Anna (Frozen)

Anna of Arendelle (/ˈɑːnə/) is a fictional character who appears in Walt Disney Animation Studios' animated fantasy film Frozen (2013) and its sequel Frozen 2 (2019). She is voiced by Kristen Bell as an adult. At the beginning of the film, Livvy Stubenrauch and Katie Lopez provide her speaking and singing voice as a young child, respectively. Agatha Lee Monn portrayed her as a nine-year-old (singing). In Frozen 2, Hadley Gannaway provided her voice as a young child while Stubenrauch is the archive audio.

Created by co-writers and directors Jennifer Lee and Chris Buck, Anna is loosely based on Gerda, a character from the Danish fairytale "The Snow Queen" by Hans Christian Andersen. In the Disney film adaptation, Anna is depicted as the princess of Arendelle, a fictional Scandinavian kingdom, and the younger sister of Elsa (Idina Menzel), who is the heiress to the throne and possesses the elemental ability to create and control ice and snow. When Elsa exiles herself from the kingdom after inadvertently sending Arendelle into an eternal winter on the evening of her coronation, Anna goes on a dangerous adventure and brings her sister back.

The original fairytale in general and the character of the Snow Queen in particular posed long-term problems to adapt into a feature-length production. Several film executives, including Walt Disney, made their attempts towards the story and numerous adaptations were shelved as the filmmakers could not work out the characters. Finally, directors Buck and Lee solved the issue by portraying Anna and Elsa as sisters, establishing a dynamic relationship between the characters.

Film critics praised Anna's determination and enthusiasm in her personality and Bell for her performance in the films.

Attempts to produce an adaption of "The Snow Queen" in the Disney studio dated back to 1943, when Walt Disney considered collaborating with Samuel Goldwyn to produce a biography film of Hans Christian Andersen. However, the story and particularly the Snow Queen character proved to be too problematic to Disney and his animators. Namely one of the troubles they encountered was that the original story lacked necessary interaction between the main protagonist, Gerda (who later served as an inspiration for Anna), and the Snow Queen. Most obviously, Andersen's version did not feature any confrontation between them: when brave little Gerda enters the Snow Queen's ice castle and sheds her tears on Kay, the Snow Queen is nowhere to be seen. There just was not enough character conflict to form a full-length feature. Later on, Glen Keane, Paul and Gaëtan Brizzi, Harvey Fierstein, Dick Zondag and Dave Goetz were among other Disney executives to make efforts towards translating this potential material to the big screen, but none of them made their way. Around 2008, Chris Buck pitched Disney his version of The Snow Queen. At the time, the project was planned to be traditionally animated under the name of Anna and the Snow Queen. However, by early 2010, the project encountered the same problem and was stuck again. Jennifer Lee, Frozen's co-director, later recalled, "The issue with the original for us in a lot of ways is it's a very symbolic story. It's very hard to translate symbolism into concrete things. Film is concrete, so you translate it."

After the success of Tangled (2010), on December 22, 2011, Disney announced a release date, November 27, 2013, for the film, together with a new title, Frozen, and Peter Del Vecho and John Lasseter took up as the project's producers. Once the film was revived again, one of the main challenges for Buck and his team was the character. The storyboards were presented to John Lasseter, who told the assembled production team, "You haven't dug deep enough." Lasseter said that Chris Buck's latest version was fun and very light-hearted, but the characters were not multifaceted, and thus did not resonate with the producer.

The original character of Gerda, known as Anna, was one of the three major characters in the script at this time, along with the Snow Queen, Elsa and Kristoff, loosely based on Kay. The characters were not considered to be well-rounded or relatable. An interpersonal and family dynamic was created once Anna and Elsa were established as sisters, an idea suggested by someone on the writing team, but no one remembered who made the suggestion. This changed the story dramatically, shifting from the conflict between the good and the evil to the conflict between love and fear. Buck stated that their script still retained basic parts of the story and the character of Gerda, citing the similarities between the original story and his version, "[Gerda] won't give up on finding her friend Kay. The only thing she really has in her, because she's not a superhero or anything, is love. In the end it's love that conquers fear."

On March 5, 2012, Kristen Bell was cast to voice the adult Anna. Livvy Stubenrauch was chosen to portray Anna as a young child, while Katie Lopez, daughter of the husband-and-wife songwriting team of the film, Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez, provided the singing voice for young Anna in "Do You Want to Build a Snowman?" musical sequence. Additionally, Agatha Lee Monn, daughter of the film's director Jennifer Lee, portrayed teenage Anna in this song. Lee explained about these casting decisions, "We really wanted to use the first two verses of this song to show you Anna's personality. And we wanted the singing to be done by real-sounding kids, not necessarily Broadway kids." Bell and Idina Menzel, who voiced Elsa, had both auditioned for Rapunzel in Tangled and had already known each other, but they did not get the part.