All in the family! Chris Buck, the filmmaker behind some of Disney’s biggest hits, including Pocahontas and Frozen, revealed an amazing connection between a few of his most beloved characters in a new interview.
Buck, who co-directed Frozen, weighed in on some Disney conspiracy theories in a chat with MTV News. The filmmaker first teased a connection between Frozen‘s Anna and Elsa and Tarzan‘s namesake character in an AMA session with his colleagues on Reddit last year.
A Frozen fan asked about the movie’s King and Queen of Arendelle, the parents of Anna and Elsa who boarded a ship for a trip but never made it back to their kingdom. While many viewers believed the royals died at sea, Buck said in the AMA, “They didn’t die on the boat. They got washed up on a shore in a jungle island. The queen gave birth to a baby boy. They build a treehouse. They get eaten by a leopard…”
While he didn’t spell it out completely, Buck’s ellipses carried quite a lot of meaning. Disney’s interpretation of Tarzan tells the story of a little boy whose parents set up camp in a jungle treehouse before getting killed by a leopard.
“When you’re working on a feature, you have a lot of time to think about stuff because it takes four years to make one,” Buck, who also directed Tarzan, told MTV News. “I think [screenwriter] Jen [Lee] and I were walking to a meeting, and I just start to tell her the entire story.”
Buck went on to detail said story, one that offers a direct tie between the two princesses and the jungle dweller.
“I said, ’Of course Anna and Elsa’s parents didn’t die,'” Buck continued. “Yes, there was a shipwreck, but they were at sea a little bit longer than we think they were because the mother was pregnant, and she gave birth on the boat, to a little boy. They get shipwrecked, and somehow they really washed way far away from the Scandinavian waters, and they end up in the jungle. They end up building a tree house and a leopard kills them, so their baby boy is raised by gorillas. So in my little head, Anna and Elsa’s brother is Tarzan.”
Buck’s explanation of the King and Queen’s jungle treehouse stands in stark contrast to a different fan theory about Anna and Elsa. The alternate idea tied in Frozen, Tangled, and The Little Mermaid, explaining that the royals were on their way to Rapunzel’s wedding when their ship began to falter, and it sunk near Denmark, providing Ariel with a spot to explore underwater.
