Animating Disney's 'Frozen'

It’s easy to get lost in a crowd — even if you’re the star of the second most expensive film of all time.

Rapunzel and Flynn Rider, characters from the 2010 Disney movie “Tangled” which cost an estimated 260 million dollars to make, are two of the the “hidden mickies” that Nadim Sinno and Tony Chai, Penn alumni and technical directors at Disney Animation Studios, hid in the new movie “Frozen.”

Technical directors supervise the workflow among departments. Artists ask them for specific tools, and technical directors make these tools for them.

Some of their work on “Frozen” involved automating large crowds of people, so that the artists didn’t have to work on every single character.

Flynn and Rapunzel appear briefly in Elsa’s coronation scene where the invited people enter the gate, among the generated characters. The land of Sugar Rush from “Wreck-It Ralph” also shows up in miniature form on a plate next to Anna in the coronation ceremony.

The indispensible character in every Disney movie, Mickey, also enters the scene surreptitiously between the shelves in Wandering Oaken’s Trading Post and Sauna and in the grass when Olaf sings “In Summer.”

“The culture in Disney is very light and just put [these characters in] for fun,” said Chai, who received a masters degree in Computer Graphics and Game Technology from Penn in 2009. “The artists and directors also like it.”

Both Sinno and Chai picked the “Let It Go” scene as one of the most impressive scenes from the movie.

“It’s the scene that goes through a huge character transformation,” Chai said. He added that it was a technically challenging scene as well, which took several months to finish.

Sinno, who received a master’s degree in Computer Graphics and Game Technology from Penn in 2010, mentioned two additional memorable scenes.

The final blizzard scene in the movie was the most challenging for him, even more so than “Let It Go,” because there were “so many layers of dust, debris, particles and snow pieces,” he said.

Another part that spoke to him emotionally was “Do You Want to Build a Snowman.”

“It has an emotional content that can strike in many different levels,” Sinno said, referring to the sisterly love between Anna and Elsa.

In fact, they both said this sisterly love is what makes “Frozen” so popular. It focuses more on love between the siblings than on falling in love with a guy the main character just met.

“It’s a very simple message to get, and it’s something a lot of people can relate to,” Sinno said.