year, she told me about why she wanted to come back to this world to continue the story:
"I think the big thing for me is; we weren't going to do a sequel. [Co-director] Chris [Buck] and I were like, 'That story's done.' But then one day we just made the mistake of talking about something and going, 'Oh my gosh. That's the thing we still haven't explored, and it's important.' Then I spent time writing these journals as the girls."
Could that "important" angle have been the girls reckoning with the disappearance of their parents? In any case, I'm eager to see what Lee (who is now running Walt Disney Animation) and Buck have in store for us when Frozen 2 arrives in theaters on November 22, 2019 – almost exactly six years after the original debuted.