Two weeks ago we saw Tangled, several days later we cleared The Princess and the Frog from our Netflix queue. Again, I thought Disney cleared out all the well-known stories collected by the Grimm Brothers so they just remade this tale by changing the setting (New Orleans in the Twenties and Thirties), the cast (it’s mainly Black actors doing the voices) and the outcome. I was wrong, Disney never made a feature with this premise. What they did do is advertise it badly. The few commercials/trailers made the “princess” character appear to be a bossy, spoiled teenager who receives her comeuppance by being transformed into a frog. I’m not alone in this perception.
Here’s how the story really kicks off. Tiana is a hard-working lady trying to save enough money to open her own restaurant. She is so focused on this goal that she turns down time with her friends to enjoy life. Then this Prince Naveen from a fictional nation comes to New Orleans; it’s fictional because of its name and his complexion, even the ruling castes of Brazil and Mexico are paler than me. He’s the opposite. He’s irresponsible, he’s lazy and he’s broke; his parents have cut him off until he gets married. You know the rest from the trailers…they are both changed into frogs to learn important lessons from each other and the B-story characters: an alligator who wants be jazz musician (nod to Louis Armstrong), a Cajun lightning bug and a witch/wisewoman of the swamp who can break the voodoo spell cast by Dr. Facilier (a surrogate for Baron Samedi).
I genuinely liked it. Disney was trying to break out of its past princess formula by using Randy Newman on the music (this material isn’t as rote as his Pixar songs) and some more Art Deco sequences (key to the Jazz Age). They recycled the look on the gators from Fantasia and The Rescuers which is fine, a trademarked style on certain creatures is cool; look at both of Matt Groening’s hit shows, all people have the overbite from his newspaper strip. I read the animators imitated Lady & the Tramp for the city scenes and Bambi for the swamp. Good choices to follow on settings. I would’ve used The Rescuers with the bayous despite it being a Seventies production, not everything Disney did between Walt’s death and the Nineties was terrible.
I think the movie tanked for many reasons but the strongest explanation would be some parts scaring the bejeezus out of little kids, Disney’s target audience. If the under eight crowd doesn’t like the film, then Disney can’t sell any of the licensed secondary junk to the parents. Thanks to Star Wars, this is where the money has moved to. I’d still recommend it, especially for the chance to hear Keith David sing. He is the voice of the villain Dr. Facilier and most people my age remember his brief performance as the gruff dad in early parts of There’s Something About Mary.
The first time I watched this movie was with my five-year-old son, who had seen it in the theater with his grandma. I honestly thought that this was Disney’s best animated feature since the mid Nineties. Such a breath of fresh air in today’s over-saturated Pixar-esque kiddy faire. Don’t get me wrong, I love the collaboration between Pixar and Disney, but this is what I grew up on and being a Disney animator was my first “career goal” when I was a kid. Having quite a bit of Cajun in my family, I though Jim Cummings as Ray the firefly was spot-on, and not since Simba cried over Mufasa’s body in The Lion King, have I felt as emotional over an animated character’s death.