Kristen Bell and Jonathan Groff to reunite for new movie musical from How I Met Your Mother creators
Anna and Kristoff are getting back together! Well, they’ve never really been apart, assuming characters in Disney movies continue living their lives when we’re not actively observing them, but either way: Deadline says Kristen Bell and Jonathan Groff, who played Anna and Kristoff in the Frozen movies, are making another movie together—and, like Frozen, it’s a musical. Also like Frozen, it’s about a woman with ice powers who is misunderstood by society, and there’s a talking snowman who likes warm hugs. Actually, no, but it is a musical film starring Kristen Bell and Jonathan Groff.
Titled Molly And The Moon, the project comes from How I Met Your Mother creators Carter Bays and Craig Thomas. The two of them wrote the script and they’ll both direct, and while it will have “comedic elements,” it’s apparently based on a “personal crisis” that Thomas went through during HIMYM’s run on CBS when his son was born with some heart defects and needed surgery when he was only two weeks old because of a genetic condition called Jacobsen Syndrome. Thomas was apparently deeply touched by the struggles his son was going through, to the point where it convinced him and Bays that there could be a story to tell “about a baby struggling to survive to go home with its parents and start life.”
If that makes it sound like the baby is the hero of this story and not the parents, that’s apparently intentional. Here’s Thomas describing the basic setup:
Musicals are always about the first moments that prove why they are musicals. Kate, our lead character, the mother, is singing a lullaby to her pregnant belly and will sort of push in on that pregnant belly and go into this other world where we see a mysterious little girl in a rowboat in the middle of the ocean, looking up at the moon and hearing that song, hearing that lullaby come through the moon. It’s the moment you realize there’s this little soul, this life that wants to exist and be in the world and wants to reach the sound of that voice. She doesn’t know what it means or who it is. It just sounds like love, and she wants to reach it, and that’s sort of the moment that we connect the two worlds of our movie, the world of Molly and the real world that her parents are living in.
Bays and Thomas also describe Molly And The Moon as a “classic live-action fantasy” movie like Labyrinth or The Dark Crystal, but built around the story of a little girl on her journey toward being born. There’s apparently a “knight in shining armor,” a “talking bunny that she meets in the forest,” and “a monster that she has to face,” and it’s all live-action. Really, the whole thing is wild enough that we don’t even have room in this story to throw in a few digs about the HIMYM finale, so congratulations to Bays and Thomas for at least pulling that off.