Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Into The Unknown: Making Frozen 2’ On Disney+, A Docuseries About The Challenges Of Making The Sequel To ‘Frozen’

Into The Unknown: Making Frozen 2 is a docuseries that documents the challenges and creative energy that is needed to undertake not only a Disney animated feature, but the follow-up to the most successful animated feature of all time, Frozen. The sequel, Frozen II, came out in November, 2019, but it took 4 years of planning and labor to get it to the screen. 

INTO THE UNKNOWN: MAKING FROZEN 2: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: We see renderings of what the characters of Anna and Elsa will look like in Frozen II, and co-director Jennifer Lee talks about how these characters feel like they’re “a part of me.”

The Gist: The series picks things up in the homestretch in December, 2018, 11 months before the film’s premiere. As Lee’s co-director, Chris Buck, says, it’s the time “when all the balls are up in the air, and they start falling.”

The first episode spans the first few months of that crunch, where Lee and Buck are working with the storyboard artists to figure out the sequences of some of the songs. Songwriters Robert Lopez and his wife Kristen Anderson-Lopez try to finish up the song “Some Things Never Change” while pitching in on the meetings with the storyboard artists for the song “Show Yourself,” which doesn’t seem to be coming together.

We also see the recording session for “Some Things Never Change,” where Idina Menzel, Kristen Bell and Josh Gad come to the Walt Disney Animation Studios (with Jonathan Groff recording his part from New York) to lay down a set of vocals for the song. In addition, we see Lee, Buck, Lopez and Anderson-Lopez watch the recording of the orchestral musical track of “Into The Unknown,” which makes Lee feel like the film is finally starting to come together.

Meanwhile, we also follow animation supervisor Wayne Unten, who supervises a team of 70 that animates all of Elsa’s scenes; one of his animators, Malerie Walters, is tasked with animating Elsa’s final movements during “Into The Unknown,” and we see her take what she has to dailies, where Lee and Buck make further suggestions to ensure Elsa’s movements as she chases the unknown up a craggy rock are realistic and in-character.

Our Take: Whatever you may think of Frozen or Frozen II, if you’re a fan of behind-the-scenes documentaries about animated films, then Into The Unknown: Making Frozen 2 should satisfy your “how did this get made?” curiosity.

It’s a pretty straightforward docuseries, showing recording sessions, animators working at their computer screens, meetings and more meetings. But what executive producer Jeanmarie Condon and her crew are showing is the monumental effort it takes to put all elements of a Disney animated film together, especially now that most of their films are animated via CGI. But what’s also the underlying theme of the series is that, from Lee and Buck down through everyone who works on the film, the pressure is there to make sure they don’t fumble the ball when making the sequel to such a popular film.

That’s the added bit of zing to the docuseries; in 2013 the same group (for the most part) managed to produce a wildly popular film whose characters would become just as iconic as Cinderella, Dumbo, Ariel and the studio’s other legendary characters (no one is as iconic as Mickey Mouse, of course). Now, the same characters they created out of whole cloth now need to be handled with care, because the expectations for them are so high.

What we liked to see is that, even with less than a year left before release, things were still developing and challenges were being overcome. “Show Yourself”, for instance, still isn’t ready for primetime, and it’s illuminating to see the entire team humbly be able to take notes and try to make the song’s scenes better. Buck and Lee are especially receptive, as they take a meeting with fellow Disney Animation directors after they screened an early cut of the film, much of which was still filled with storyboard panels and animatics. That kind of humility is necessary in order to get such a massive undertaking made, and seeing some of the really inside-baseball aspects of how Disney makes sure their films are as good as they can be was refreshing.

One of the things we always get short-shrift on during these BTS documentaries is how the animation is done, and we still don’t get a ton of the nuts and bolts here. We get more than we usually do, with Walters admitting that her whole job is maybe one minute of animation, and we also see her gushing at Menzel when Unten brings her around the office for a visit. But one day we just want to see how slow and meticulous animating a character’s expressions and movements are, especially with how advanced CGI is now. Unten mentions that there are hundreds of controls for each character, and we see a screenshot of a very complicated control panel for Elsa’s face. But we don’t get any info on how that “secret sauce” is made. Maybe Disney doesn’t want to give away their secrets. But damn, we’re just the type of geek that would love to see such a thing, in detail.

What Age Group Is This For?: People of any age that are curious about how Frozen II came together.

Parting Shot: We’re left with “Show Yourself” still needing to come together, with everyone taking it in stride, knowing that they’re trying to make the film the best that it can be.

Sleeper Star: We liked the video that Walters and her husband shot of her leaping down the sidewalk in her neighborhood, with her husband rolling by on a skateboard. But we also couldn’t stop smiling at the fact that Bell wore a traditional Mickey Mouse sweatshirt to her recording session for “Some Things Never Change.” That seems like a very Kristen Bell move.

Most Pilot-y Line: There are a few moments about the “magic” of the Frozen franchise and “why we do this” that are a bit schmaltzy, like Menzel and Unten holding hands and giving each other credit for bringing Elsa to life. Others are more sincere, like a letter Unten reads from a teenager who credits the first movie with bringing her back from the brink of suicide.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Into The Unknown: Making Frozen 2 doesn’t suffer from the usual Disney self-promotional schtick that infiltrates most of the Disney+ BTS docuseries we’ve seen, it’s still a very informative series that shows that even the best animated features run into issues and problems that need to be overcome.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company.com, RollingStone.com, Billboard and elsewhere.

Stream Into The Unknown: Making Frozen 2 On Disney+