"Let It Go" in 25 Languages and I’m Still Not Sorry

Idina Menzel’s voice doing what it does in the third act of Frozen hits harder than it has any right to. The song picked up an Oscar nomination for Best Original Song, which was obvious to anyone who’d sat through the film—and the film itself works in ways Disney hadn’t quite managed in a while. The music especially. I’m not going to pretend I came to this ironically.

Disney released a video assembling "Let It Go" performed in 25 different languages, each one by a different voice actress for that region’s release. What it becomes is an accidental survey of the song’s actual bones. Hearing the melody stripped of familiarity, landing in Mandarin or Polish or Thai, you catch what’s doing the real work underneath. The structure is genuinely strong. The key change still lands. Goosebumps in languages I don’t speak—which tells you something about where the feeling is actually coming from.

I didn’t expect to feel anything from a Disney multilingual marketing exercise. And yet here we are.