For Anna (Kristen Bell), co-director Jennifer Lee created a cheerful wardrobe featuring “playful” floral patterns and saturated colors. “Anna’s travel outfit is made of heavy wools and velvets since they live in a northern climate,” she adds.
Elsa’s costumes early in the film are confining, underscoring that she’s hiding her power. But when Elsa accepts who she is, Lee says her clothing opens up and “shows her freedom.”
To create Olaf, Disney created software called Spaces, which allowed artists to deconstruct the character — and rebuild him — as part of the animation process; and Flourish, which allowed artists to more easily add extra movement, for instance to the twigs on Olaf's head.
Voice actor Santino Fontana says of his character, Prince Hans, "He's slightly awkward — but in a good way."
Even though Disney's animators had wrestled with braids for 2011's Tangled, the hair for Elsa was vastly more complicated: While Rapunzel carried 27,000 extralong strands on her head, the Frozen team found themselves dealing with upward of 400,000 CG threads — a feat that required the invention of a new program, called Tonic, to execute.
A character design sheet shows Anna's many moods.
"You needed to understand why the Snow Queen does what she does," says producer Peter Del Vecho of Elsa (voiced by Menzel). "And it was developing a sibling relationship between Anna and the Snow Queen that allowed us the depth of the story, emotionally."
Prince Hans’ look is “elegant and put-together,” says Lee. “He’s not from Arendelle, so we wanted him to still have rosemaling [a decorative Norwegian painting technique], but his jackets have more of a graphic design.”
Fjords, viewed during a Disney Animation research trip to Norway, were used as models for Frozen's Scandinavian setting.
Befitting an outdoorsman from the mountains, Kristoff’s clothing — complete with fur and a red sash — reflects the Sami, the indigenous people of Norway.