‘Frozen 2’ story artist from Chicago suburbs always wanted to ‘bring drawings to life’

Before she even had the words for it, “Frozen 2” story artist Donna Lee knew she wanted to work on cartoons.

The 27-year-old, who grew up in Des Plaines and Buffalo Grove, recalls someone asking her at age 8 what she wanted to be when she was older.

“I just pointed to the screen, and I was like, ‘I want to do that,’ and it was ‘The Lion King’ that was playing,” Lee said. “And she’s like, ‘Oh so you want to be an animator?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, I want to be just like that. I just want to bring drawings to life.’”

She spent a lot of her childhood drawing while watching Disney classics like “Beauty and the Beast,” “Cinderella” and “Snow White,” as well as shows like “Arthur” and “The Simpsons.” After graduating from Adlai E. Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, she studied film, animation and video production at the Rhode Island School of Design.

She got her first animation industry job at DisneyToon Studios and worked on “Abominable” at DreamWorks and “Wonder Park” at Paramount before landing her current gig at Walt Disney Animation Studios in 2017 to start work on “Frozen 2” (in theaters Thursday).

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While she initially wanted to become an animator, Lee fell in love with storyboarding after taking a class on the subject. She found herself drawn to the big-picture process of laying out an entire scene over the detail-oriented minutiae of animating individual motions.

“I think animation, they’re very focused on just the acting part of the character, and for storyboarding it’s more of just juggling a lot of different things at once,” Lee said. “So for us, we do, like, the first rendition of the acting, I guess. Like we choreograph it out and then the animators will take that and they kind of use that as a base.”

As a story artist on “Frozen 2,” Lee worked with directors Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee, who also wrote the screenplay, as part of the team responsible for translating script pages into storyboards. The boards serve as a first draft of a scene’s shot composition and a roadmap for the animators to start their work.

“Seeing my drawings come to life is literally the most magical thing,” Lee said. “If I think about Disney magic, I think that’s what it is, and I think that little person inside of me just felt so, like, ecstatic to see it just move in front of me. It’s literally like breathing it into life, and it’s just such a beautiful feeling.”

“Frozen 2” sees Elsa following a mysterious voice calling her to an enchanted forest to learn about the origins of her powers and events in her kingdom’s past, with Anna, Olaf, Kristoff and Sven in tow.

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Lee worked on several early scenes, including a game of charades between the main cast and a scene of sisters Elsa and Anna recalling a lullaby their mother used to sing for them. She also storyboarded several pivotal scenes involving revelations about Elsa’s abilities, but wouldn’t go into detail about them ahead of the film’s release.

“It was a lot of like these moments of like, ‘Oh my gosh,’ and it kind of moved the story forward,” she said. “So a lot of times the directors kind of gave me these scenes where they’re like, ‘OK, this scene they’re actually discovering this new aspect to the past.’”

While storyboarding Elsa’s quest for answers about her past and search for a place where she belongs, Lee saw parallels to her own pursuit of her artistic dreams, and she tried to channel that passion back into her work.

“I think I was able to relate to her because I always felt like there was something else out there that I need to do, like there’s something else out there almost, in a way, calling out to me, and for me that was storyboarding,” Lee said.

“So when I was working on her character, I was really trying to channel that, like, ‘I think I’m just meant for something and I think I just need to go out to LA. I just know that the answers are there,’” she added. “And so I think for Elsa, I was just trying my best to use that and I feel like that’s a message that everyone can relate to, you know?”

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