The Princess and the Frog
Directors: Ron Clements & John Musker
Writers: Story by Ron Clements & John Musker and Greg Erb and Jason Oremland, Screenplay by Ron Clements & John Musker and Rob Edwards, based on the story The Frog Princess by Ed Baker; music and lyrics by Randy Newman
Producer: Peter Del Vecho
Featuring the Vocal Talents of: Anika Noni Rose, Bruno Campos, Keith David, Michael-Leon Wooley, Jennifer Cody, Jim Cummings, Peter Bartlett, Jenifer Lewis, Oprah Winfrey, Terrence Howard, John Goodman
I recognize what they’re doing – the broad humor and the good heart, the way colorful ink is made to imitate life, the fairy tale story that proudly wins its happy ending. It is familiar but shocking, because it makes you realize just how long it has been since you saw it. It’s Disney Animation.
This is not to say that the Walt Disney Transglobal Entertainment Conglompire has failed to put out cartoons in recent years. But it felt so distressingly like they hated their own legacy and character, like they had no confidence that children still worked the way they did even 15 years ago when The Lion King was enrapturing them. When the budgets and staffs were slashed, when spreadsheet-inspired sequels to classics were outsourced to quickie TV animators, and finally, when they announced that they were through with 2D hand-drawn animation, and would be switching entirely to digital like their competitors at Pixar and Dreamworks, I wondered why all these suited bigwigs could have such poor taste as to grin at a funeral.
But with Pixar heads John Lasseter and Ed Catmull brought in to take the reins of the animation studio that inspired them and so many other artists in its heydays, we have the privilege of watching this one corner of Disney re-discover, and re-embrace, its true nature. The Princess and the Frog might not rank in the masterpiece class of Disney’s long roll call of animated features – the format they essentially invented with 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs – but it brings with it a palpable breath of joy. You get to see them remembering what they do, and that it feels good.
The story takes that classic fable about the frog looking for a kiss to restore him to Princehood, and transports it to Jazz Age New Orleans. This provides a rich well of music from which to draw, and a nearby swamp where frogs might feel at home. It’s a world of haves and have-nots, and Tiana (Anika Noni Rose) grows up on the have-not end of the streetcar line, where she learns to believe in hard work, community, and secret family recipes. She grows up fiercely determined to honor the sacrifices of her father (Terrence Howard) by opening her own restaurant – a modest dream, but the way she fights for it, and sings about it, makes it sound more enriching than “Someday My Prince Will Come”.
There is a Prince in town, the charming (and disowned) wastrel Naveen (Bruno Campos), who is searching for an heiress who might trade some cash flow in order to be a bona fide Princess. But a run-in with a Voodoo trickster known as The Shadow Man (Keith David) leaves him trapped in amphibian form.
Tiana knows this fairy tale well and tries to help, but her kiss actually makes her a frog as well. And the story expands beyond the set-up to become something much more like a romantic comedy version of another famous fantasy – The Wizard of Oz. Working adversarially at first (before…well, you know) they quest deep into the swamp in search of the ancient Voodoo queen Mama Odie (Jenifer Lewis), and along the way pick up a few misfit companions with dreams of their own. Fairy tales are built on the notion of borrowing and re-interpreting, so it’s no knock to identify such influences. It’s encouraging to see that Disney is once again choosing such classy tales from which to draw inspiration; after all, they took at more than a little bit of Hamlet for The Lion King.
You want the environment of an animated film to provide cues that excite the artists, and sometimes you can see The Princess and the Frog in such a hurry that it shortchanges some of its own best visuals. There’s such a rich grace to their foggy riverbanks, and I love the just-spooky-enough garishness of The Shadow Man’s sinister “Friends on the Other Side”. You need to be a mixture of festive and haunted to tell a story in New Orleans, and the animators, under the direction of Little Mermaid and Aladdin maestros Ron Clements and John Musker, well deliver their share of the magic. I was left wanting more.
The songs, timed with Broadway precision, are by Randy Newman. They are neat, but without the transcendence of the best works of the duo of Menken and Ashman who gave Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast their unforgettable melodies. In the realization of the setting they play a pleasing and authentic role, but they have a habit of just plunking along then stopping, without a sense that you actually went anywhere.
Watching The Princess and the Frog is like enjoying an imperfect step taken in the right direction. It’s jury-rigged expansion doesn’t feel bloated at feature length, and helps it arrive at a family-friendly theme. Tiana is non-traditional in an excellent way, and I don’t mean in her skin color but in the way that strength, ambition, and belief in herself are not her fundamental problem. Disney Animation didn’t lack for confidence when it set off so boldly in the wrong direction in recent years. What it lacked was perspective on what’s important. Here’s a movie about just what re-discovering that can do for you.