The Princess and the Frog | Animation | rated G | starring vo Anika Noni Rose, Bruno Campos | 1:37 mins
When working class girl Triana (Anika Noni Rose, Dreamgirls) goes to a costume ball she is confused for a princess by a talking frog (Bruno Campos), who like the classic children’s fable The Frog Prince, was once a prince. Hubris led him to be cut off by the family and now down on his luck he wanders into the shop of a tarot card reader (known as the Shadow Man) who puts a voodoo curse on him. But after the fabled kiss with the frog a very unexpected thing happens, sending Triana and the frog on a journey through the swamps of New Orleans with the help of alligators and lightening bugs to get their human bodies back.
As someone who put The Emperor’s New Groove and Lilo and Stitch on his list of favorite films for their year, and even liked the last half of Meet the Robinsons, I’ve always been a fan of any Disney attempt to break from their own formula and do something different. The Princess and the Frog is a high concept twist on the classic fairy tale, re-fashioned to be set in the colorful culture of New Orleans with all of it’s Jazz, food, swamps and voodoo lore. But with all that it’s one of the flattest animated movies the studio has ever made. Both dramatically superficial and low in a spirited personality. And it isn’t because the film is traditional hand-drawn animation. The animation is quite stunning. The most beautiful part of the film.
New Orleans, which was once regarded as an armpit by Hollywood, once called putrid, brackish and foul by The Simpsons, was suddenly discovered to have a unique and respectable culture in the political aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. And while it is a somewhat unbelievable charge for a Disney movie, the New Orleans re-awakening smacks of opportunism and band-wagon jumping. But it isn’t through lack of trying. Like David Simon’s Treme, Frog immerses itself deep in New Orleans culture, it’s human characters realistically realized, it’s themes adult and it’s musical tastes limited specifically to those who will like Zydeco and jazz. I found all of the songs bland and unmemorable.
And Frog starts out pretty good. The film does a solid job setting up Triana’s childhood, a friendship with her insufferable friend and her dreamer of a father. It beautifully creates an image of New Orleans residents brought together on a front porch for good home cooking. Frog is very much centered around what occurs when Triana kisses the frog (which I won’t reveal) and from that point on the movie goes on autopilot. Lazily slipping back into the comfort zone of the Disney formula, the movie gives us wacky sidekicks in an alligator and a lightening bug and the Disney villain in the voodoo-waving magician with CGI tarot cards who seems to have made a deal with the devil, but seems harmless even as Disney villains go. He’s more of a salesman. None of these characters are well realized. Heck, the prince himself is not a very fleshed out character before he becomes a mucus-covered amphibian.
I admire the fact that this is one Disney movie that doesn’t seek to appeal to every demographic in the family, it’s aimed at a very specific audience rarely catered to in pop culture. If you love Jazz, Zydeco and New Orleans (even if the movie only hits the obvious sign posts of the city), The Princess and the Frog might hit the spot. I watched with increased boredom as the movie went from rich and promising to flat, uninspired and lifeless.