After Friday’s decision to select Beijing was to host the 2022 Winter Olympic games—despite the city’s lack of snow—another controversy has emerged, this time over one of the official songs:
Some have pointed out that the song, titled The Snow and Ice Dance, sung by the duo Sun Nan and Tan Jing, sounds awfully similar to Let it Go, the signature song by the ice princess Elsa (performed by the actress and singer Idina Menzel) from Disney’s animated mega-hit Frozen:
The release of the Olympic song, one of 10 official songs announced for the 2022 games, has sparked controversy on the internet—both in China and internationally.
On the song’s YouTube page, negative comments in Chinese have piled up, saying the song is an example of China’s shamelessness in copying others’ original work. Because of bans on YouTube in China, it is unclear how many of these comments were written in mainland China.
Caijing Online—a prominent business magazine—also did a thorough analysis of the two songs’ similarities and found that the songs share similar instruments, prelude chords, and tempo, among other features, the New York Times reports (paywall).
A spokeswoman for the Beijing Games organizing committee said that she was not authorized to respond to the New York Times’ request for comment on the matter.
Songs aside, China could certainly use an Elsa, with her power to make it snow. Although temperatures can drop below freezing in northern China in the winter, the region is too dry to produce nearly enough snow for the sports featured in the Winter Olympics.
In the absence of an ice princess, however, artificial snow should do the trick.