Blast From The Past Reviews: The Princess & The Frog

It’s been less than a week since I returned from DisneyWorld. It was a great vacation, and easily the best of the three times in my life I have visited the theme park. Every trip has its ups and downs, but this was overall a fantastic voyage away from home for a week, and I’d definitely recommend visiting The Happiest Place On Earth if you never have before. We did the four separate parks across four days, and that’s… not bad. But it did leave us rushing from ride to ride without taking much time to enjoy our surroundings. Most notably, there were baby otters at Animal Kingdom I did not get to see. NOT THAT I’M BITTER.

Anyway, what I kept getting reminded of while I was at the parks was how I had never gotten around to seeing one of Disney Studios’ last great non-CGI animated works, The Princess & The Frog. Between the Tiana’s Bayou Adventure ride and meeting Tiana herself at one of our dinners (our niece got the full princess dinner experience), it occurred to me that when I returned home, I was going to have to rectify that hole in my watch history.

The Princess & The Frog is an updated take on a fairly classic tale, and that original story is read aloud at the start of the movie. It is, of course, about a handsome prince who is turned into a frog and requires a princess’ kiss to return to his human form. The Disney iteration here focuses on a young woman named Tiana who is working multiple jobs so she can afford an old building to renovate into the restaurant she and her daddy always dreamed of starting.

Elsewhere, the somewhat hedonistic (think: hedonistic for a Disney movie. He likes to dance with women, play music, and has no desire to settle down) Prince Naveen of Maldonia is visiting New Orleans with his personal valet in tow. When the valet comes across the Shadowman, a voodoo doctor, the two conspire to take Naveen’s position and riches as they transform him into a frog.

Naveen knows the story of the Frog Prince, too, so when he comes across Tiana at a costume party and mistakes her for a princess, he convinces her to kiss him. However, instead of curing Naveen, it turns Tiana into a frog!

From there, the duo try to find a way to get their human forms back.

TWO UPS AND TWO DOWNS

+ Keith David as the Shadowman adds real gravitas to the movie’s voice acting lineup. To be fair, the voice acting across the whole picture is really solid (Oprah herself even has a role as Tiana’s mother), but Keith David is particularly good. Getting to play the maniacal Disney antagonist really helps him out, as he gets to go all-in, and he’s clearly having all of the fun in the world in his role.

Also, between The Princess & The Frog and Hazbin Hotel, I apparently just learned in the last year that David can sing! So good on him. A really talented actor with a bigger skill set than I ever knew he had. Makes me want to watch They Live again. But then, when don’t I want that?

+ The story is very sweet, and the New Orleans backdrop adds a bit more flavor to the proceedings than a lot of Disney stories have ever had. Most such cartoons are set in fairly nebulous settings that don’t really contribute anything to the story. The closest to a relevant setting I can think of is Beauty & The Beast, which occurs in Somewhere, France.

Here, though, New Orleans is almost a-whole-nother character in the movie. The food and music and culture and surrounding bayou of the city are all alive and feel important to the characters and plot. It’s not just some mythical placeholder of a locale; it’s the historic city of New Orleans, and the animators and writers took care to treat it with respect.

– I don’t really buy the love story between Naveen and Tiana. It seems to come out of nowhere and feels forced. They start their dynamic off as foes, but then they… dance one time? And that’s it; they start having feelings for one another. It happens because the film needs it to happen, and that’s all.

This is kind of the Disney M.O., though, isn’t it? Think back to Cinderella or Snow White or Sleeping Beauty or The Little Mermaid. It’s not like those love connections had any real meat on the bone. Again, there was love in that the screenwriters told us they were in love, but that’s all we got; we sure didn’t see it on the screen. To The Princess & The Frog’s credit, Tiana and Naveen have a better romance than those movies do. But it’s still highly rushed.

I guess the target audience of five year old girls aren’t really here for a two hour courting period before the characters have to fight evil shadows, though. So what can you expect?

– The music isn’t highly memorable. The movie doesn’t have a real hit tune on which to hang its hat. The jazz-inspired songs are fun enough while you listen to them as the film plays on, but nothing really stuck with me and kept me humming it in its wake. So many Disney hit movies have at least one song that sticks around in the cultural zeitgeist, but there isn’t one here, which is a real shame.

Honestly, I’ve seen other reviews on Letterboxd saying they LOVED the songs, so take my personal Down with a grain of salt. The music didn’t resonate with me, but it’s subjective, and others definitely dug it.

7.0

The final score: review Good

The 411

So was The Princess & The Frog worth the hype I built it up as in my head? It’s certainly a good flick. I don’t find that it measures favorably against some of the studio’s real heavyweight titles, but it’s depth and cultural significance places it ahead of some of the more well-known movies in Disney’s library. I’d say it’s a middle-of-the-road animated feature for the company, but given their track record, that’s still pretty damn good.