Forty years ago, Jennifer Lee was miserable in middle school. Her parents had got divorced and she had moved to Rhode Island with her mother and sister. She was, by her own account, “always a mess. Stains on my clothes … knots in my hair … chubby.
“I was born into a very modest life,” she says today. “I was a kid with ADHD; terrible in school. I don’t think people ever thought I could amount to anything.”
Her liferaft was a VHS tape of Cinderella, rewatched daily for its pep talk in perseverance. “Cinderella was bullied severely and I was bullied. But she stayed true to herself, even when it was really hard. Something about the concept of fighting through it helped me.” She pauses. “I think a lot of us get knocked down often, over and over again, in our lives.”
After a few stumbles, Lee ended up in New York with a job in publishing, a postgraduate degree in film and a young daughter. When Agatha was seven, they decamped to Hollywood so that Lee could do rewrite work on the script for Disney’s Wreck-It Ralph. Two months turned into 12 years; today, Lee is chief creative officer at the company where she had temped.
Why? Lee has been responsible for a wildly lucrative revolution, which re-energised the studio – and cinema beyond. She won an Oscar for Frozen in 2014, which also made her the first woman ever to direct a film (which she also scripted) that made more than $1bn. In 2019, she co-wrote and co-directed Frozen’s sequel – the project on which she met her now-husband, the actor Alfred Molina – and that same year took over as Disney Animation’s chief creative officer after the departure of John Lasseter for “inappropriate hugging” (not of her, she has said).
Now 51, Lee is warm, glossy and as successful as you can get. She no longer needs to see a bit of Cinderella to get her out of the house, but the film is still a touchstone (original pencil sketches from 1950 hang behind her LA desk). Her new film, Wish, co-written with Frozen’s Chris Buck, is also about a downtrodden teenage girl who wishes on a star. Colourful magic and chatty animals follow, but so, too, does the realisation you need to put in some legwork to make your dreams come true.
The film is Disney’s big push for a cinema hit this Christmas (in the company’s centenary year, to up the stakes further). Lee has been on a small world tour previewing 20 minutes of unfinished footage. In London last week, we saw Asha (voiced by Ariana DeBose) scamper with her pyjama-wearing baby goat through the watercolour medieval-ish kingdom of King Magnifico (Chris Pine), who solicits his subjects’ wishes, then grants a handful in X Factor-style shows. Asha is interviewed for the post of his apprentice, but whistleblows once she realises that Magnifico approves only the most vanilla dreams, fearful anything more ambitious might trigger a peasants’ revolt.
It looks bracing, I say: a young woman of colour taking on a totalitarian regime. “You got that from 20 minutes,” Lee says. “I’m excited!” So how does she think it might play in Iran?
Lee remains impeccably politic. “We’re not trying to make a statement like that. Underdog stories are there for a reason.” That reason is that the next generation needs stories in which “a teenage girl can change the world. Especially in a time where it can feel like a drop in the ocean to be that person. We’re forming our own societies all the time and they’re not easy, they’re really complex, and we didn’t shy from letting that be evocative.”
The film also looks as if it might be bravely sceptical about monarchies, I suggest. “It was important to me to not make a statement about monarchy,” says Lee. There’s a queen, too, she says, who ends up making a decision “which is really about good leadership. I wanted to make sure we were saying this isn’t about any one place or structure.”
I believe her. I’d long assumed scripting a Disney super-cartoon must be a nightmare of dancing on eggshells while dodging hot potatoes; that decisions over characters’ race, sexuality and level of mobility (Asha’s best friend has a crutch) are the result of years product-testing and offence-proofing in every possible territory.
Not so, says Lee. “It’s such an odd thing because from the outside, you’d think it’s a check-box formula. It’s oddly the opposite. When you manage characters from outside in, they don’t resonate. And if it’s not authentic, no one comes.”
Lee’s gift has always been in adding dimensions to 2D characters. For Frozen, she put Elsa and Anna through Myers-Briggs personality tests and wrote diaries in their voices. She did the same for Asha and Magnifico. Much of the graft at Disney, she says, is 800 employees “just being very vulnerable and sharing” about their own families and experiences of childhood. “Relaxing into letting there be a lot of deep conversations.” Their own offspring are encouraged to feed in; the nine-year-old Agatha ended up doing vocals for the young Anna in Frozen.
When Lee was promoting that film, she said she was concerned about a global “escalation – and exploitation – of fear”. Presumably that has only increased in the decade since? She nods and tiptoes agreement. “It was a different time. Social media wasn’t at this scale. It’s scary. The concept of the reward of instant likes, instant attention, instant praise is probably confusing.”
She has Agatha to thank, she says, for correcting her assumption that young people expect immediate gratification. “My daughter said: ‘We are so overstimulated and we don’t know what to trust or where to look. We just need certain things to be easy. And when they’re not, it’s a tipping point.’
“For young people, life is far more flooded, far more chaotic. The floor is always moving. The world is quite loud and seems to be full of contradictions.”
Lee’s solution is a practical one: get them a roadmap early – and make it even more clearly signposted and less reliant on fairy godmothers than Cinderella. Wish is quite a kick up the pants. “It’s your responsibility to pursue a wish,” says Lee. “And there will be scary times and failure and things won’t work out. I like the idea that it’s OK that it’s hard.”
That’s what fairytales are, she says, confidently. Her colleagues at Marvel make mythic stories of the gods. She prefers putting someone ordinary through the wringer for their own betterment – and that of the audience. “Fairytales teach us how to cope with the tough realities of life.” She smooths her blue silk dress. “Plus, there’s a goat in pyjamas.”