By Chad Jones
San Francisco Chronicle
They’re both adorable and sassy, spirited and ever-cheerful. One is a figment of computer animation and the other is just downright animated.
Beginning today, Kristen Bell is realizing a dream she’s had ever since she first saw “The Little Mermaid”: She’s giving voice to a Disney princess.
In “Frozen,” Disney’s adaptation of “The Snow Queen” by Hans Christian Andersen, Bell plays Anna, the spirited younger sister of Elsa, voiced by Broadway star Idina Menzel, who has unintentionally unleashed everlasting winter on their quaint Scandinavian kingdom.
Once the world has frozen over, it’s up to Anna, with help from a snowman named Olaf, a mountain man named Kristoff and his reindeer, Sven, to save her sister and her kingdom.
“When we started this project, Anna was not like she is in the movie,” Bell says on the phone from New York. “The directors, Chris (Buck) and Jennifer (Lee), were really collaborative and heard me when I said I wanted to play someone more like I’d want to see on the screen: awkward, thinks too fast, has her foot in her mouth a lot, is daring, eternally optimistic, too loud and playful and goofy.
“All those things do not add up to your typical Disney heroine. Sometimes in the booth they’d just press record and let me talk to myself. I’d snort here, have my hair in my mouth there, trip over something here.”
Bell’s goal from the start was to make Anna the odd one out in the Disney princess canon.
“I’m so proud of how she turned out,” Bell says. “I didn’t want to play a girl with good posture or hands like a ballerina, the way the Disney princesses do. I wanted Anna to be the antithesis of that, and they let her be that. She’s got a fighter spirit and you root for her.”
You want to root for Bell, 33, as well. Though trained in musical theater at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and a veteran of two Broadway shows (the short-lived 2001 musical “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” and the 2002 revival of “The Crucible” with Liam Neeson), Bell got her big break as the teen sleuth Veronica Mars in the TV show of the same name.
She’ll revive the character on the big screen next year, but until then, she’ll revel in the wonder of a year that brought her a daughter, Lincoln Bell Shepard, born last March, and a wedding to fellow actor Dax Shepard last month.
Though the two had been together since 2007 and were engaged in 2010, they famously said they would not wed until California legalized same-sex marriage.
Once Proposition 8 was overturned in June and same-sex marriages resumed, Bell proposed to Shepard on Twitter.
So here is Bell’s year so far: baby, check; husband, check; Disney princess, check. Is she feeling any pressure now that she’s part of the pantheon that includes Snow White, Cinderella and Belle?
“Nah,” Bell says. “Feels right.”
For Bell, the next order of business on the “Frozen” front will be to see if the movie inspires a Disney theme park ride.
“If there aren’t any plans, I’m going to instigate them,” Bell says. “All I know is that this ride should be freezing — so cold they’ll have to rent you a coat.”
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