The Snow Queen - Other Adaptations and Inspired Works

Other Adaptations and Inspired Works

• Gerda and Kai - The Snow Queen Book by Richard Koscher.
• Northern Lights: A novel by Philip Pullman that loosely parallels the plot of The Snow Queen in that a young girl travels north to find her kidnapped friend.
• Revelations: Persona: A video game developed in Japan for the PlayStation game console has a side quest which revolved around the tale of The Snow Queen. Originally removed from the American version due to time consumption, it was restored for the game's 2009 PlayStation Portable remake.
• The Snow Queen: A Korean drama that centers around the Anderson classic starring Hyun Bin and Sung Yu Ri as Han Tae Woong and Kim Bo-Ra, a mismatched yet heartwarming couple. Han Tae Woong, once a math genius winning the IMO (International Math Olympiad), dropped out of his Science Academy as a result of his friend's suicide. By chance, he meets his friend's sister and melts her heart with love, reminiscient of Anderson's Snow Queen.
• Spirit: Graham Masterton's 2001 horror novel features characters and themes from The Snow Queen.
• The Devil Wears Prada: One of Miranda Priestly's (Meryl Streep's character in the film) tabloid nicknames is "The Snow Queen" because of her icy demeanor.
• The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: In Volume II of Alan Moore's comic, the Snow Queen's palace is featured in the New Traveller's Almanac.
• The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe: It is possible that the White Witch from C. S. Lewis's novel may be based on the Snow Queen, as she turned Narnia into a snow-covered land, and is also depicted as wearing a white fur coat.
• The Rose and the Beast: Francesca Lia Block wrote a version of this fairy tale in her collection of adaptations of fairy tales. Her story is called "Ice," and while she retains some of the main elements of the original fairy tale, such as the basic plot and the proximity of their houses and the window-box gardens, she does not mention the grandmother or much of the back story. In her adaptation, The Snow Queen is a metaphor for heroin addiction. The characters are teenagers in a modern world.
• Sailor Moon: The first arc of the final season of the anime adaptation tells a story heavily based around the tale of the Snow Queen. The Evil Queen Nehelenia is reawakened from her dream inside a mirror and freed from the closure by another villain Sailor Galaxia, who also makes Nehelenia's Mirror of Dreams appear. Nehelenia is agitated by the sight within it, showing Sailor Moon and her friends living a happy life on Earth following her defeat. She brakes the mirror in anger and it shatters into small pieces and falls to Earth. The love interest of the story's main character, Tuxedo Mask, gets a piece of Nehelenia's mirror shard stuck in his eye, and subsequently forgets about his love for Sailor Moon and surrounds himself with mirrors - the same happens to other people around. Nehelenia captures him and holds him, in revenge for humiliation. Sailor Moon sets out to save him and must go through a series of trials, including one scene in which she is trapped in a beautiful garden with flowers that tell her to forget about pain. Sailor Jupiter's rose-shaped earring is what reminds her of her devotion to Mamoru, and she must persist through a raging snowstorm to finally meet and save him from the queen.
• Breadcrumbs: Anne Ursu's 2011 children's novel is an extended reinterpretation of the story.
• Fables: Kay and the Snow Queen appear in Bill Willingham's comic book series from DC Comics Vertigo Imprint. There Kay is a grown man who still has the mirror fragment in his eye and so sees the sins of all around him. He constantly gouges out his eyes, but they regrow after a few years. The Snow Queen is one of the most powerful servants of the Adversary, an enemy of Fabletown, and is also the mother of the second Jack Frost. The Snow Queen's name in Fables is Lumi, which is Finnish for snow.
• The Snow Queen: The fable inspired Joan D. Vinge's science-fantasy novel which added interstellar travel, sea-dwelling sentient mammals, and a galaxy-wide conspiracy to the basic love story.
• The Wizard of London: Mercedes Lackey's tale is based upon the plot of The Snow Queen, albeit set in Victorian London with the trappings of Elemental Magic. Lackey later used Anderson's tale as the basis for her 2008 novel, The Snow Queen. This book focuses on the Snow Queen herself. In this tale, the "snow queen" is an alias of the Ice Fairy, a good Fairy Godmother charged with testing heroes and guiding princesses from the northernmost of the Five Hundred Kingdoms.
• "Travels with the Snow Queen": Kelly Link based the short story on Andersen's fairytale, portraying Kay and Gerda as adults and giving the story a romantic twist. The story is included in the collection Stranger Things Happen.
• Winter's Child by Cameron Dokey is based on The Snow Queen.
• The Snow Queen's Shadow was released July 5, 2011. It is the fourth book in Jim C. Hines' Princess series. When Snow White's magic mirror breaks, a demon is released. The demon's magic distorts the vision of everyone it touches so they see only ugliness and hate. This parallels what happens to Kai when the shard of the Snow Queen's mirror gets into his eye.