The Princess and the Frog
This movie just made me happy. It’s not the third Renaissance of hand-drawn animation, although it’s beautifully done. Nor does it completely erase the memories of recent Disney hand-drawn misfires like “Home on the Range,” “Atlantis: The Lost Empire,” and “Treasure Planet.”
What it does do, and very well, is twist a classic fairy tale in that purely Disney fashion, and find room for clever twists, genuine warmth, and a lot of wonderful Randy Newman musical numbers. It doesn’t hit the classic status of “The Little Mermaid,” “Beauty and the Beast,” and “The Lion King” (it’s more on par with “Tarzan” and “Pocahontas”), but you can feel like hand-drawn animation has another chance with the way directors Ron Clements and John Musker infuse the film with life and energy.
Their story starts with young Tiana and Charlotte being told the tale of “The Frog Prince” by Tiana’s mother Eudora (voiced by Oprah Winfrey), a seamstress in New Orleans in the 1910s. Charlotte (to be voiced with humorous Southern Belle lovliness by Jennifer Cody) is enraptured by the thought of finding her prince- she comes from a well-off family headed by patriarch “Big Daddy” La Bouff (John Goodman). Tiana, on the other hand, is more skeptical, although she has her own dreams, like owning her own restaurant like her father James (Terrance Howard) wished for her.
As a young woman (now voiced by Anika Noni Rose), her father gone (he died in WWI), Tiana has worked hard and saved for her whole life (currently working two jobs) to make their dream come true. But through a series of unfortunate events, well, let’s just say Tiana feels a bit froggy when visiting Prince Naveen (Bruno Campos) gets caught up in the spell of local witch doctor Dr. Facilier (Keith David) and needs a kiss by a local princess to be returned to form.
Yes, Tiana is Disney’s first African-American “princess” (and the film is the Mouse House’s first to include African American characters since their ’40s film “Song of the South,” still unavailable on DVD beyond the bootleg circuit) but more importantly, she’s also a continuation of the head-strong female characters like “Little Mermaid’s” Ariel and “Beauty and the Beast’s” Belle. She’s a smart and loving character who has the same kind of dreams other Disney characters have had, but more based around the love of her family and her parent’s dreams for her, which happened to be her own as well.
As always, as the saying goes, life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans. Granted, Tiana is a frog, chasing around the bayou with Naveen to try and break the doctor’s curse, but along the way she finds an adventure and friends to share it with, especially a trumpet-playing gator Louis (Michael-Leon Wooley) who just wants to play with the big boys of jazz, and Ray (Jim Cummings), a lightening bug who provides an unusual voice of reason for both Tiana and Naveen when they find their lives and feelings changing.
The film has all of the elements of a Disney classic- sadness, joy, delightful music (Newman’s songs don’t really rate with his Pixar best in memorability, but serve the story beautifully)- and all the promise of an artform that should have no problem finding its’ box-office legs again after so long. Just remember- it’s not the medium it’s made in, it’s the story that matters. And Disney has restarted with a lovely one.
