The first Frozen 2 trailer looks grim as hell

Today, Disney released the first trailer for Frozen 2, the sequel to 2013’s animated musical adventure Frozen. Directors Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee, returning from the first film, have said virtually nothing so far about the plot of the new film. And the initial trailer doesn’t fill in any gaps. It’s a wordless collection of scenes of the characters grimly striving at various unclear tasks. In particular, it looks like Queen Elsa (voiced by Idina Menzel) is trying to escape a barren island by running across the churning ocean, while her sister Anna (Kristen Bell) and their friend Kristoff (Jonathan Groff) charge into their own grave-looking crisis situations. The overall tone is grim and serious, with comic-relief snowman Olaf (Josh Gad) barely making an appearance.

Trailers can definitely be deceiving, and we’ll certainly see more trailers with different tones and focal points before the film comes out, but this initial look feels like a more mature take on these characters. The officially released logline for the movie reads, “Elsa, Anna, Kristoff and Olaf are going far in the forest to know the truth about an ancient mystery of their kingdom.”


However, the directors have said Frozen 2 will again be a musical (not surprising, since the original Frozen was built around the show-stopping number “Let It Go,” which won the Best Original Song Oscar in 2013), with original songwriters Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez returning to write the songs.


Frozen 2 is scheduled for wide theatrical release on November 22nd, 2019.