Let it Go！险些失败的【冰雪奇缘】背后的故事

The Disney megahit was almost a disaster, until a series of creative brainstorms saved the day.

迪士尼的这部电影险些变成了一场灾难，直到一系列创造性的奇思妙想化险为夷。

In 2014, the Disney movie Frozen became the top-grossing animated movie of all time. It won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature Film, and “Let It Go” won the Oscar for Best Original Song. The film contained all the elements of a traditional Disney plot—princesses and ball gowns, a handsome prince, a wisecracking sidekick, and a stream of upbeat songs.

2014年迪士尼电影Frozen冰雪奇缘成为历史上最卖座的动画电影，获得奥斯卡最佳动画长片奖，主题曲“随他吧”赢得了奥斯卡最佳原创歌曲奖。这部电影包含了所有传统的迪士尼元素，公主和舞会礼服，一个英俊的王子，一个俏皮的小弟，和很多欢快的歌曲。

But throughout, these elements had been disturbed, just enough, to let something new and different emerge. We assume such original storytelling comes from the innate genius of its creators, but here’s how Frozen really got its fairy-tale ending.

但从始至终，这些元素都仅仅保持在刚好的地步，让一些新的和不同的元素能有出现的余地。我们认为这种原始的讲故事方法是来自于它创造者的天赋，但下面的故事展示了Frozen如何真正得到了它的童话结局。

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it’s 2012, and the screening-room audience is all Disney employees. As the lights dim, two sisters appear on the screen against an icy landscape. Anna, the younger character, quickly establishes herself as bossy and uptight, obsessed with her upcoming wedding and her coronation as queen.

2012年，放映室的观众都是迪士尼员工。灯光变暗，两个姐妹出现在屏幕上，衬着冰冷的背景。安娜，年轻的角色，迅速确立了自己的专横和易怒形象，迷恋着她即将到来的婚礼，和她女王的加冕式。

Elsa, her older sister, is jealous, evil—and cursed. Everything she touches turns to ice. She was passed over for the throne because of this power, and now she wants revenge. She plots with a snarky snowman named Olaf to claim the crown for herself, and she floods the village with vicious snow creatures.

艾莎，她姐姐，是嫉妒的性格，诅咒着她。她触摸的任何东西都会变成冰块。她因为这个特性没有办法得到王位，所以她现在想要复仇。她和一名叫奥拉夫的尖刻雪人合谋，要把皇冠抢回来，然后她用恶毒的冰雪生物淹没了整个村庄。

The monsters, however, are soon out of her control. They begin to threaten everyone, including Elsa herself. The only way to survive, Anna and Elsa realize, is for them to join forces. Through cooperation, they defeat the creatures, and everyone lives happily ever after.

那些冰雪生物很快脱离了她的控制。它们开始威胁到每一个人，包括艾莎自己。安娜和艾莎意识到唯一存活下来的方法，就是联手合作。最后她们击退了那些生物，之后每个人都快乐地生活着。



The name of the movie is Frozen, and it is scheduled to be released in just 18 months.Often, when a movie screening ends at Disney, people cheer or shout. This time, there are no cheers. As everyone files out, it is very, very quiet.

影片的名字叫Frozen，并预期在18个月之后上映。通常，迪士尼的电影放映完之后，人们会欢呼或者大喊。但这次，并没有。大家一个个走出去，非常安静。

After the screening, the director, Chris Buck, and about a dozen other filmmakers gather to discuss what they saw. This is a meeting of the studio’s “story trust,” a group responsible for providing feedback on films as they go through production.

在放映之后，导演克里斯和大约十二个电影的其他制作员工，聚在一起讨论他们看到的景象。这是工作室“story trust”工作组的会议，这个组的职责就是在制作过程中对电影提出意见和反馈。

Disney’s chief creative officer, John Lasseter, begins. “You’ve got some great scenes here,” he says. “The dialogue between the sisters was witty. The snow monsters were terrifying. The film had a good, fast pace.” And then he begins listing the film’s flaws. After detailing a dozen problems, he says, “There’s no character to root for. Anna’s too uptight, and Elsa’s too evil.”

迪士尼的首席创意官，约翰·拉塞特，开始了发言。“这儿有一些很好的场景，”他说。“姐妹之间的对话是诙谐的。雪怪物是可怕的。这部电影有一个很好的，快速的节奏，“然后他开始列出了电影的缺陷。在详细介绍了十几个问题之后，他说：“没有任何角色能够获得支持。安娜太暴躁了，艾莎太邪恶。”

Others chime in: There were logical holes in the plot. There were too many characters. The plot twists were foreshadowed way too much.

其他人附和：故事有情节的逻辑漏洞。有太多的人物。情节的曲折被剧透了太多。



Buck isn’t surprised. His team had sensed the movie wasn’t working for months. The film’s screenwriter had restructured the script repeatedly. The songwriters were exhausted from writing and scrapping song after song.

克里斯并不惊讶。他的团队已经意识到这几个月的工作没有成效。电影的剧本制作者重新改写了剧本。作曲者已经对写歌弃歌的循环感到筋疲力尽。

“There’s a lot of really good material here,” Lasseter tells Buck, “but you need to find the movie’s core.” Lasseter rises from his seat. “It would be great if it happened soon.”

“这儿确实有一些很好的素材。”约翰对导演说。“但你需要找到电影的核心。”约翰站了起来。“如果能快点确立核心的话真是再好不过了。”

From the beginning, the Frozen team members had known they couldn’t simply retell an old fairy tale. “It couldn’t just be that at the end, a prince gives someone a kiss, and that’s the definition of true love,” Buck told me.

从一开始，冰雪奇缘的员工就知道他们不能简单地重复讲述一个古老的童话故事。“最后不能是那样的，王子给了谁一个吻，然后就是真爱的定义了。”导演对我说。



They wanted the film to say something bigger, about how girls don’t need to be saved by Prince Charming, about how sisters can save themselves. They wanted to turn the standard princess formula on its head.

他们希望电影可以讲述一些更大的世界观，包括女孩们不需要被迷人的王子拯救，姐妹们可以自己解救自己。他们想要把标准的王子公主故事彻底改变。

“It was a really big ambition,” said Jennifer Lee, who joined the team as a writer after working on Disney’s Wreck-It Ralph. “And it was particularly hard because every movie needs tension, but if the tension in Frozen is between the sisters, how do you make them both likable? The movie needed to connect emotionally.”

“这是非常大的野心，”Jennifer Lee说，他在完成迪士尼的无敌破坏王之后作为一个作家加入了这个团队。“这特别难，因为每一部电影都需要紧张对立，但如果紧张感是在姐妹之间，你如何让她们两个都讨人喜欢？这部电影需要情感上的连接。”

“Creativity is just problem solving,” Disney Animation Studios (and former Pixar) leader Ed Catmull has said, and so each morning, Buck and his team of writers and artists assembled with their coffee cups and to-do lists. Songwriters Bobby Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez would videoconference in from their home in Brooklyn.

“创新就能解决问题。”迪士尼动画工作室（前皮克斯）领袖艾德·卡姆尔这样说过，所以每一个早晨，巴克导演和他的团队中的作家和艺术家都围绕在他们的咖啡杯和待办事项列表周围。词曲作者Bobby Lopez和Kristen Anderson Lopez会在布鲁克林区的家中进行视频会议。

“Instead of focusing on the things that aren’t working,” Peter Del Vecho, the producer, said the morning after, “I want you to envision your biggest hopes. If we could do anything, what would you want to see on the screen?”

“与其关注那些没用的部分，”Peter Del Vecho，制片人，早晨过后说道，“我要你描绘出你最大的希望。如果我们可以做任何事情，你想在屏幕上看到什么？“



People started describing what excited them about Frozen. Some were drawn in because it offered a chance to upend the way girls are portrayed in films. Others were inspired by the idea of two sisters coming together.

人们开始形容什么东西让他们对冰雪奇缘感到兴奋。一些人被吸引是因为它提供了一个机会来颠覆电影中刻画女孩的方式。其他人的灵感来自两姐妹最后走到一起的想法。

“My sister and I fought a lot as kids,” Lee told the room. Then, when Lee was in her 20s, her boyfriend drowned in a boating accident. Her sister was there at a time of need. “There’s this moment when you start to see your sibling as a person instead of a reflection of yourself,” Lee said.

“我姐姐和我在儿时总是打架。”Lee对大家说。在她20多岁时，她的男朋友在划船时意外溺死。她姐姐在她需要的时候时刻陪着她。“那时候你才开始真正地把你的姐妹当成一个独立的人来看，而不是另一个的自己的反映。”

“I think that’s what has been bothering me the most about this script. Siblings don’t grow apart because one is good and one is bad. They grow apart because they’re both messes, and then they come together when they realize they need each other.”

“我认为这是剧本中困扰我最多的地方。兄弟姐妹们不会因为一个好一个坏而产生隔阂。（所以难以建立矛盾点）他们都在处理自己的乱事因此变得疏远，但他们意识到对对方的需要的时候就会重新在一起。”

Over the next month, the Frozen team focused on the relationship between the movie’s sisters. In particular, the filmmakers drew on their own experiences. “We can always find the right story when we start asking ourselves what feels true,” Del Vecho told me. “The thing that holds us back is when we forget to use our lives, what’s inside our heads, as raw material.”

接下来的一个月，冰雪奇缘团队把目光聚焦在电影中的一对姐妹身上。制作人还特意利用了他们自身的经验。“我们问问自己，什么会让我们感觉真实？这种故事就是正确的。”Del vecho说。“我们忘记套用生活中的例子，在头脑中的活生生的案例，这样的思路是错误的。”



A few months later, songwriters Lopez and Anderson-Lopez were walking through a park in Brooklyn, and Anderson-Lopez asked, “What would it feel like if you were Elsa? What if you tried to be good your entire life and it didn’t matter, because people constantly judged you?”

几个月后，词曲作者洛佩兹和Anderson Lopez走在布鲁克林区公园，Anderson Lopez问，“觉得如果你是艾莎你会怎样呢？如果你这一生都在努力变好，但毫无作用，因为人们不停把自己的判断强加在你身上的时候该怎么办？”

“Elsa is being punished for being herself,” Anderson- Lopez said to Lopez. “The only way out is for her to stop caring, to let it all go.”

“艾莎遭受惩罚只因为她是她。” Anderson- Lopez对洛佩兹说。“唯一的出路就是她不在乎这些事情，随他吧。”

They riffed, singing snippets of lyrics. What if they wrote a song that started with a fairy-tale opening? Then Elsa could talk about the pressures of being a good girl.

他们反复哼唱着歌词的片段。如果他们写一首开头是童话故事的歌怎么样呢？之后艾莎就可以讲述她做一个好女孩的压力有多大了。

“She could change into a woman,” Anderson-Lopez said. “That’s what growing up is, letting go of the things you shouldn’t have to care about.”

“她可以成长为一个女人。这就是长大的意义。让那些你不想关心的事情随风而去。”

She began singing, trying out lyrics for Elsa to convey that she doesn’t care what anyone thinks anymore.

她开始歌唱，试图传递出艾莎想传达的心情，就是她再也不想关心别人是怎么想的了。



Let it go, let it go.
That perfect girl is gone.

“I think you just figured out the chorus,” said Lopez.

随他吧随他吧。完美的女孩已不在。

“我认为你已经想出来和声该怎么唱了。”洛佩兹说。

Back in their apartment, they recorded a rough draft. The next day, the Frozen team put “Let It Go” on the sound system at the Disney headquarters.

回到他们的公寓之后，他们录下了一个粗略的样段。第二天，Frozen团队把“随他吧”放在迪士尼总部的声音系统上了。

“Finally, it felt like we had broken through,” Lee said to me later. “We could see the movie. We needed someone to show us ourselves in the characters, to make them familiar. ‘Let It Go’ made Elsa feel like one of us.”

“最后，我们感觉我们终于破冰了。”Lee对我说。“我们可以看看这部电影。我们需要这样的角色，她们就是我们自己，让我们感到很亲切。“随他吧”让艾莎感觉很像我们中的任何一个人。”

Seven months later, the Frozen team had the first two thirds of the film figured out. They knew how to make Anna and Elsa likable while driving them apart to create the tension the film needed. They had transformed Olaf into a lovable sidekick. Everything was falling into place.

七个月之后，冰雪奇缘团队已经完成了整个电影的前三分之二。他们知道如何把安娜和艾莎在不影响剧情冲突的前提下性格树立得相似。他们还把奥拉夫变成了可爱的小伙计。大家都各就各位了。

Except they had no idea how to end the film. The group was so comfortable with its vision of the sisters that it had lost the ability to see other paths.

但他们不知道如何将电影结束。这个团队对这对姐妹的样子太满意了，以至于他们没有办法设想出另外的路线。

“We had to shake things up,” said Catmull, the studio’s president. “So we made Jenn Lee a second director.”

“我们需要重新洗牌。”工作室的总裁Catmull说。“所以我们让Jenn Lee做第二导演。”



Lee was already the film’s writer. Naming her as a second director, with equal authority to Buck, didn’t add any new voices to meetings. But sometimes the best way to spark creativity is by disturbing things just enough to let some light through.

Lee已经是电影的编剧了。把她任命为第二导演，和导演克里斯权利相同，这没有给会议带来不同的声音。但有时最好的激发创造力的方式是刚刚好地把事情扰乱，好让一些光通过。

“The change was subtle but at the same time very real,” Lee told me. “I felt like I had to listen even more closely to what everyone was saying because that was my job now.” She understood that people were asking for clarity, for every choice to reflect a core idea.

“这种变化是微妙的，但同时非常真实，”李告诉我。“我觉得我必须更仔细地听每一个人的话，因为这是我的工作。”她明白，人们要求每一个选择都清晰，以顺利反映核心理念。

Lee had come to Disney as a new film-school graduate with a young daughter, a fresh divorce, and student loans, and now she was the first female director in Disney’s history. Anderson-Lopez and Lopez had fought to build the careers they wanted, even when everyone said it was ridiculous that they could support themselves by writing songs. Now here they were, with the lives they’d wished for. For Frozen’s ending, Anderson-Lopez said, they had to find a way to share that sense of possibility with the audience.

Lee来到迪士尼的时候是一个电影专业的新毕业生，有个刚刚离婚的女儿，借着学生贷款，但现在她是迪士尼历史上第一位女性导演。 Anderson-Lopez和洛佩兹则是非常努力地打拼他们想要的事业，即使每个人都说他们通过写歌养活自己简直荒谬。现在他们就在这，活着他们想要的生活。至于冰雪奇缘的结尾，Anderson-Lopez说，他们已经找到了和观众分享这种生命中可能性的方式。

“What is it for you?” Anderson- Lopez typed.

“你怎么想？” Anderson-Lopez打字问道。

Lee replied 23 minutes later. All the members of the team had their own ideas. However, Frozen could have only one ending. Someone had to make a choice. And the right decision, Lee wrote, was that “fear destroys us; love heals us. Anna’s journey should be about learning what love is; it’s that simple. Love is a greater force than fear. Go with love.”

Lee 23分钟之后回复了。团队中的每个成员都有自己的想法。但冰雪奇缘只能有一个结尾。有些人必须做出选择。大家做出的正确是“恐惧毁灭我们，爱使我们痊愈。安娜的旅程是学习什么是爱，这很简单。爱是比恐惧更强大的力量。带着爱前行吧。”



Later that month, Lee sat down with John Lasseter. “We need clarity,” she told him. “The core of this movie isn’t about good and evil, because that doesn’t happen in real life. And this movie isn’t about love versus hate. That’s not why sisters grow apart.

那个月的晚些时候，Lee和约翰坐下来谈了谈。“我们需要弄清脉络。”她对他说。“这个电影的核心不是爱和邪恶，因为在生活中他们不会发生，而且这个电影也不是关于爱与恨对抗的事，这就是这对姐妹没有产生隔阂的原因。”

“This is a movie about love and fear. Anna is all about love, and Elsa is all about fear. Anna has been abandoned, so she throws herself into the arms of Prince Charming because she doesn’t know the difference between real love and infatuation. She has to learn that love is about sacrifice. And Elsa has to learn that you can’t be afraid of who you are; you can’t run away from your own powers. You have to embrace your strengths. That’s what we need to do with the ending—show that love is stronger than fear.”

“这是一部关于爱情和恐惧的电影。安娜是站爱的那边，而艾莎身上有着关于恐惧的一切。安娜已经被抛弃了，所以她把自己变成了白马王子的武器，因为她不知道真正的爱和迷恋的区别。她必须知道爱是要做出牺牲的。艾莎也必须知道，你不能害怕你自己，你不能逃避你自己的力量。你必须拥抱你的力量。这就是我们需要做的——结束时要揭示爱比恐惧更强大。”

“Say it again,” Lasseter told her.

再说一次。约翰对她说。

Lee described her theory of love versus fear again, explaining how Olaf, the snowman, embodies innocent love, while Prince Hans demonstrates that love without sacrifice isn’t really love at all; it’s narcissism.

Lee再次描述了她心中爱对抗恐惧的想法，解释了奥拉夫，那个雪人讲天真无邪的爱具体化，而汉斯王子则证明了没有牺牲的爱，完全不是爱，而是自恋。

“Say it again,” Lasseter said.

再说一次。约翰说。

Lee said it again.

Lee就又说了一次

“Now go tell the team,” said Lasseter.

约翰说，‘现在就去告诉我们的团队’。

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In November 2013, Frozen was released. The prince wasn’t charming; in fact, he was the villain. The princesses weren’t helpless; instead, they saved each other. Finally, true love came from siblings learning to embrace their own strengths.

2013年的11月，冰雪奇缘上映了。王子一点也不迷人，事实上，他还是个反派。公主一点也不无助，相反，她们互相帮助对方。最后来自姐妹之间的爱让她们学会了去拥抱自己的力量。