The Princess and the Frog

Watching The Princess and the Frog, Disney's first traditionally 2D animated film in five years, only reinforced my admiration for Pixar and its output. This film is certainly acceptable entertainment for small children, but is extremely lightweight and tedious for adults. Seeing it on the heels of a great animated film like Toy Story 3 only makes it seem less impressive.

The story is a familiar one--a young girl from humble origins aspires for something better and ends up a princess. I'm not sure why Disney had such an obsession with princesses over the years--feminist scholars smarter than I am have written extensively about this. Do little girls of today still want to be princesses, especially when the only reasonable means to accomplish it is by marrying a real prince?

The princess in this film is Tiana, who grows up poor in New Orleans. Her mother is a seamstress for a rich white family, and she befriends their daughter, Charlotte, who is really prince-obsessed. When they grow up Charlotte is angling after Prince Naveen, who is visiting from a foreign country at Mardi Gras. Tiana is a waitress, and scrimps and saves in the hopes of owning her own restaurant.

Naveen, a louche fellow who has been cut off by his family, meets Doctor Facilier, a voodoo master who offers to read his fortune. By magical means Naveen is turned into a frog, with the only hope of transformation to kiss a princess. He sees Tiana at a masked ball, and seeing her wear a tiara, assumes she's a princess. He convinces her to kiss him, but because she's not a princess, she turns into a frog, too. Chased by Facilier and his shadowy minions, they escape into the swamp and befriend a jazz-obsessed alligator and a Cajun firefly, who try to help them find a voodoo priestess to change them back into human form.

The film itself is nothing special. The slapstick is for small children, and the message--be true to yourself, or something like that, is banal and simplistic. I frequently found my mind wandering while watching. The songs by Randy Newman are forgettable. The animation is nice, but in this day and age it's hard to wow sophisticated viewers. I was really only dazzled by the scenes that involve Facilier summoning the demons from beyond, in a tune called "Friends on the Other Side."

Instead, I found myself wondering about extraneous things, such as the what's the deal with all the princesses in Disney? Or the issues raised by Tiana's being African American, a first for a lead character in Disney. It's nice to see, but I'm not quite sure that making an African American story wrapped up with voodoo is very sensitive, or making the main character black but then turning her into a frog for most of the story. I was also interested in Naveen's color--he's kind of toffee. I see on Wikipedia that initially he was white, but black groups objected. I guess his medium shade was a compromise.

Bucking the trend with modern animation, the cast is mostly unknowns. John Goodman, Oprah Winfrey, and Terrence Howard voice small roles, but Tiana is the relatively unknown Anika Noni Rose.