SAN DIEGO – The arrival of Frozen's Queen Elsa on ABC's Once Upon a Time sounds like a corporate synergy dream, but producers say it was a matter of creativity, not business strategy.
They wanted Elsa and other characters from the animated Frozen, an Oscar-winning box-office hit, on the fourth-season drama, which returns Sept. 28 (8 p.m. ET/PT), because the two Disney-owned entities embrace similar themes.
"Our show is about a family coming together. That's exact what we love so much about Frozen, that it was two sisters and putting that family together," executive producer Edward Kitsis says. "What we love is you have Elsa, who is not a villain, but she had to face a really tough growing up, contending with who she is, and that's very similar to Emma (Jennifer Morrison) and Regina (Lana Parrilla)."
"Our show is about a family coming together. That's exact what we love so much about Frozen, that it was two sisters and putting that family together," executive producer Edward Kitsis says. "What we love is you have Elsa, who is not a villain, but she had to face a really tough growing up, contending with who she is, and that's very similar to Emma (Jennifer Morrison) and Regina (Lana Parrilla)."
"From the beginning of the show, it's taking these various mythologies of these fairy tales we love and mashing them up together," says executive producer Adam Horowitz, who sat with Kitsis for an interview at Comic-Con. There's so many themes in (Frozen) that we responded to so strongly. We've been having a lot of fun interweaving that world with our own and finding connections, hopefully finding unexpected and surprising ways that our characters and those characters have either known each other or crossed paths or will."
Elsa (Georgina Haig, Fringe), who arrived by accident in Storybrooke in the last minutes of the Season 3 finale, will be joined on Once by her sister, Anna (recent college graduate Elizabeth Lail); iceman Kristoff (Scott Michael Foster, Greek); and Sven the reindeer (a real one). John Rhys-Davies will provide the voice of Pabbie the Rock Troll.
Anna, too, fits well in the Once environment, Kitsis says. "She's a character who never gives up on the people she loves. That's the theme that we have spread throughout the first half" of the season.
Producers showed a clip of Haig and Lail, the former blonde and the latter red-haired, in a Season 4 scene during Saturday's Once panel at Comic-Con. The characters arrive on Once after the events of the movie.
Other new arrivals include Michael Socha, who played the Knave of Hearts on last season's Once Upon a Time in Wonderland, and Elizabeth Mitchell, who Kitsis and Horowitz worked with on Lost. Her role remains hush-hush. Giancarlo Esposito, who plays the Magic Mirror, will return. His character was featured in a clip with Regina during the Comic-Con panel.
Although Elsa and friends constitute a big-ticket arrival based on their box-office success, the main focus still will be on the characters in Once's Storybrooke. "We're not doing the Frozen sequel. We're honoring the movie and not changing the characters, but it's really these characters coming to Once Upon a Time," Kitsis says.
The producers wanted the Season 4 story to remain a surprise, but said it will pick up just after the end of last season and connect to Emma's acceptance of Storybrooke as her home.
"Emma's had a whole three-season long arc of not knowing what's going on, not believing, believing, then finding there's magic within herself," Horowitz says. "She''s been all over the place her whole life, looking for a home, and realizing Storybrooke is her home. Now, going into Season 4, how do you make that home a home?".
