If you've watched Into the Unknown: Making Frozen 2, you know that the making of that film was, to a large degree, utter chaos. Even months before the film was set to premiere the filmmakers were still working on some significant parts of the film and trying to find the right story. In the end, the quest led to them to songs like "Show Yourself," which largely defined the film, and Josh Gad recently revealed that something very similar happened with the first Frozen movie, which eventually led to "Do You Want To Build a Snowman?"
Appearing on People's Couch Surfing, Josh Gad says that only about six months before the original Frozen was set to be released, the film was "a mess" at least according to songwriter Robert Lopez. One of the issues at the time was that the relationship between Anna and Elsa was developing properly, but the songwriter had an idea of how to fix it. According to Gad...
I’ll never forget six, seven months prior to the movie coming out I was with Bobby Lopez and I said ‘How’s the movie coming?’ And Bobby looks at me and he goes ‘We just screened the movie and it’s a mess.’ And I go ‘Well can you fix it?’ And he’s like ‘I hope so. We’re playing around with the idea that we need this moment where we really see the girls’ affection for each other early on. So we’re playing with this song that’s called "Do You Want To Build a Snowman?"
It's a well-known story at this point that originally Frozen was a bit more traditional of a story and that Elsa ended up being a more standard sort of villain character. Over the course of the story's evolution, that changed into the version that we know today. It became the story of the relationship between two sisters. However, it seems that even only a few months before the film was supposed to be done, there was a feeling that the emotional bond between Anaa and Elsa didn't feel right, something was missing.
It's difficult to even imagine what Frozen would have been like without this song. So much takes place through that music, it's a montage of action and a time-lapse as well. Frozen would have had to have a very different opening without that song.
While Josh Gad wasn' part of "Do You Want to Build a Snowman?", his character directly benefitted from it. The idea of building a snowman becomes incredibly important early in Frozen, leading to the introduction of the snowman character of Olaf play by Gad.
Somehow, even with so much needing to be figured out at more or less the last minute, both Frozen movies became hits. The first became the highest-grossing animated movie of all-time until it was dethroned by the sequel.
