Disney making a huge comeback! ‘The Princess and the Frog’ Review
Posted on December 19, 2009 - 8:16am by michael
My first impression at the beginning of
The Princess and the Frog was that the animation seems to be years and years behind the rest of the majority of the animated features that are populating the cineplexes these days. The movie is presented in the style of classic Disney animation, and it’s a classic Disney story, which lends to the proceedings something of a retro feel when compared to the advanced animation in things like
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs or
9, to name just a couple. But it’s only a few minutes into the movie when it becomes clear that rather old-fashioned animation is not going to get in the way of a highly entertaining and charming movie experience. There are towering classics in the Disney catalog for any new film to compete with, but
The Princess and the Frog is definitely one of the best ones to come along in quite a few years.
And the story, of course, you already know. It’s a retelling of the classic children’s story “The Frog Prince,” except this time it takes place in the American south at the height of the Jazz-Age, when the lower Mississippi was full of enormous, rich white men and poor, healthy black people laboring in a still-racist society and harboring small, impossible dreams. We meet a young black girl named Tiana who dreams of opening a restaurant with her father, and a rich, bratty white girl named Charlotte who’s father hands her everything on a silver platter and who dreams of one day marrying a prince and becoming a princess. Reminds me of some girls I knew in high school.
Before long, Tiana finds herself transformed into a frog at the worst possible time, when she’s about to sign for the purchase of a building in which she’ll open her own restaurant and fulfill hers and her father’s dreams. You can imagine her frustration, and to make matters worse, she’s stuck with a similarly transformed Prince Naveen, and they have to work together to break the spell in time to fulfill their respective dreams.
The colorful cast of characters is one of the staples of most Disney movies, but also one of the most difficult things to get just right. When the comic relief is nothing more than a gimmick thrown in to get a few laughs, it’s nearly impossible to overlook, but they hit the nail on the head here. My personal favorites were
Michael Leon-Wooley as Louis, a trumpet-playing alligator, and
Jim Cummings as a fast-talking firefly. And the atmosphere of the lower half of the United States is created so thoroughly and tangibly that I felt like I had lived there. I could almost smell the Cajun food cooking and hear the fireflies in the air.
[caption id="attachment_66868" align="alignright" width="398" caption="Tiana and Prince Naveen discover one of the harsh realities of amphibious life."]
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And on a more serious note, the movie walks a wispy tightrope in accurately portraying a racist society, but they make no efforts to pretty anything up, which might be why they succeed so brilliantly. There’s no reason to deal with racism here. That’s just the way society was at that time and that’s all there is to it. It’s all just a backdrop here anyway.
At some point not long into the movie, the charming story and hilarious characters make the simpler, old-fashioned animation starts to bring back fond memories of countless Disney classics. This will happen right about the time when you remember that movies should be appreciated on their own rather than immediately compared to the technical aspects of their counterparts. 2009 has seen an amazing amount of contribution to the world of animation, but
The Princess and the Frog has come along, and perhaps just in time, to remind us that huge advances in animation technology are not necessarily the way of the future, and that even in the ultra-modern world of computerized animation perfection, there is still plenty of room for the same style of movie that we knew and loved when we were kids.
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