Why Olaf loves bears
You might find something unusual about Olaf if you are a heavy fan of Frozen movies and books. It’s that Olaf is the only character that has a lot to do with bears. He mentions bears sometimes in the movie, but if you look at some books and novels, you’ll find quite a few bear stories. Why bears? Why does Olaf like a bear? In this article, we focus on this topic.
Olaf: Once upon a snowman
Let’s rewind to when Olaf first met Oaken. Olaf, without his nose at that time, calls Oaken ‘fuzzy man bear’ as he hears that Oaken will give him a new nose.
We can think of about two reasons why Olaf calls Oaken a bear.
- Oaken, with his beard and big body, looks like a bear at first glance.
- There’s a bear character called ‘Fozzie Bear’ from Mupper Studio, now part of Disney, and it just looks like Oaken.
For these reasons, Olaf might think of the bear as he first saw Oaken.
After this scene, when Olaf leaves the store, he calls Oaken a “big, lovable, pink-faced bear man”. Olaf’s image of Oaken is just that of a bear from the moment they met. Or, to put it another way, we can speculate that the bear is one of the most familiar animals to Olaf, so he can drag that image from his head when he met someone resembles it.
Family game
In the family game scene, Olaf spits out some names of the bear. He only speaks out the name of bears(grizzly bear, black bear, a brown bear), which is quite different from Kristoff, who says ‘Lion’ or ‘Angry face’. Olaf, of course, loves reading books and acquiring knowledge. Still, judging from the knowledge of species of bears, he seems to have many interests in bears.
Children’s book
The bears also appear quite often in the books with Olaf.
The book ‘Frozen: Olaf and the Three Polar bears’ tells the story of Olaf, which lost his way in the woods but found an empty house in the woods, which turns out to be the house of the polar bear family.
‘Anna & Elsa : The Polar Bear Piper’ deals with Olaf, Elsa, and Anna sending the polar bear family back from Arendelle to the north pole.
We see that books with Olaf have a lot of stories involving bears.
Elsa’s memory
Then, why does Olaf love bears? Or, even if he doesn’t love bears, we can at least say that he seems interested in bears. Is there any reason?
One way of explaining this is by focusing on the relation between Elsa and bear. In the previous article Elsa and unicorn, we claimed that Elsa’s favorite animal is a unicorn. We also claimed that since Elsa’s memory is projected to Olaf when she had created Olaf, Olaf also loves a unicorn.
Then it seems natural that if we can find evidence of Elsa’s interest in bears in the movie, we can explain why Olaf is interested in it.
Elsa’s stuffed bear
Then, let’s start looking for connections between Elsa and the bear in the movie.
As a child, Elsa had many toys. We need to focus on the stuffed animals by the window. As mentioned a few times, there’s a stuffed unicorn and bear by the window. We mentioned that a unicorn was Elsa’s favorite animal at that time and presumably still is. For similar reasons, the stuffed bear would be a similar one.
Elsa and snow bear
Another thing to be focused on is the shape of the snow figurines that Elsa created with her magic.
When Elsa plays Enchanted Forest with Anna, she creates a bunch of snow figurines. Look at the one at the bottom. If you look closely, you’ll notice it looks pretty similar to the stuffed bear by the window. This means that child Elsa must have had some interest in the bears.
When we see Elsa playing Enchanted Forest with Anna, she has made several different stuffed animals. One of these is the teddy bear at the bottom. It looks almost identical to the stuffed bear in her window. This means that child Elsa must have had some interest in bears as she both has stuffed animals and creates them with her magic.
Another interesting scene is when Elsa creates snow figurines for children at the town festival. She uses her magic to make two stuffed animals: the bear we mentioned above and a dinosaur. If we observe, both look like the same dolls she made when playing with Anna, suggesting that she still seems interested in bears.
Elsa and bear
These observations suggest that Elsa has kept some level of interest in the stuffed bear of the bear itself from childhood to now. And it seems that Elsa’s these memories were carried over Olaf when she created him. Just as her memory with unicorn did. Therefore, Olaf seems to have a particular interest in bears, which appears in an episode involving bears.
Summary
Olaf particularly has many episodes involving bears. This originated from Elsa’s interest in bears or stuffed bears.
