There isn’t a song, gag, art design, character, moral or plot point in “The Princess and the Frog” that doesn’t seem patently borrowed, adapted and simplified from every other Disney movie ever.
But you know what? I don’t care.
“The Princess and the Frog” is highly watchable, charming, artistic, amusing and funny in the spirit of any of the Disney classics I grew up with as a kid. The film is done in a stunning, colorful 2-D. It has a textbook, but workable story structure. It forces its audience to think, engage with the characters, feel emotions and do it all simply. It does everything an animated movie was supposed to do before chaotic digitally animated action sequences took over or before Pixar made their kids movies a little too smart and started scaring lackadaisical parents and their kids back to the former.
It tells the story of Tiana (Anika Noni Rose), a black girl from New Orleans working two waitress jobs so she can fulfill her dream of owning and operating a restaurant of her own. Her life changes when the handsome but penniless Prince Naveen (Bruno Campos) comes to New Orleans and is tricked and transformed into a frog by an evil Voodoo doctor who wants to control the city. Tiana kisses Naveen the frog in hopes that he’ll change back and help her open her restaurant but is then changed into a frog too. On the run and on the quest to change back, they meet talking, jazz performing animals, fall in love, and learn lessons about the bigger picture of life, all that good stuff.
Some will call it magic, and it is. Hearing Randy Newman’s lively bayou-blend score in accompaniment with watching the vivid animation by people who still know how to animate the old fashioned way is as entertaining and enthralling as “The Lion King.” Or “Aladdin.” Or “The Little Mermaid.” Or “Pocahontas.” Or “Beauty and the Beast (well that’s pushing it a little).”
Because at this point, isn’t it packaged magic? Doesn’t Disney’s spell come from a recipe? Isn’t it just a little stale? Not a moment of “The Princess and the Frog” is as lovely as “Beauty and the Beast.” Not a character is as lively as Robin Williams’s Genie. Not a moral is as pure as perhaps the best of the Disney films, “Pinocchio.”
But I can envision parents starting their kids off on watching films with this new one. It’s modern, it’s solid, and it’s not locked away in the Disney vault. I’d like to imagine new generations of kids growing up to be like Tiana and not like the Kung Fu Panda.
3 stars