After a five-year hiatus, The Princess and the Frog marks Disney’s return to traditional animation and its first real “princess” story since Beauty and the Beast 18 years ago. For the former, it’s great that the wait is over; for the latter, maybe it would have been better to wait a little longer.
Unlike Disney’s other princess movies, the backdrop of 1920s New Orleans sets The Princess and the Frog in a concrete place and time—and this is both a blessing and a curse. The blessing is that it creates a stronger connection to Tiana (Anika Noni Rose) and those arround her. The curse, I’ll get to in a bit.
The princess of this story, young Tiana grows up to share her father’s dream of one day running a fine restaurant. And while Charlotte (Jennifer Cody), her rich playmate, is coddled and grows lazy, Tiana absorbs from her parents an indomitable work ethic that survives the death of her father, his dream unrealized.
Tiana is working double shifts as a waitress to slowly save up to purchase a building for her restaurant, when luck finally shines upon her. Prince Naveen of Maldonia (Bruce Campos) is coming to town, and Charlotte—looking to snag herself a prince for a groom—talks her pushover of a father, “Big Daddy” La Bouff (voiced by John Goodman, the most recognizable voice in the cast), to host a dinner. And since Big Daddy is one of the richest men in New Orleans, the dinner is going to be huge—and Tiana is hired to cater a mountain of her famous beignets.
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Prince Naveen, it turns out, is the frog in this story. At an encounter with Dr. Facilier, a felonious practioner of Voodoo dark arts, Naveen is transformed into a frog while a doppleganger takes his place so as to take Charlotte’s hand… and daddy’s fortune.
When Naveen (who though a frog can still talk human) runs into Tiana at the dinner party, he convinces her that her kiss will restore him to his original princely form. Unfortunately, she doesn’t meet all of the requirements—so one reticent kiss later, they’re both frogs. Slapstick events ensue, resulting in Naveen and Tiana finding themselves deep in the Louisiana bayou with no easy way home, no idea of how to stop the mistaken marriage of Charlotte and the fake prince, or—most importantly—how to regain their human form.
This is where, for me, the narrative ran off the rails. To put it bluntly, the next 30 minutes were boring. Everything before had been, if not great, at least entertaining—so it is almost as if the middle of the movie were handed off to someone less capable. It transforms into a misfit road comedy where the jokes fall flat and the events aren’t all that interesting. Two characters important to the resolution of the movie (Louis, a crocodile voiced by Michael-Leon Wooley, and Ray, a hillbilly firefly from Jim Cummings) are introduced, and they eventually prove fun—though not so in this section of the movie.
By the time everybody gets back to New Orleans and things are wrapping up, almost all momentum has been lost. The final act is highly kinetic, well-scripted, goes in some unexpected direction, and best of all, the animators are turned loose on some fantastic supernatural happenings. If the entire movie has been this well done, The Princess and the Frog would head straight into the pantheon of Disney Animation classics.
The biggest drawback is the music. Not only is this a princess movie, but it’s a musical, with a lot of singing. There’s nothing wrong with any individual song in the movie, but rather, it is a problem of accumulation. I don’t know how many total songs were in the movie, but each one is obviously a cookie-cutter Randy Newman production. Don’t get me wrong. Randy Newman is an incredibly talented man, from one of the most talented families in Hollywood history. Unfortunately, all of his songs sound the same, turning songs that individually may have been fine, into an exercise in wearying repetition. By the end of the movie, it felt like they might as well have just looped, “You’ve Got a Friend in Me” throughout and saved some money. There are no memorable standouts or showstoppers, no “Be Our Guest,” “Under the Sea,” “Colors of the Wind,” or even a “Circle of Life” that people could hum as they leave the theater. With none of the songs individually memorable, several days after having seen it I find myself forgetting that it was a musical.
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Looping back to the comment earlier about it also being a curse that the movie has a concrete place and time: In so setting the movie, it creates for the aware audience member benchmarks of reality, extraneous baggage, and standards of behavior. How can one comment on the gender dynamics of The Little Mermaid when it doesn’t exist within a real society?
That’s not true when the movie is set in 1920s New Orleans. A lot will be asked about how race is handled in this movie. In a way that isn’t really fair, but then Disney can’t complain too much when it touted the fact that Tiana (then known as Maddy) is black. She’s Disney’s first black princess. What does that mean for the empire? I don’t know, I don’t particularly care.
The movie does, though, present race within a specific historical context—raising all sorts of possibilites for missteps and slights. And justly or not, Disney has a smudged record here, and for some it will be an uphill battle.
For the most part, the movie simply ignores race. It tries to be ahistorical within a specific historical context. Tiana is black, Charlotte is white, Naveen is…indeterminate, although the name originates from India (and though his accent struck me as vaguely Indian, Bruce Campos is from Brazil). This indeterminacy sidesteps the question of miscegenation in the 1920s South. That’ll be a relief to many who feel it just shouldn’t be an issue in a children’s movie and a form of hiding their head in the sand to those who will view even ignoring the issue as a political statement.
Disney’s attempts to appease all sides also creates new issues. It is odd that Charlotte, the daughter of a rich white man, and Tiana, the daughter of a seamstress who makes dresses for Charlotte and her dolls, grew up to remain close friends. This was probably a story element that made more sense when Tiana was still Maddy and she and her mother were still maids in the rich white man’s household.
©Disney Enterprises, Inc.
In short, those who don’t want race to be an issue in this movie will see no issue with race. Those who do want to see how issues of race are handled will find issues in this movie. Time will show that neither of these groups will ever convince the other.
The Princess and the Frog is, somewhat sadly, a middle-of-the-road feature from Disney Animation compared to what they’ve been doing for the last 15 years or so. Much better than Home on the Range but maybe not so good as Meet the Robinsons. Proving once again the much larger point in the hand-drawn vs. CGI debate: story trumps format.
For parents with their normal concerns about content that may bother their children, scroll down past the film information for some spoilers. Those who do not wish to be spoiled, should not.
The Princess and the Frog is a Walt Disney Pictures release.
- Wide release on Friday, December 11.
- Directed by Ron Clements and John Musker
- Screenplay by Ron Clements and Rob Edwards
- Starring Anika Noni Rose, Bruno Campos, Keith David, Michael-Leon Wooley, Jennifer Cody, Jim Cummings
- Rated G.
- Running time 97 minutes
- Alex’s Rating: 6 out of 10
SPOILERS – Parental Warning: The Princess and the Frog is rated G and for the most part I’d have no quibbles with it. There are two things that parents of young children may want to be aware of however. First, there are two scenes where Dr. Facilier, the Voodoo doctor, communicates with his friends “on the other side.” The first time there is somewhat scary music and demonic totems on screen that may be a bit intense. At the movie they come to punish Dr. Facilier for a failure and essentially consume him alive (not in a gory way) but this scene is also intense. The second thing to be warned of is that a sympathetic character dies in the course of the movie. While not quite of the emotional impact found in the deaths of Bambi’s mom or Mufasa in The Lion King, it is a comedic and very likable character. It also is not gory, but his death does happen on screen.
