The Snow Queen (cancelled CGI film)

The Snow Queen was an unreleased computer-animated fantasy adventure film that was to be produced by Universal Feature Animation. Based on the fairy tale of the same name by Hans Christian Andersen, it was set to be directed by Audel LaRoque and written by LaRoque, Joel Cohen, Alec Sokolow and James Gunn.

The film was originally planned for a December 2006 release by Universal Pictures, but was delayed to 2007. In March 2006, Universal moved the film to 2008, and announced LaRoque as the director of Computeropolis 2, which he was directing concurrently with The Snow Queen. However, in March 2007, the project was abandoned by Universal due to script problems, and LaRoque announced that he was no longer working on the project, and would instead work on an original idea that would later become 2012's Quest. After the cancellation, some of the characters and elements from this film were later re-integrated into Universal's 2015 animated feature Paradoria, which would spawn a media franchise to compete against Walt Disney Animation Studios' Snow Queen-inspired franchise, Frozen.

Premise
Two children, Gerda and Kai, embark on a journey to stop the Snow Queen from turning the world into ice.

Production
The rights to the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale "The Snow Queen" had reportedly been offered to Multimedia Animation in the early 1990s but were turned down. In June 2001, Universal Studios announced that they were adapting "The Snow Queen" into a computer-animated film, via Universal Feature Animation to make this. Michael Wildshill was attached to direct the film from the script by Toy Story writers Joel Cohen and Alec Sokolow. During that time, Universal Animation's rival studio Walt Disney Feature Animation was also attempting to adapt The Snow Queen into an animated film for many years, but had reportedly been in limbo.

In April 2002, James Gunn, the writer of Scooby-Doo (2002), was hired to do the re-writes for the script. By May 2003, the first draft was completed. In April 2004, it was reported that Audel LaRoque had been set to direct the feature, as Wildshill left to direct Woo La La (then titled Nippon). In July 2004, Universal set the release date for December 20, 2006, which was, in May 2005, pushed back to 2007. In March 2006, Universal then moved the film to 2008, and announcing LaRoque as the director of Computeropolis 2 (known as Computeropolis 2: The Error of Doom at the time), which he was directing concurrently with The Snow Queen. It was reportedly announced that Me & Mobo director Steve Samono was negotiating to take over as director from LaRoque, but had not decided yet. However, Samono later stated that he was still involved with the project. On December 12, 2006, LaRoque revealed an "animation test" footage, about which he said, "It's just something that kind of represents what we want to do. I couldn't be more excited by how it turned out."

Cancellation and legacy
In March 2007, three months after the test footage, Universal announced that the production of The Snow Queen was ultimately shut down, due to having problems with the script. LaRoque, who was unhappy about this, said about the film's cancellation, "The story wasn't working that right. We're out of ideas now, so we killed The Snow Queen." Not only because The Snow Queen was suffering script issues, but it is also because LaRoque would instead work on an idea that would later become Quest. During the production of Quest for a 2012 release, LaRoque expressed interest of reviving The Snow Queen, which did not last very long, however. In December 2011, Disney announced they were in development to make an unrelated film called Frozen inspired by the Snow Queen fairy tale, which was released in November 2013. Knowing the Universal version could not be completed before the Disney version, Audel dropped the project.

Some of the elements and characters from Universal's cancelled Snow Queen film were reused into Quest as well as Paradoria, which was released in 2015 to provide Universal with a brand franchise to rival Disney's Frozen franchise. The film's antagonist, the titular Snow Queen, was loosely reworked into Mola, who is also the antagonist of Quest, while the protagonists Gerda and Kai were reworked into Jamo and Keena from Paradoria.

Scripts
Each script has a different storyline.

Video game
There was a video game planned for release alongside the film. Going by the same name as the film, it was planned to be a platforming adventure game. It was planned to be released around 2008, and the hopes were pretty high for the game. However, Universal pulled the plug for the film, so did the video game. No screenshots or video of gameplay were ever released.

Trivia
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Gallery
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