Why the Frozen short that played before Pixar’s Coco kicked up so much controversy

In the two weeks around Thanksgiving, in movie theaters and multiplexes across the continent, the same strange event occurred: Moviegoers and families bought tickets to see a movie together. They settled into their seats, popcorn and soda in hand. And after the trailers finished, the movie began.

A few minutes in, they started to wonder if they’re in the right place. Ten minutes in, they really started to wonder. A few people left the theater to check that the film they’ve sat down to see is, indeed, Pixar’s Coco. Yes, it was. Then why, 20 minutes after the trailers ended, were they still watching a musical short about the characters from Frozen?

It’s a question that many moviegoers faced in the days following Coco’s theatrical release — and one worth looking into. Why, exactly, was Coco preceded not by the traditional Pixar short film but by a 21-minute-long featurette called Olaf’s Frozen Adventure?

And was the backlash so severe that Disney pulled the short entirely from theaters in the United States by December 8 — or was that, as Disney claims, always part of the plan?

Over Thanksgiving weekend and into the next week, people got mad, on the internet and elsewhere, about Olaf’s Frozen Adventure, a 21-minute “short” featuring Anna, Elsa, and most of all Olaf, the snowman voiced by Josh Gad, as they search for a holiday tradition to make their own; due to the events of Frozen, the sisters don’t have traditions, so Olaf goes off to find some for them.

Olaf’s Frozen Adventure alternates between grating and occasionally charming, with some mildly funny slapstick bits in the middle. There are four original songs, none of which are memorable. It certainly lacks the creativity one expects from the short films Pixar typically runs before its feature movies, but it wasn’t, on its own, the most heinous animated entertainment I’ve been subjected to this year.

Olaf’s Frozen Adventure didn’t screen for critics before Coco, so I had to seek it out separately, which I did about a week after its theatrical release. Judging from reports people sent to me on Twitter, my viewing experience was similar to many others. A family with two small children sat a few rows behind me, the parents talking to each other in Spanish, the kids chattering excitedly. A couple in their late 20s walked past me and settled down in my row while the trailers were playing. It was a small early evening crowd, typical for a weekday in Midtown Manhattan.

I knew what was about to happen — I was there to see Olaf’s Frozen Adventure, after all — but the rest of them were ostensibly there to see Coco. About 10 minutes in, as Olaf was knocking on the door of another villager’s house, the 20-something man sitting in my row got up and started walking toward the exit. He paused before passing me and asked, “Is this Coco?”

“That’s what I wanted to know,” the father said from three rows back.

When I nodded, he sat back down, but the father stood up and walked out and didn’t come back.

We all watched, mutely munching our popcorn, as Olaf got lost, then found, then discovered that he was the Christmas tradition they sought all along. (How a sentient snowman can be a “tradition” is still a little beyond me, but by the end I wasn’t asking questions.) The Olaf’s Frozen Adventure credits rolled, I packed up and slipped out of the theater, and outside, I nodded to the father, who was sitting on a bench outside the theater scrolling on his iPhone.

The confusion my fellow moviegoers experienced in the theater, about whether they’d accidentally slipped into Frozen 2 (due out in late November 2019) rather than the whimsical story about a young Mexican boy in the Land of the Dead they were expecting, was shared by many moviegoers:

There’s one big reason for that, and it has to do with what I, a New Yorker, think of as the “subway platform principle.” In the 12 years I’ve ridden the notoriously unreliable New York City subway system, signs have been installed in many stops that update riders on how many minutes remain before their train arrives. It’s a helpful development for subway riders, but it’s also a savvy move on the MTA’s part; most people are more willing to wait for a train they have some assurance is 10 minutes away than they are to wait half that time for a train with no sense of whether it will actually arrive. It’s easier to endure a period of time if you have an idea of when (and if) it will end.

Most people’s problems with Olaf’s Frozen Adventure run along a similar principle. The typical Pixar short is between two and eight minutes long; Olaf’s Frozen Adventure is 21 minutes. Most anyone who’s seen a Pixar film knows they’ll see a short before the film — that’s not the problem. And if Olaf’s Frozen Adventure were, say, four and a half minutes long, even those who are sick to death of Frozen would probably have forgotten about it by the time Coco was over. But if you’re not prepared for that 21-minute runtime, Olaf’s Frozen Adventure feels interminable, as if it will never end.

In reality, Olaf’s Frozen Adventure is the length of an episode of network TV, which is not what most people expected, but helps explain the strangeness of its placement before Coco. The film was originally slated to be a Christmas special on ABC, which is owned by Disney — and it did finally air on ABC as a holiday special on December 14. That accounts for the length, but it also explains the rhythm of the short, which feels as if it has distinct lulls in the action — precisely where the commercial breaks would be placed.

Who decided to move the short from TV to the big screen? In an interview with Entertainment Weekly in June, John Lasseter (then head of Pixar and of Disney Animation, though he recently took a leave of absence after revelations of sexual misconduct) indicated that after seeing Olaf’s Frozen Adventure, he and the filmmakers decided it should run before Coco because it was “too cinematic to not inhabit the big screen.” Lasseter also liked the idea of both the short and Coco being about holidays:

“When we put shorts in front of features, I always love to have shorts that contrast, that aren’t about the same subject or setting or environment, but with this, both stories are incredibly emotional and so much about family that they really fit,” Lasseter says. “And both celebrate two completely different holidays, so I think that was also fun to put them together.”

He also mentioned another reason for running Olaf’s Frozen Adventure, a non-Pixar short, before a Pixar feature for the first time in Pixar’s history. (Pixar shorts have sometimes run before Disney Animation films.) Disney acquired Pixar in 2006, and thus cross-promotion makes sense. In the interview, Lasseter talks about keeping the excitement alive for the upcoming Frozen 2 with shorts like Olaf’s Frozen Adventure and Frozen Fever (which ran before Disney’s Cinderella in 2015), as well as other Frozen merchandise.

Lots of people love Frozen, of course, many of whom were likely in the opening weekend audience for Coco; even those who aren’t as fond of Frozen might have gritted their teeth and borne it (or made a quick trip to the concession stand) if they knew how long it would be. But the pairing of the two properties is also frustrating to those who love the work of Pixar and felt that the work of a different studio owned by the same company was being pushed on them; Pixar is a trusted brand in a way that Disney Animation is not, and mixing the two feels like naked advertising.

Disney did try to warn people. The move from TV to pre-Coco short was announced in June, through news outlets and Lasseter’s interview. On June 13, Disney also released a trailer for the “featurette” Olaf’s Frozen Adventure, which ran before Cars 3. The fourth paragraph below the trailer’s description on YouTube mentions the 21-minute runtime, but otherwise the trailer seems to lean on the term “featurette” to indicate to audiences that it’s not just a short film.

“Featurette” is industry lingo for a film that’s not a short but not full-length either, though your average moviegoer likely wouldn’t know that. Furthermore, most audiences aren’t used to watching trailers for featurettes, and most of Coco’s promotion didn’t mention Olaf’s Frozen Adventure; the fact that Olaf’s Frozen Adventure isn’t advertised on the ticket or in many cinemas likely added to the confusion. People with good memories who saw the Olaf’s Frozen Adventure trailer before Cars 3 in the theater this summer might have remembered what they were in for, but they likely still weren’t prepared for it to be the length of an episode of TV.

Furthermore, Coco clocks in at 1 hour and 49 minutes, which is relatively lengthy for a kids’ film. Some families have to calibrate for their young children’s attention spans when going to see a full feature-length movie. The extra 21 minutes extended that period substantially — especially if you calculate for trailers, which add nearly 20 more minutes — and the result is that Coco actually started about 40 minutes after its posted showtime, which could ruin the experience entirely for some families.

For its part, Disney is now maintaining that it always intended for Olaf’s Frozen Adventure to end its run before Coco. On December 3, Entertainment Weekly quoted a Disney representative who said that “this was always promoted as a limited run so it’s not really a story — the end of our Olaf theatrical play is coming next week,” and that “all of the ads and messaging” around the short said as much.

However, the trailer for Olaf’s Frozen Adventure doesn’t mention a limited run; the text below it on YouTube mentions that it would be for “a limited time,” but doesn’t specify a date. No text about the end date or a limited run appears with the trailer on the Disney site.

Some audiences had an additional reason to be irritated about Olaf’s Frozen Adventure beyond its length. Coco is the first Pixar film set in Mexico, with an entirely nonwhite cast and deep roots in Mexican culture. It’s gone over like gangbusters not just in the United States but also in Mexico, where it opened on October 27. Olaf’s Frozen Adventure played along with it.

That sparked an outcry. Mexican moviegoers complained on social media; someone created a Facebook event to march on Paseo de la Reforma in protest. And within days of release, Cinemex — a major cineplex chain in Mexico — announced via its Twitter account that it would no longer be showing Olaf’s Frozen Adventure before Coco.

Coco has been a massive success in Mexico — in fact, it’s now the biggest box office hit in Mexican history. But combining it with Olaf’s Frozen Adventure, which takes place in a fictional country based on Norway and stars two lily-white girls, has been interpreted by some as an attempt to make white audiences more interested in a film starring nonwhite characters. Whether or not that’s true, the optics were pretty bad, especially coupled with the landmark that Coco’s Mexican setting represented for the studio.

Whatever the case may be, it’s clear that Olaf’s Frozen Adventure has not gone over the way Disney intended. There’s no Tomatometer score for the featurette, since critics weren’t able to see and review it before release, but its audience score on Rotten Tomatoes is a dismal 39 percent. (Coco, by contrast, has a 97 percent Tomatometer score.) And the short left US theaters entirely on December 8.

What can Disney learn from this experience? First of all, it’s wise to respect the audience’s expectations, especially when a sizable swath of that audience is children. Keep shorts short — and if you’re going to mess with the playbook, do a lot of marketing footwork to make sure that people aren’t taken off guard.

And second, consider more strongly how it looks to pair one short with another feature. It might not be the best idea to smash together a strong brand like Frozen, the source of scads of merchandising, with a film from Pixar, which has its own brand loyalists. And it doesn’t look great to lead into the studio’s first film about nonwhite characters with an interminably long featurette about white characters, either.

Meanwhile, audiences in the US no longer have to contend with Olaf’s Frozen Adventure if they go to see Coco — and that’s a good thing. Coco is plenty capable of standing on its own as an enjoyable, beautiful film. No snowmen are necessary.

This article has been updated with information about the short’s run in US theaters.