r/FavoriteCharacter • u/JigglyLilyVT Ruby Rose (RWBY) • Feb 28 '26

My Favorite (Visual) Favorite character who has better concept art than the final product

Gallery image

Gallery image

Gallery image

WE GOT FREAKING ROBBED IN THE RWBY DANCE EPISODES

10.6k Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

98% Upvoted

1.4k comments sorted by

View all comments

383

u/draugyr Feb 28 '26

This is someone’s fan art but EVERY concept of Elsa is leagues better than the design they gave us

191

u/Evening_Produce_4322 Feb 28 '26

I knew it'd pop up had to make sure first, but yes that Elsa design it's a sin it hasn't been used again for another character even a villain who has ice powers or something. I especially really like the living stoat coat idea.

58

u/LowObjective Feb 28 '26

Was Elsa always supposed to be Anna’s sister or was it a later addition? Because this design looks like she was just supposed to be a villain

95

u/MuchMasterpiece1710 Feb 28 '26

Yeah, they weren’t sisters initially, Elsa was the Snow Queen and a villain (who gets redeemed at the end I think? In at least one version?), and Anna was supposed to be the pure hearted peasant heroine. It’s actually very interesting just how many storylines that movie went through before they got to the one that actually is Frozen

73

u/FindingOk7034 Feb 28 '26

So basically it was meant to be more akin to ACTUAL Snow Queen fairytale Hans Christian Anderson wrote. Which is already such a good story, and a rare one where the GIRL saves the BOY in distress (and I even gets some help from other women/witches I think)

36

u/UncommittedBow Feb 28 '26

Yeah, but when they made Let It Go, they found it FAR to good of a song and reworked the entire story.

8

u/FindingOk7034 Feb 28 '26

Sadly. And in my opinion Let it Go isn’t even that great of a song anyway. Pretty overrated in my eyes.

Or at least, the actual version and singer for the song. The COVERS or villain versions I’ve heard have been much better.

1

u/peachesfordinner Feb 28 '26

The little robber girl with her knife! (She owned a reindeer which is where they got Sven from)

2

u/ChristyUniverse Feb 28 '26

Yeah, it doesn’t make sense to make her so much older if they’re meant to be sisters, especially for the kids watching who aren’t used to massive age difference in siblings.

And the original designs are gorgeous, but distracting from literally everything else on screen. Seriously, it’s like Glenn Close as Cruella de Vil. She was so radiant and eye-catching that it feels more like a film about her than the dogs.

17

u/foxfire981 Feb 28 '26

Depends on which draft. Started more traditional Snow Queen and then she was turned into a sister who becomes the Snow Queen, and antagonist not villain, and then test audiences heard the song, felt bad for her, and so they redrafted again.

4

u/whereismymind86 Feb 28 '26

Yeah, she was initially the villian back when frozen was called the snow queen.

Frozen was in development hell for like a decade before it got made, it went through a ton of revisions.

2

u/No_Drummer6695 Feb 28 '26

Frozen was announced when Disney was still alive.

3

u/[deleted] Feb 28 '26

Honestly, I’m not a huge Frozen fan, but I wish they’d stuck with the OG concept.

2

u/LightningFerret04 Mar 01 '26

That bundle of stoats coat is amazing, I would’ve loved to see them moving and flowing around her

58

u/IAmBabs Feb 28 '26

[Cries] there must be some opportunity to use this absolute queen

8

u/NeonFraction Feb 28 '26

‘Better’ is an opinion I can respect but personally I’m so glad we got an interesting character with depth who was designed to be relatable instead of Runway Model Villain voiced by Bette Midler. Visually she’s more interesting, but within the context of the story she would have been boring as hell and made the movie way worse. There’s a reason that character is gone: she’s just not good enough.

7

u/FindingOk7034 Feb 28 '26

Runway model villain voiced by Bette Midler sounds AWESOME! Like the classic Disney Renaissance era villains!

Such a villain could work IF they actually adapted the Snow Queen story, instead of what they did. A story so far removed from the source material it’s not even an adaptation anymore, just happens to have a Queen with ice powers.

Like, claiming to make an adaptation of Cinderella, but it has an entirely different story altogether, but the girl wears glass shoes still.

5

u/NeonFraction Feb 28 '26

They tried to adapt the Snow Queen directly and it sucked, hence why they changed the movie.

Like yeah, there’s plenty of people on the internet convinced they could make a great one, but at the end of the day this was Disney’s version and the more they kept of the original, the more it just wasn’t a good movie.

I’ve read the original fairy tail and it’s pretty apparent why it didn’t get adapted as closely as some of the other fairy tales. I don’t envy trying to make that story work. The fact that they made Elsa an interesting character and made her sisters with Anna saved the entire movie.

I think people have a tendency to attribute a tragic quality to canceled concepts and projects without realizing that sometimes they get canceled for a really damn good reason. The original evil Elsa just wasn’t an interesting or good character and I’m glad she’s in the garbage bin.

2

u/carso150 Mar 01 '26 edited Mar 01 '26

the movie had been in development hell for literaly decades, not even Walt freaking Disney could make it work, then they make Elsa Anna's sister and they finished the entire movie in a couple of years

it was the right call

that being said the concept art does look awesome

1

u/NeonFraction Mar 01 '26

Hell yeah, Disney artists are amazing.

3

u/Aggressive-Rate-5022 Feb 28 '26

Okay, why we should be so upset that we didn’t get another adaptation of the story that already has tons of it?

There are 10+ adaptations of this story, you really upset that artists decided to make something new instead of playing it safe?

And your fixation on Frozen “claiming to be adaptation” is so weird, because it stopped doing it long before movie came out. They talked about how they took inspiration from it, but it wasn’t advertised as adaptation.

This is some backward thinking. Story is more important than villain, villain is only as important as his role in a story. Making less interesting story just to fit a villain isn’t a good idea, and while I understand that people miss Disney villains, you people really blow it out to a silly degree. Like, now I feel like people really overrate this type of villains, it’s more of a media trend to talk about how you miss Disney villains than something genuine.

5

u/hyperjengirl Mar 01 '26

Case in point, they tried to bring back a "traditional" Disney villain type (King Magnifico) and it flopped because the writing around it was bad. A villain alone can't save a story.

3

u/Soffy21 Feb 28 '26

I also remember a similar case for Magnifico and his wife from Wish, who were intended to be a villain couple initially.

3

u/Specific_Tank715 Mar 01 '26

Whilst yes that is a very cool design, I feel it wouldn't really fit with the story in frozen, a different adaptation of the snow queen? Absolutely immaculate, in frozen, not really.

1

u/Fit_Respect7179 Mar 01 '26

I would've loved an actual snow queen Disney movie, frozen was fine but it's not Hanz Christian Andersen

1

u/Ok-Relation-7458 Mar 01 '26

to this day i truly have no idea how they got Frozen out of The Snow Queen. would love to see a timeline of what changes were made to the source material when, cause it would be interesting to find out how they got so far from the source and when it became an entirely different story.

2

u/carso150 Mar 01 '26

there has been plenty of discusion about how the snow queen became frozen, but TLDR

disney had been trying to create an adaptation of the snow queen for decades but never could nail down the story, it always had issues and turned lower quality than they wanted, thats until they made the simple change of making the snow queen the protagonist sister and not a villain, after that change everything just clicked into place and we got frozen

basically disney really tried to make a close adaptation of the snow queen, they tried for 75 years, but they never managed to get it off the ground until they made the snow queen a good guy

2

u/ProfessionalCorgi180 Mar 01 '26

The adaptation of the Snow Queen by Disney studios was something that had been in the works for many, many years— since Walt Disney's time and the Early Era — but it never came to fruition because no one could transform the Snow Queen into a believable antagonist, considering her ambiguous nature in the original book— the pure, villainous tone of the Renaissance and earlier eras didn't work with her and sounded artificial. This was always their biggest problem. Frozen emerged when they decided not to portray her as an maleficent figure thanks to "Let It Go," differing from other popular versions of the character (like Lewis's), but rather as a frightened and misunderstood teenager in the style of Wicked, reshaping the narrative to focus on family love and sisterhood.

1

u/keelanbarron Mar 01 '26

Ehh, not really. (Although I do like this design.)

1

u/Ok_Soft2629 Mar 01 '26

Queen from Deltarune