“I Grew Up On Disney Fairytales And It Was An Absolute Dream Come True To Work On This Show,” Brittney

“I grew up on Disney fairytales and it was an absolute dream come true to work on this show,” Brittney says about designing for Frozen. “And not only just to work on it, but to be able to work on costuming. It turned out that this film is a huge costume show. It’s perhaps the biggest animated costume film that’s ever been done. Not only the shear number of costumes, but the layers, and the amount of complicated layers of costuming because these girls can’t freeze!”

“So our materials had to be heavier materials like wool and velvet,” says Brittney. “Those materials are inherently more structured so we had to design these costumes to sort of have a shape, have a form that was their natural form and design any folds that would happen. If we needed a character like Anna to twirl with a really nice flowing dress, we had to give her pleats instead of more fabric that was less structured. One of the ways that we were able to add playfulness, though, into these more structured materials, was through rosemaling, inspired by the Bunad costumes that we’re seeing in Norway.”

“For Elsa, our jumping off point was really the shape of a snowflake,” Brittney says. “Because it, well it harkens back to some of the language we see in the rosemaling throughout the film up until this point, it is unique to her. And so we replaced all of her rosemaling with the snowflake and we go further by sort of completely immersing her in a snowflake. See, if you take her cape and you lay it flat on the ground, it is a snowflake. It’s the shape, the six-sided shape of a snowflake. So that was, it was a sort of groundbreaking moment for her because that really sort of set the language for what Elsa is at this point in the film.”

Brittney Lee at D23.com