We may have all watched the animated film Frozen (2013) more than once. And Sunidhi Chauhan is no exception. A fan of the film’s hit songs, she could especially relate to Queen Elsa, the film’s misunderstood and emotional protagonist, whose icy powers accidentally send her kingdom into an eternal winter. However, little did Chauhan realise that her connect with Elsa will deepen further.
Two years after the film released in theatres across the world, Frozen, very recently dubbed in Hindi, features the Indian singer as the voice of Elsa. The dubbed version will premiere on Disney Channel on Saturday. “Although I had seen it many times, I still had to go deeper into the character,” says Chauhan who is not new to the Hindi dubbing of an animated character. She has also been the voice for Rio and Sons of Ram . She continues, “When Disney offered me the voice of Elsa, I had to do a lot of research on how to get the tone of the character right.” Strangely enough, the CGI characters invoke more emotions in the audience than actors of flesh and blood. Chauhan agrees, “The kind of humaneness I feel with these characters, most of the times I don’t see that in our films.”
For Chauhan there has always been a link between singing and acting. “A part of me has been acting for the last 20 years,” she says.
“Through my singing career, I’ve gone through expressing varied emotions — happy, sad, dancing and even raunchy. There, I had to do them with sur and rhythm, whereas while giving voice to the character, I had to bring the same emotions by way of speaking or conversing,” she explains.
The hit theme song from Frozen , ‘Let It Go’ has been transformed into ‘Fanaa Ho’ for its Hindi makeover sung by Chauhan. “When you convert an English song into Hindi, it can sound weird. We were careful and hope that we’ve managed to do a good job.”
With a dramatic shift in film music in the last few years, Chauhan — just like her peers such as Sonu Nigam, KK, Shaan and Shreya Ghosal — has cut down on her Bollywood singing assignments. “I take up offers only when the song needs me and only me,” she says. “Today, composers want to experiment with new voices. And a lot of male-oriented club songs hardly have any place for female vocals.”
The singer also laments the excessive use of pitch correction and auto tuning in the composers’ attempt to make the voices sound polished.In the coming days, the 32-year-old, who’s married to music producer Hitesh Sonik, will have most of her time occupied with acting for Nagesh Kukunoor’s next film. Chauhan will face her biggest acting challenge, portraying the role of a musician in the film alongside colleagues such as Shankar Mahadevan, Papon and Sivamani. It’s too early to talk about the film, that hasn’t even gone on floors as yet. But Chauhan confesses that she has had the acting bug since childhood.
“My father used to be an actor. He was into theatre for 15 years and I have grown up watching him perform and sing,” she reminisces.
“A lot of the power in my voice is inspired from that experience. It also inculcated in me the desire to act. I never took it seriously and I got busy with playback singing, shows and reality TV. But when Nagesh offered me a role in his film, I grabbed the chance,” she says.
(Frozen will air at noon today on the Disney Channel)
The playback singer is all set to play
a musician in Nagesh Kukunoor’s next film
