Frozen 2 Debunks Disney Fan Theories on Little Mermaid, Tangled

Frozen 2 has already put together a list of remarkable successes. The sequel had the biggest opening weekend for an animated film of all time. (Well, depending on whether you consider the “live action” lion king to be animated.) He has given the parents of small children a soundtrack that settles in their heads. And most of all (at least for me), it unmasks one of the most virulent – and frankly one of the dumbest – Disney fan theories out there.

Finally, finally, I can say with certainty that Tarzan is not secretly Elsa and Anna’s long-lost brother.

(Ed. Note: This post contains important spoilers for Frozen 2 and many of me are pedantic about Disney traditions.)

Walt Disney Animation Studios

When Frozen came out, there were three big theories about how it was associated with other Disney movies. One was that Frozen and Tangled took place in the same world. This was not particularly far-fetched as Tangled protagonists Flynn Rider and Rapunzel make Frozen on-screen cameos when Anna sings “For the first time ever”. They were on their way to Flynn and Rapunzel’s wedding when their ship sank into a storm just before the movie started.

Another theory was that the ship on which Elsa and Anna’s parents died was the ship at the beginning of the Little Mermaid. Both films are based on stories by Hans Christian Andersen, so okay, well, well, if you want that.

The third is based on a quote by director Chris Buck, who also directed Disney’s animated Tarzan in 1999. Buck told of a meeting in which he told his co-director Jennifer Lee, “Of course, Anna and Elsa’s parents did not die, yes, there was a shipwreck, but they were at sea a bit longer than we think, because the Mother was pregnant and gave birth to a little boy on the boat, they are shipwrecked and somehow they have really washed away from the Scandinavian waters and land in the jungle, at the end they build a tree house and a leopard kills them, so their baby raised by gorillas. “

What he said is that Tarzan is Elsa and Anna’s little brother.

People came up with this idea and wrote articles about the “CONNECTION !!!!!” between the two films, YouTube videos made over the link and heralded the statement of Buck as a canon.

But the theory is objectively wrong.

Look like the same people to you: Disney and Disney

First and foremost, Tarzan shows the film to Tarzan’s parents, who have absolutely nothing to do with Elsa and Anna’s parents. The fathers both have facial hair, but here the similarity ends. This does not even reveal the fact that the costume style around the 1830s plays Frozen, while Tarzan comes later. The source material – Edgar Rice Burroughs’ book Tarzan Of The Apes – was discontinued in the 1910s. The Disney movie moves the period a little earlier, as the gorilla scholar Professor Porter refers to Queen Victoria, Charles Darwin and Rudyard Kipling. The bustle in Jane’s dress suggests that the story takes place in the late 19th century.

But more importantly, Chris Buck did not mean it when he explained the context. The full quotation, which is rarely quoted, ends with an ironic remark about integrating Buck’s 2007 Sony animated film Surf’s Up into the same big headcanon with meta-narration. “So in my little head is Anna and Elsa’s brother Tarzan – but on the other side of the island, penguins are surfing to record a non-Disney movie, Surf’s Up, that’s my funny little world,” Buck said in 2015 to MTV He added a mandatory line that fans can do whatever they want.

It is one thing to create a personal canon and to deal with the “what if?” Of established fictional worlds. Fanfic is there for that. It is an exercise in creativity and world education. One can say that Anna and Elsa are actually Rapunzel’s cousins! Or write an AU in which all characters are mermaids! Or pair Elsa with Jane Porter! The beauty of fanfiction is that your ideas can co-exist not only with Canon but also with the ideas of the rest of fandom.

But when headcups and easter eggs are presented as unassailable facts, a director’s joke becomes a video story, and people who find out I’m a big fan of Disney come up with a “well,” to tell me about the “truth ” to inform. It deprives of the joy to imagine these connections and play around with the possibilities.

Luckily, Frozen 2 did the best it could for my mind: exposing all three of these theories in one scene.

Disney

In the second act of the film Elsa and Anna discover the ruins of their parent ship – not in the south, as they had once suspected, but in the north. The current squeezed the ship into the edge of the magical forest in the land of Northuldra, but the sisters soon discovered that their parents were trekking across the Dark Sea and seeking answers to Elsa ‘s ice force. With newly discovered water magic, Elsa sees the moment immediately before her death, as they clung to each other, the waves rose and they finally drowned.

And under my breath, I muttered, “Oh, thank God.”

The ruined ship in Northuldra and the gloomy statue of Queen Iduna and King Agnarr, who are about to drown, illustrate three great things:

• Although Tangled takes place in this world, Iduna and Agnarr were clearly not on their way to a wedding, but on a critical search.
• The ship is not on the ocean floor, so it’s not the wreck that Ariel swims through in The Little Mermaid.
• The parents of Elsa and Anna clearly died in the shipwreck, so they did not land in a jungle where they built a tree house and then traveled about 50 years into the future to have a child.

So I am free. Get rid of the shackles of people trying to improve my Disney knowledge with these “facts”. Free yourself from the burden of the canonized theories and try to distort the film as it was written and intended.

Well, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to make my modern Frozen AU Fanfik here, where Elsa and Anna open up an ice cream parlor in a small town to escape the legacy of their grandfather as CEO of a large corporation that exploited indigenous peoples and Tax evaded. Canon never bothered me anyway.