How Frozen Jumped From the Big Screen To Disney Parks Around the Globe, Including World of Frozen at Disneyland Paris’ Disney Adventure World

But yes, while this all sounds great, we too would love to give Olaf a real-life, warm hug. Thankfully, that door has not been closed.

“We’re not quite sure he’s built to a state where he can endure hundreds and thousands of people hugging him, so the show is still how he’s represented within the village,” den Dulk said with a smile. “We know we want to give that opportunity to our guests, and we’re still exploring what the best ways are to do that.”

“These types of projects are really exciting and give us opportunities in the future to represent characters in new ways, especially characters that are sort of smaller size, but to make them come to life in ways we couldn’t do before. You can imagine there’s a whole array of cool characters that we could try and make come alive. We’re very happy that Olaf at World of Frozen is part of that sort of evolution in what we can do with our robotic characters.”

Olaf is just one way guests will be brought into the world of Frozen, but there are much more subtle ways that round out the experience to make it feel as authentic as possible.

One example is Elsa’s magical powers. While we can see her Ice Palace on the North Mountain above Arendelle, the team wanted to put her abilities on display in a way guests could walk right up to.

“One of the most beautiful things is the fountain with the snowflake on it in the middle of town,” Gould said. “That’s not something we saw in the film, but it was this wonderful idea that den Dulk had. How do we bring that magic, Elsa’s magic out in the open? And so when you see the castle, it has her ice magic decoration on it, but this was a way of bringing it up closer for people to really connect with.”

Speaking of the Ice Palace, the structure of it is actually inspired by a snowflake.

“The Ice Palace is basically a six-sided building because every snowflake has six points,” Gould said. “And so then the fountain echoes that design philosophy as well. It’s all about those sort of invisible things. I don’t think any guest ever goes, ‘I love that six-sided Ice Palace!’ But it’s just embedding all this design philosophy into every expression of the story that makes it just feel that there’s a kind of unity to it that feels really comfortable and appealing.”

What people do talk about time and time again, however, is Frozen Ever After. That attraction is back for Disneyland Paris’ World of Frozen, and it even features a bit of new queue and some changes that will make it worth riding for veterans of the one at Walt Disney World or elsewhere.

Beyond that, however, that attraction is kind of the reason we are celebrating this big moment today as that’s where Frozen’s entry into the world of Disney Parks began, even before the first film debuted.

Frozen Ever After Was A Bet on a Fairy Tale About a Snow Queen

den Dulk has been working on the Frozen franchise non-stop for about 13 years, but his journey with Anna and Elsa began even before they hit the big screen. In fact, the plans to build the Frozen Ever After attraction were in motion well before the film was released to the world.

“Nobody really knew that Frozen was going to take off in this way,” den Dulk said. “Everybody had good feelings about the film, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t think people were betting that it would reach the heights it has.”

den Dulk first saw a rough cut of the film in the summer of 2013, which was a combination of storyboards and simple animations, but he noticed something very important that would be a key factor in the global success of Frozen.

“What I did recognize was the Norwegian or Scandinavian component of the film,” den Dulk said. “I didn’t know that was part of Frozen before I saw a preview because the film’s very loosely based on The Snow Queen by Hans Christian Andersen, and that fairy tale doesn’t really dictate a specific place. So, the filmmakers could have placed it anywhere really, but they chose a very Norwegian/Scandinavian aesthetic for the film.”

As a designer, den Dulk picked up on these aspects and that led to discussions about bringing Frozen to EPCOT’s Maelstrom at Walt Disney World, which sits in the Norway pavilion. There was a time it was potentially considered for Fantasyland in Magic Kingdom, but Seven Dwarfs Mine Train was already being built there.

Maelstrom ended up being a perfect home for Frozen because, despite it being a fan favorite, den Dulk shared that the ridership of the attraction was pretty low and that the resort had been wanting to do something to it but didn’t quite know what.

The project began a bit smaller, with elements of Frozen planned on being installed into Maelstrom, but the success of the film led to Disney wanting it to be even bigger and grander, and that led to it getting its own attraction.

What Disney didn’t do, however, is demolish Maelstrom and start from scratch. Instead, it tasked the team to build Frozen Ever After over the existing layout of the ride, much like it did when it replaced Splash Mountain with Tiana’s Bayou Adventure.

And this is when the teams at Walt Disney Imagineering and Walt Disney Animation Studios began to work together to bring Frozen to life in the most authentic way possible. For example, Wayne Unten, who was the supervising animator for Elsa on Frozen, wasn’t just consulted on the singing Elsa Audio-Animatronics figure that sings ‘Let It Go,’ he insisted on animating her himself.

Gould also shared that a big goal for the team was to invite guests into the… well… World of Frozen, and it all begins with our favorite snowman.

“We really wanted the attraction to feel like every character sees you, is welcoming you, and is inviting you in,” Gould said. “And that starts with Olaf seeing you and running towards you, which really was us trying to make you feel like he can’t even wait to see you. And the moment he does, he wants to run up and make that connection.”

“I think that’s something that’s really magical and probably invisible to the guests that we actually try to embed the emotional themes like these in the physical experience that you’re having.”

This is also seen in the big ‘Let It Go’ moment, which is actually Idina Menzel’s stunning performance from the movie, except for one small, yet supremely important change.

“In the film, she’s saying, ‘It’s time to see what I can do.’ It’s a song that she’s singing to herself when she needs to understand who she is,” Gould said. “For the ride, we changed it to ‘It’s time to share what I can do,’ because that’s that invitation. We want people to feel welcome.”

And welcome people feel, as Frozen Ever After consistently has one of the longest wait times at EPCOT, and that was even before Imagineering updated the faces of Anna, Elsa, and Kristoff.

However, there are a lot of successful attractions at Disney Parks, so why was Frozen given the green light to expand across the world?

From World Showcase to The World

When den Dulk and the team were working on Frozen Ever After, he was asked to look at a project for Tokyo Disney Resort that was Frozen related and would be located south of Indiana Jones Adventure: Temple of the Crystal Skull.

While a Frozen Kingdom was later built in the newer Fantasy Springs area of Tokyo DisneySea, that original project was never completed and that part of the park is still empty. Despite that, it wasn’t long before den Dulk would be set on an even grander adventure.

“We had a leadership change at Walt Disney Imagineering in 2016 and Bob Weis took over,” den Dulk said. “He looked at all the resorts and there was an ask from Hong Kong Disneyland to expand as they had a multi-year expansion planned and were interested in Frozen as well.”

“We took Bob on Frozen Ever After while it was still under construction, and he said, ‘I kind of like this concept. I think it’s fun. Could you imagine if you could build this as a brand-new ride, in the context of Frozen versus the context of Norway?’ I said, ‘Well, of course!'”

Hong Kong Disneyland proved to be an exciting place to build the first-ever World of Frozen, as the park was surrounded by the breathtaking Lantau Mountains.

“It’s literally this physical, natural berm,” Gould said. “And the incredible thing was not only can we build the North Mountain, but we actually have real physical mountains that are going to help us tell the story. When you walk into that land, it feels so much bigger than even what we built because of those mountains.

“It’s kind of like the way Cars land was for Disney California Adventure, that park needed a big statement that really said, ‘You know what? This is a new Disneyland here and you really need to come back.'”

Gould then mentioned that Disneyland Paris’ Walt Disney Studios Park was also, at the time, in need of that “DCA boost, and everyone understood that.” And what better way to send it to the stars than with the help of Anna, Elsa, Olaf, and all their Frozen friends?

What The Future Holds for Frozen and Disney Entertainment

And so we are back at Disney Adventure World and World of Frozen, which will continue to evolve and grow and change, just like the characters that first helped us fall in love with the franchise. As many are aware, Frozen 3 and 4 are already in the works at Disney, and there very well could be even more stories headed our way even further in the future.

With that in mind, I had to ask den Dulk and Gould how they plan for these new chapters of Frozen. After all, it would be a huge missed opportunity if they didn’t imbue at least some of what’s coming next to these lands that are meant to be living and breathing. This topic has become even more relevant after the news that Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge would be changing to include the Original Trilogy era,

“An attraction is going to be more set in a certain moment of time, but a land should always take place after the latest movie,” Gould said. “Today, when you’re in World of Frozen, you’ll see Anna in her Queenly outfit from the end of Frozen 2 and you’ll see Elsa in her beautiful Snow Queen look, as that’s who they are now. When a Frozen 3 or Frozen 4 comes out, we will evolve that story. So the land will always be a living place that reflects Frozen today and wherever that story is.

“It’s an incredible opportunity to keep telling the story going forward. And I guess when we make our films, if we do it right, when the movie ends, the audience knows that the world didn’t end, that those characters’ lives didn’t go away. They keep going. And in the parks, we get to deliver on that expectation. We go beyond the boundaries of the movie.”

den Dulk added that we are living in “happily ever after times in Arendelle,” and that the drama and disasters are behind us. There is a bright future ahead, and that’s not just for World of Frozen.

The team is already hard at work on the aforementioned Lion King land that will be neighbors with World of Frozen, and who knows what other stories Disney will bring to life next alongside Magic Kingdom’s Villains Land, the Cars-themed Piston Peak National Forest, the upcoming Coco attraction and Avatar Land at Disneyland, Hollywood Studios’ Monsters, Inc. land, and more.

So, what is it about Frozen? Sure, it’s now considered an “Evergreen Story” at Disney that’s also based on a fairy tale that has European roots in it, but it checks so many of the boxes that not only Disney looks for in a story, but all of us.

“Human emotion is universal,” Gould said of the power of Frozen. “It’s true in the way people connect to these characters, that no matter where in the world you’re from, that sense of family, love, and bonding is something we all relate to. And so people want to be in Arendelle because all of those most optimistic ideals of who we want to be as people are there; that we want to be with family, that we want to connect, and that we want to feel like we are also sharing our love with those we hold closest to our hearts. I think you feel that in World of Frozen, and it’s a pretty miraculous thing for a physical place to evoke that kind of emotion, but I think it really does.”

On top of all of that, Disney Parks offer something not many other places do.

“What is so special to me about Disney Parks is that for quite a large part, these parks all over the world are part of generations of guests that come back,” den Dulk said. “People go there and make memories, and then they take their children or friends and they create new memories, and the cycle continues.”

As someone who was just at Walt Disney World experiencing this exact thing, I echo what den Dulk says wholeheartedly. Not only was I there with my Mom, who introduced me into the world of Disney through The Lion King, but I was able to bring my daughter, who ended our trip running through the streets of EPCOT in her Elsa dress with the biggest smile on her face.

Those memories will last in our hearts forever, and that is why stories like Frozen last and endure and places like World of Frozen matter.

And that is the real Disney magic.

Adam Bankhurst is a writer for IGN. You can follow him on X/Twitter @AdamBankhurst, Instagram, and TikTok, and listen to his show, Talking Disney Magic.