Frozen songwriters now working on an adorable new kids movie about a genderqueer prince
‘The Prince and the Dressmaker’ by Jen Wang is soon to be a full feature-length movie (Amazon)
The award-winning husband and wife songwriters behind Disney’s Frozen have announced their next project: a heartwarming tale about a genderqueer prince.
Fresh off of their third Oscar nomination for Frozen 2’s “Into the Unknown”, musical duo Kristen and Bobby Lopez are now working on an adaptation of Jen Wang’s much-loved graphic novel, The Prince and the Dressmaker.
Set in Paris at the dawn of the modern age, the book tells the story of 16-year-old prince Sebastian, whose parents are hoping to find him a suitable bride.
There’s just one problem – Sebastian is far more interested in dresses, and at night he takes Paris by storm as the fabulous Lady Crystallia.
He finds support in Frances, a loyal dressmaker who fashions Sebastian’s spectacular gowns for him. She is forced to keep her talent a secret in order to hide her friend’s identity, until she just can’t bear putting her dreams aside any longer.
In the book, prince Sebastian expresses feelings of being genderqueer or genderfluid, but is never explicitly labeled. “Some days I look at myself in the mirror and think, ‘That’s me, prince Sebastian! I wear boy clothes and look like my father.’ Other days it doesn’t feel right at all,” he says.
Published in February 2018, the film rights were snapped up by Universal Pictures just two months later, and the story has already won widespread praise for its sensitive approach to the themes of gender, identity, family and friendship.
No timeline for the musical movie adaptation has been announced, but it’s certainly in safe hands with Kristen and Bobby Lopez. As well as Frozen and Frozen 2, they also wrote the award-winning scores for Coco, Winnie the Pooh, The Book of Mormon and the Walt Disney World production of Finding Nemo – The Musical.
The news comes just days after Disney announced it would be introducing its first openly LGBT+ character in an upcoming Pixar film, Onward. The character will be a lesbian cyclops played by Lena Waithe.
