Olaf’s Original Death Scene in Disney’s Frozen II Traumatized Children

I learned something today. Apparently, there was a much more intense version of Olaf’s “death” in “Frozen 2.” According to a story from the Olaf voice actor, Josh Gad, it was so intense that it may have traumatized children.

Gad apparently wrote a memoir, “In Gad We Trust.” In this book, he discussed the situation involving Olaf’s original death scene.

He couldn’t even record the voice lines that Jennifer Lee (writer-director) had written without crying. It was also the first scene he filmed!

“Jen and I started recording the dialogue and I couldn’t get through it without sobbing. Those first recordings were brutal, and I remember feeling that we were doing something that was going to pack a serious punch.”

“The creatives do a very good job of keeping everything under lock and key and only giving us what they think we need to execute our roles,” Gad explains. So imagine his surprise when he discovered “the first scene I ever recorded for the film” would be the death of his character Olaf, the loyal, child-like snowman companion to Bell’s Anna.

“I got to the studio and Jenn slow-rolled me into the day’s material. As I looked at the scene, the first thing I saw was ‘Olaf begins to flurry away.’ I read further. ‘Anna sobs’ and ‘Olaf looks to her for help.’ I looked at Jenn. ‘Wait — are we…?’ With tears in her eyes, she nodded her head and said, ‘Yes.'”

I’m all for emotional punches, but they have to be age-appropriate. Granted, when I grew up, we had “The Secret of Nihm,” “The Dark Crystal,” and “The Last Unicorn.”  I may not be the best judge, but the original death scene from “Frozen 2” was indeed too much for children. Gad says they changed it after the disastrous first test screening.

“[I] asked Jen how the first test screening went, Jen is many incredible things, but a good liar is not one of them. She put on a brave face and said, ‘The adults loved it, but the kids were very confused and very, very sad.'”

Later, Gad learned that the issue was with his character’s death scene,

“Olaf’s death scene was causing absolute havoc with the younger viewers.

They were apparently sobbing, screaming, and fully traumatized by the extended sequence and the tone of the scene.”

Disney CEO Bob Iger apparently thought it was a bad idea as well. Gad recalled Lee saying that Iger told her,

 “Olaf is a child. You can’t just willy-nilly kill a scared child, because the children watching will see themselves in him.”

What happened with the original scene?

“In the first version, Olaf himself was scared and confused by what was happening, but in its commitment to the brutality of Olaf’s naiveté about all things, including dying, we had made our intended audience scared for Olaf, rather than emotional.”

They fixed it by doing “an altered version in which Olaf isn’t scared, but instead is at peace and comforts Anna before he leaves. Instead of disintegrating in the wind and asking Anna for help in a confused panic, Olaf says, “I’m flurrying away, the magic is fading.” Before he dies, the snowman tells Anna that he “thought of one thing that’s permanent – love.”

It’s interesting to see how just a switch in the presentation of something can make a scene shift from traumatic to just sad.

Of course, Olaf returns just a bit later in the film.

While sad enough, it’s a good thing that Disney changed the original version because that would not have gone over well with parents or children.

What do you think? Comment and let us know!

Source: EW