The upcoming Disney+ series Olaf Presents features the Frozen franchise’s famous Olaf the snowman sidekick retelling classic Disney movies like The Little Mermaid, Tangled, and The Lion King. While Olaf Presents’ main goal seems to be to get a laugh through less-than-two-minute-long shorts, it highlights the collaborative power of the Disney+ streaming platform.
While Disney is always free to allow collaboration among its different projects and properties, Disney+ might make it easier. At a press conference for the upcoming series, Producer Jennifer Newfield spoke about being able to build on pre-existing Disney tales:
“It’s nice to [be able to build] off of ourselves as Disney, like using some of the tales that we’ve told that are so familiar, and which are building off of fairy tales that existed even before the time of Olaf…so the self-referential piece [] almost like grows with [Olaf’s] knowledge and self-awareness…”
Jennifer Newfield
When audiences have the ability to seamlessly move back and forth from projects like Olaf Presents to the actual films that are presented in the series, it changes the way content is produced and what kind of content is produced. Newfield went on to say:
“Because I think as a lot of people probably noticed the common collective idea of that sequence in Frozen II…we kind of knew that something needed to get bigger and become a bit of some films being integrated. And so [Director Hyrum Osmond] knew that there were other people in the studio, who also had that same thought…[there was] an insane amount of collaborative ideas as we went through every script together.”
Jennifer Newfield
As a relatively young platform, Disney+ is likely only just beginning to realize the new opportunities it has when all of its properties are housed together. Olaf Presents starts streaming on the platform on Disney+ Day on November 12.
