In the 2013 Walt Disney Animation Picture Frozen, physics
deviates from normal physics in several ways; even though the film seems to be
placed in our reality. Frozen was so popular that in 2014 it had won an Oscar,
BAFTA and Golden Globes for Best Animated Feature Film. Just like all believable films, physics is
key to its success. Believable does not automatically mean realistic. Depending
on how the film’s story and universe is set in, animators can get away with
pushing physics to the limit. In Frozen, the animators had to create unique physics
for the supernatural powers seen in the film; furthermore, they have exaggerated
the paths of action and used motion blur and stretch to its advantage.
Path of action is “the trajectory of a moving object”. In
any film you will see path of action being used in two ways: the normal path
that you see in our reality or the path that is exaggerated. Frozen has
examples for both of these path of actions.
An example of an exaggerated path of action in the film is where Anna is
dancing with a statue of a man’s head. She was spinning with the statue and it accidentally slips out of her hands; making
it land on the top of a five layer cake on a table which is located on the
other side of the room. You never see where the table with the cake is located
in relation to Anna in the film; however, with the angle that the statue was
going, it would have landed somewhere in the middle of the cake, not perfectly
on top of the cake. You can also see exaggerated path of action in the scene
where Kristoff, Anna, and Sven jump a 30 foot span to get away from a pack of
wolves. It is very unlikely that any of them would have made it
across the span. Sven and Anna would have fallen to their deaths, identical to
how the sled Kristoff was riding started to fall to the grown after hitting its
apex. They did not have the right speed
or angle to actually make that jump in our reality.
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| Anna lets go of the statue and it fly's into the top of the cake. |
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| Kristoff, Anna, and Sven jump a 30 foot jump. |
Frozen also has examples of path of actions you would find in our world.
Such as, when Anna throws a snowball at Marshmallow, the bigger scary snowman,
and hit him on the side of his shoulder. However, it’s unlikely that the
snowball would have made it to the snowman from the distance Anna was at; it
shows a great example of “Fourth Down at Half-time”. Other scenes where the path
of action is like our own would be where Sven bucks Kristoff off his back so
that Kristoff makes it to the other side of the ice water. Also, when Kristoff
is being thrown out of the Trading Post into the snow by Oaken; however, it is unlikely
that Oaken could have thrown Kristoff that far from the building because of
Kristoff’s weight and size.
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| Krisoff following the path of actions. |
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| Kristoff is being thrown out of the Trading Post into the snow by Oaken. |
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| Notice the beautiful, smooth path that the snowball takes. |
Motion blur and stretch is very important to an animated film. Motion
blur is the apparent streaking of rapidly moving objects in a still image,
movie, or animation. When watching a film, animated or not, and you stop it in
the middle of someone or something moving, it seems like they are being stretched
or pulled away from another part of their body. They do this to objects and characters
because it makes a more realistic motion blur when played at normal speed. It
can be used in a subtle way, such as when Anna is being pulled away to dance
with the Duke of Weselton, to a direct way, as
in the “Let It Go” song scene. During the “Let It Go” song, Elsa’s face
and hands stretch in odd shapes when she uses her powers. When you slow down
the film or freeze it at the right time, you can see her hand is stretched out;
this makes her hand looked deformed. Playing Frozen at its normal speed you can
barely tell the stretching is happening; however, at some points you can tell
something is not quite right. A great example of stretch is when Anna punches
Hans in the face and knocks him off the ship towards the end of the film. When Anna’s fist hits Hans straight in the face,
his face and body start to move backwards; however, part of his face is being
left behind causing the unhuman looking face that you see in the film. In “Let
It Go” and Hans getting hit in the face scene, when you watch it at normal
speed you cannot see the weird stretch shapes the animators create.
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| Notice the motion blur as they move along in the scene. |
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| Note the way Elsa's face and fingers look in this still(s). |
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| Normal Hans... |
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| ....Not normal Hans. Great example of stretch. |
The magic in Frozen
would never exist in our world; therefore, the animators had to create their physics
for the magic you see in the film. When the Trolls are in there rock form, they
move on their own and start to roll down a small hill to the royal family. This
is similar to when an object is acted
on by an unbalanced force, the law of inertia; however, for Elsa’s powers it
alone defies the laws of physics and reality. In the film, Elsa turns her coronation
dress into the dazzling blue ice dress; along with ice three inch heels. As we
know, that is physically impossible to make a dress out of thin air. Animators
had to use their imagination on how the action of the magic would play out in
the scene.
You can see “snowflakes” coming off Elsa’s body as her clothes are transforming;
spiraling off her back like a wind was coming off it. For the dramatic ending,
where Elsa makes winter turn back into summer; she uses the power of “love” to
thaw the ice. It is very similar to the
“snowflakes” coming off Elsa’s body when her clothes were transformed. In the scene, the animators have to
understand how ice would melt; however, they had to speed up the action to make
it more magical.
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| Elsa's ice clothing transformation. |
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| Note all the different movements of the snowflakes. |
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| The trolls start to move on their own in there work form. |
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| Young Elsa pushes young Anna and (not alive) Olaf with the power of ice. |
In Frozen, the physical laws are typically followed the same as ours throughout the film; however, they are broken when it is called for in the scene. This variation of the normal physical laws makes the film more entertaining for the audiences of all ages. Exaggerated paths of action, stretching objects and characters to showcase motion blur, and creating a unique physics for the supernatural powers seen in the film are just some of the physics represented in Frozen.
