The original Frozen was a massive hit for Walt Disney Animation. It's one of the biggest animated movies ever made and it was so big that it actually spawned a sequel, something we rarely see with theatrical Disney animation. The movie balanced Disney's history of animated films equally with taking a critical eye toward the very same concepts. For many reasons you could call Frozen a perfect movie, but there is one flaw in the movie according to the pair behind all of Frozen's music. Beyond that, there's something they consider a "great shame."
On Friday, Disney+ will debut Into the Unknown: Making Frozen 2, a documentary series that follows the final year of production on the soon-to-be hit movie. As one might expect, getting the music right is a big part of the series, and as such, the songwriting team of Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez admit that the sequel game them an opportunity to write one major wrong in the original film, giving Jonathan Groff something awesome to sing.
In the first movie, we did not get to write a song for Kristoff, and it’s going to be our great shame that we carry with us for the rest of our lives but we’ve tried to make it right with Frozen II by giving Kristoff an epic song.
Whether you know Jonathan Groff from Broadway, Glee or Frozen, there's little argument that the man has an incredible voice. And yet, nobody got much of a chance to experience that in the original Frozen. Kristen Bell called the lack of a Jonathan Groff song her only critique of the first movie, and so it appears that the shame that the songwriters feel extends even to the rest of the cast.
Having said that, while Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez might feel shame over the decision to overlook Jonathan Groff in the first movie, one person who does not feel that way is Jonathan Groff himself. He would like to remind everybody that he actually did have a song in the first Frozen, and he loves that song, thank you very much...
Everyone always came up to me and said that they were surprised that I didn’t have a song in the first Frozen movie. I always felt like “Reindeers are Better Than People” was a song and I was very proud of that song.
Having said that, the song that Jonathan Groff did get in Frozen II is just as epic as Kristen Anderson-Lopez claimed it would be all those months before Frozen II came out. Groff is perfect for an unapologetic '80s rock ballad that somehow fits perfectly into the film despite it's seeming randomness.
All six episodes of Into the Unknown: Making Frozen II, hit Disney+ on Friday.
