No word on how he feels about 'The Little Mermaid.'
Long before movie studios realized the box office and storytelling potential of a shared cinematic universe, fans had been developing their own theories about how characters in seemingly disparate films are related. Oftentimes the creators of these various works tend to be the biggest and most passionate fans. There's Quentin Tarantino's alternate-reality universe in which his movies take place, Stephen King's interrelated fictional world, and even a fan theory connecting Joss Whedon's many creations. Some of the more out-there theories require stretching the imagination, but a new one that relates Disney's Frozen and Tarzanfilms adds a new wrinkle to their tales.
As MTV News reports, Frozen co-director Chris Buck, who spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about the animated blockbuster during production, has an interesting take on the families of his two Disney pictures. Technically this one has been floating around the internet for some time, but Buck has now explicitly addressed it as follows:
Image via Disney
“When you’re working on a feature, you have a lot of time to think about stuff because it takes four years to make one. I think Jen [Lee] and I were walking to a meeting, and I just start to tell her the entire story. I said, ’Of course Anna and Elsa’s parents didn’t die.'
Yes, there was a shipwreck, but they were at sea a little bit longer than we think they were because the mother was pregnant, and she gave birth on the boat, to a little boy. They get shipwrecked, and somehow they really washed way far away from the Scandinavian waters, and they end up in the jungle. They end up building a tree house and a leopard kills them, so their baby boy is raised by gorillas. So in my little head, Anna and Elsa’s brother is Tarzan."
Image via Disney
So there you go. No official Disney-stamped crossover world between Frozen and Tarzan, but still a fun little peak inside the mind of a creative director who's fully immersed himself in the worlds of his animated movies ... and fan theories. If you're wondering just how serious Buck is about the whole thing, he also addresses another corner of his imagined world:
"But on the other side of that island are surfing penguins, to tie in a non-Disney movie, ’Surf’s Up.’ That’s my fun little world.”
Directors can be fans, too. It's a fun reminder to just enjoy our own little self-created worlds every once in a while. At least until Disney greenlights FroZan: The Reunion Special.
