Disney's 'Frozen': Kristen Bell and Idina Menzel to voice new animated tale

The Wicked Witch of Oz might be turning green with envy (if she wasn’t already, obviously).

Idina Menzel, who won a Tony Award for originating the role of misunderstood Elphaba in Broadway’s Wicked, will be playing a different type of sorceress in Walt Disney Animation’s upcoming Frozen, loosely based on 1845’s The Snow Queen by Hans Christian Andersen.

Kristen Bell will costar as Anna, a young girl who ventures to find Menzel’s Snow Queen and end the perpetual winter that has fallen over their mythical kingdom, the studio announced today.

The movie, of course, will have a musical element, with original songs by Broadway’s Robert Lopez (a two-time Tony winner for Avenue Q and The Book of Mormon) and wife Kristen Anderson-Lopez (who worked with him on Disney’s 2011 Winnie the Pooh.)

Still uncast in the movie is the role of the leading man, Kristoff, a mountain climber who leads Anna on her quest through snowy peaks and dangerous cliffs to find the legendary Snow Queen.

The digitally animated feature will open in November 2013 and is being directed by Chris Buck (Tarzan, Surf’s Up) and produced by Peter Del Vecho (Winnie the Pooh, The Princess and the Frog).

Andersen’s writings, of course, provided source material for the movie that led to Walt Disney Animation’s renaissance in 1989 — The Little Mermaid, another loose adaptation of a classic tale whose popularity today is testament to its, let’s say, legs.

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Former Warner Bros. chief to run Walt Disney Studios