Walt Disney, part LXVIII: When we're human

THE PRINCESS AND THE FROG

2009

Directed by Ron Clements and John Musker

Written by Rob Edwards, Greg Erb, Jason Oremland, Ron Clements, and John Musker

Spoilers: severe

It took a couple of years for it to become obvious what John Lasseter's priorities for Walt Disney Animation Studios entering the second decade of the 21st century were going to be, but when they did, they were very obvious; and one of them was, clearly, to wash off the first decade of the 21st century, and trace a path back to the last decade of the 20th, the era of Disney animation's highest ascent.  Nothing says it better than the studio's year-on-year movies for 2009 and 2010: what would not have been noteworthy in the early 1990s becomes noteworthy here, when we got two movies, back-to-back, intended to resurrect the Disney princess musical genre such as had lain dormant since Mulan in 1998 (or Pocahontas in 1995, if we're more literal about "princesshood" than Disney; and, really, since Aladdin in 1992, for like Aladdin, and like Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, these new ones would be based on classic fairy tales).

There would soon be something with Rapunzel, bringing back the Disney princess musical in a new old-fashioned way, the first to be made with CGI, which had long since become the default for American theatrical animation.  But first would come The Princess and the Frog, based loosely on "The Frog Prince" folktale—and more proximately on E.D. Baker's book "The Frog Princess" (though not any less loosely)—and The Princess and the Frog aimed itself squarely at just old-fashioned, at least so long as you aren't one of those fragile people who get neurotic whenever anyone correctly describes the 1990s, ten years gone even then, as "long ago."  And so, not only did it seek to revive Disney's traditional narrative strengths and faded fortunes, but its artistic soul; Lasseter, though one of the founding talents of CGI, had determined in his nostalgia to revive 2-D, hand-drawn animation at WDAS.  He was aware of the air of resentment that had hovered around Disney's cartoons since hand-drawn animation died there in 2004, with the good (but ignominious) Home On the Range; he found a groundswell of appreciation for Disney returning to its roots.  To secure the best possible chances, he repatriated Disney's greatest-ever directorial talents, Ron Clements and John Musker, to the studio, and while they had their choice of projects, surely they were encouraged to choose the door marked "the traditionally-animated one," and they got something close to the whole gang back together: Andreas Deja, Mark Henn, Eric Goldberg, Randy Haycock, Anthony DeRosa, Ruben Aquino, and more—including their trusty layout supervisor, Rasoul Azadani, one last time—and it was, I believe, the first time they ever worked with Bruce Smith.

This does give Clements and Musker the unfortunate distinction of being the men who killed American traditional feature animation twice; but, unlike the first time (the multiple-record-setting commercial catastrophe of Treasure Planet), it wasn't through hubris, but merely by making a sweet and lovely cartoon—even a well-received one!—that underperformed anyway.  Even so, it's one that should have always sounded like a bad or at least suboptimal idea, given the various important missions it was intended to fulfill.  As to its lack of success, it's clear that Disney thought it underperformed, even if $271 million on $105 million—plus fully $117 million in home video sales*—doesn't sound so bad to me.  Yet Tangled more than doubled its gross, and it's difficult to argue "if you (re)build it, they will come" on behalf of traditional animation, when twice as many people preferred the other thing.**  Myself, I've come to terms with the fact that traditional animation is the beloved of, mostly, loudmouthed nerds, not mass audiences, not parents and not kids, and not when it isn't attached to the uniquely IP-driven phenomenon of a theatrically-released Simpsons feature such as preceded Princess and the Frog by two years.  Looking ahead, 2011's traditionally-animated Winnie the Pooh couldn't make a profit on $30 million; in that light, Princess and the Frog looks like it did beat the world.

As for whether it was ideally-designed to achieve its risky aims, let's be clear about what those aims were, and the first was what we already said—to renew the Disney princess musical as a viable genre and 2-D as a viable medium.  The second, rather famously, was to introduce to the Disney Princess brand a marquee representative of a demographic that had gone neglected for decades by this point: a left-handed princess.  Then when they cast southpaw Anika Nani Rose for the role, they decided they might as well make her black, too—you know, I might have reversed my notes here—but either way, for the latter thing, this was a matter of basic decency: even accepting that a penchant for ethnically-plausible medieval-ish neverwhens that serve as fanciful children's dioramas—mainly of Europe, so your Snow Whites, but also your Aladdins and Mulans—isn't per se "bad," and even knowing the list was not ever going to be endless, I think it should still shock you just how quickly you'll be done when you tally up Disney's black characters as they stood 48 films in, nine years into the 21st century.  (If you muttered, "maybe there's a worse reason audiences preferred the one with four hundred cubic feet of blonde hair," I wouldn't contradict you.)  But for reasons that do make sense—basically, "this is for Americans, but we have to take into account the destruction of cultural continuity inflicted upon the black diaspora by the slave trade"—the black Disney Princess was decided to be a Black American, and I've frequently wondered if "American" wasn't the best path.  It's always struck me, anyway, that, with the exception of Jasmine, and until Moana a few years later, Disney's "ethnic" princesses were not afforded quite the same neverwhens, tied instead to concrete polities with real political conflicts (I will include Mulan here: Mulan's vastly more "about China" than Snow White is "about Germany").  So, just like Pocahontas before her, an American princess meant placing our heroine inside of actual time, and against a backdrop of actual history that remains fraught, apt to trigger a hypervigilance about its cartoon setting that placing it in, say, Great Zimbabwe might not.  It enforces, as a matter of absolute necessity, a requirement that its story not begin so much as one nanosecond earlier than June 19th, 1865—which poses its own problems, so let's move it down the line to the 1920s, which is lots better—so what we have is the most chronologically recent Disney princess musical by what feels like centuries, even if The Little Mermaid and Cinderella probably only predate it by decades.

I've come around on this: Princess and the Frog's Americanness is part of its unique personality, and while it'll come up a few times in this review, I'm mainly teasing it, even if the unavoidability of the film becoming a discourse object is a shame.  But we do also have the specific scenario it adopted, and even armed with results I like, and with an awareness that Pixar had been poking at a "Frog Princess" adaptation long before their absorption by Disney, I do not know how anyone convinced themselves that either this film's "Disney princess musical revival" objective or its "first black princess" objective was going to be best-served by turning that princess musical, black or otherwise, into a talking animal cartoon, meaning that the human animation which was Disney animation's hallmark isn't going to be in this movie that much (nor is black skin, and it also means my favorite work of animation qua animation here winds up being a white girl), and that we're going to have to attach pretty much all of our romantic swoons (since at least Disney princess musicals could still be romances here in 2009) to amphibians covered in slime.  Or, they'll have us know, mucus.  Which is totally not a subset of "slime."  And because this prologue has gotten long, let's get to the substantive review: the worst thing about the movie by many miles isn't anything political, it's the brutishly mechanical callback to the initial (and reasonably-amusing) mucus joke that its vain frog prince made, now repurposed as a hypothetically-badass retort for our heroine to spit at our villain in the climax, a line that Musker concedes everyone else hated, to which Clements, in their commentary, demurs in a manner that makes it clear that he just does not want to relitigate his creative partner's madman insistence on this terrible line for the hundredth time.

So: in 1914, we find young Tiana (Elizabeth Dampier now; soon Rose) with her friend and playmate Lottie (Breanna Brooks now; Jennifer Cody later).  Lottie's the daughter of a wealthy white man, Eli "Big Daddy" La Bouff (John Goodman) who's the patron of Tiana's seamstress mother Eudora (Oprah Winfrey!).  Tiana and Lottie are presently engaged in an argument over the propriety of making out with a frog, if that frog were, in fact, a prince.  Tiana expresses disgust, not that she'll be waiting for the day her prince will come, amphibian or not.  We discover Tiana's yearned-for dream when we follow her back to her house in what, with a slow dissolve that's elegant but speaks volumes, must be a different side of New Orleans.  (This is somewhat undermined immediately thereafter, by a background for Tiana's bedroom that renders her modest stilt home patently bigger on the inside.)

As far as "image-driven sociology" goes, however, this preceding frame is pretty amazing.

Tiana's dream, anyway, is the same as her father's (Terence Howard's), which is to own a restaurant where they can cook.  They let us know she's very good at it (and she does seem to be good at baking, though it bears mentioning that her first, best, and only instinct with actual food is to endorse the McIlhenny Company's Tabasco product with all the natural grace of Laura Linney in The Truman Show).  Yet six or so years later, Tiana is still there, flopping with exhaustion for the thirty seconds she has for rest between her pair of waitress jobs, and her dream is hers alone now.  Yet it's as doggedly pursued as ever, with cans upon cans of coins that amount to something like real money back now.  She still needs more, but she gets that from Lottie for catering a big masquerade party in honor of a visiting dignitary—because Lottie ain't forgotten her dream is to bag that prince, which I guess is harder than ever now, what with the First World War—and that prince is one Naveen (Bruno Campos), cad and ne'er-do-well, who, himself, has announced to his valet Lawrence (Peter Bartlett) his intention to marry the first rich chick he can find, because his parents have cut him off for taking such full advantage of these roaring 20s.  However, while Tiana surveys the old mill that she hopes to turn into her restaurant, Naveen and Lawrence are getting trapped in the Vodoun web of the Shadow Man, Dr. Facilier (Keith David), and this is going to have serious consequences for Tiana at the party—and she was already having a bad time thanks to learning she was "outbid" for the property (given its sellers' reference to her "background," I daresay it's not clear she was "outbid" at all)—for she is placed in just such a position that she's wearing a princess gown at the exact time that a curious little frog jumps up on the La Bouff balcony, to whom Tiana, with angry irony, offers a kiss.  Much to her surprise, he verbally accepts.

I am bothered, quite a bit, by Naveen here—transformed by Dr. Facilier, of course, to be easier to handle for Facilier's grandiose and overcomplicated scheme to snare Lottie by way of Lawrence (himself transformed into Naveen via blood magic) and then seize the La Bouff fortune (though I do kind of love what a little tactical twist this is, so that it's slightly disorienting every time I've ever watched the movie that Naveen's already a frog)—for he is required to believe Tiana actually is a princess, and hence be unbelievably Goddamned stupid, for the plot to work.  I suppose there's not really any easy way around it, but because Tiana's not royalty, when she kisses the talking frog, the curse merely expands, transforming her into a frog, too.  They blunder their way into the bayou, where they can talk to animals, and though the first dozen only want to eat them, they make allies out of the jazzman gator Louis (Michael-Leon Wooley) and the Cajun lightning bug Ray (Jim Cummings), who offer their help to get to the good witch doctor Mama Odie (Jenifer Lewis).  In the meantime, Tiana and Naveen need to learn how to work together, and when they manage to do that, maybe they'll find that despite each one's basic contempt for the other, they complement one another in ways that they didn't know they needed; but Facilier needs that amphibian blood bag, and he shall find them.

Besides Naveen's "you were wearing a tiara!" bullshit, that's solid plotting, with Disney updating the romantic storytelling of a fairy tale all the way to the unfathomable modernity of the romantic storytelling of It Happened One Night (and I kid both ways: The Little Mermaid and Aladdin—and Hercules in its noirish way—had pretty much already stepped fully into modern times, despite their mythic-feeling romances; and this one's not so old-fashioned as a 1934 movie, either, while the shaking off of avowed mythicism has some human rewards here, too).  Whatever else, the constant criticism of Disney princes had percolated upwards, and while this criticism has always been unfair, it is best to make sure your deuteragonist has a personality, and I'm gratified that despite embodying almost the exact same romantic fantasy as Tangled's male lead (the bad boy has his edges sanded off by the integrity of the hot babe), Naveen comes off so distinctively from his immediate successor, basically pinned down as a Maurice Chevalier or Claude Dauphin figure, by which I obviously mean "Campos is playing him like an unrapey Pepe Le Pew.***"

He's excellent, then, and underrated (in his ever-underrated category), this soft-handed and self-involved slut of a prince possessed of aristocratic charm that's deeply entwined with the kind of aristocratic arrogance that, indeed, can come off as charming, even when it's vaguely revolting, because it seems so secure in its own prerogatives, and Tiana's job (so far as this romantic comedy is concerned) is to disentangle the one from another, without necessarily meaning to, so that he could ever be worthy of her.  His job, in this romantic comedy, is to be an amusing idiot with hidden soulfulness, and Naveen is aces at it.  (There is the further matter of "what the hell is Prince Naveen, anyway?", and what the design decisions and fake country he's from say is that everyone was aware of the question, "so which subset of humanity could marry Tiana or Lottie in 1920s Louisiana?", but also hoped you wouldn't dwell on it.)  If anything, Naveen is almost "too good"; he's inordinately more fun than Tiana, by design (freewheeling joie de vivre is what she needs to learn from him), and he changes more, and the dream that lifts her out of the drudge she acts like is nicely specific in theory but in practice the story has little use for "gourmet aspirations," so when it tries it does things like position the concept of Naveen learning to mince vegetables as a major character shift.

There are some minor plot holes, I suppose, some even more important than, "hey, you weren't wearing clothes."  (For instance, the pre-climax downbeat depends on Tiana forgetting what the magic solution to their magic problem was.)

The better news is that none of that matters much: Rose and Campos have a swell back-and-forth and the fact that this fated Disney couple spends almost the entire film together does mean that we have plenty of opportunity to believe that they're growing towards one another, as much through the sheer accumulation of the individually-insignificant gestures as all the bigger ones.  They are also the first Disney couple to unambiguously French kiss, if that is what you'd like to call the horrifying tangle of tongues they wind up with, when their appetites (for bugs) and unrefined froggy instincts fully kick in, which is pretty wonderful as a "how can we express the romantic subtext here in the unsexiest manner possible?" exercise.  (There is also a beat where the blind Mama Odie kisses her pet snake's tongue, which feels like some animator, who might or might not be Deja, her supervisor, got away with something gnarly.)  Princess and the Frog is pretty funny all 'round, in fact, which might be the thing I've shifted on the most over the years, given my recollection of it as one of the Disney movies most direly impacted by its comic relief, unusually so for any Clements and Musker film.

Lo, that comic relief is decent: I confess I find the adventure at its most compelling for the five minutes of hushed darkness that starts Tiana and Naveen's journey off, when the bayou is still nothing besides total terror from their new perspective (as far as continuities with its directors' career-long obsessions go, I only just now realized that our heroes' reduction to diminutive frogs means that normal-sized Facilier is this Clements and Musker film's Clements and Musker giant).  But the sidekicks we get are good even if, perhaps, they benefit from remembering they suck; nevertheless, the comedy is frequently laugh-out-loud humorous.  (There's what basically amounts to a Tex Avery cartoon concerning hick frog hunters unintentionally smashing one another's heads in over Tiana and Naveen that is wonderfully energetic, and gets to be Tiana's major character pivot, in a way that Naveen's "slice faster, you useless prick" doesn't quite accomplish; I also like the funny precision of the animation whilst Tiana is being put-upon at her shitty job.)

Louis's prissy gator, anyway, who sees in Tiana and Naveen a means to join the human world, is a winning enough concept (that I'd have liked better before it was streamlined, when he was a previous Facilier victim, rather than a trumpet-playing actual alligator, which arguably has more All Dogs Go To Heaven influence than is entirely healthy; still, Goldberg's supervision of him is bouncy, squishy fun).  Ray comes with the caveat of Cummings doing off-putting dialect work in service to occasionally-annoying dialogue, but winds up actively great thanks to a few things, the big one being a downright heartmelting delusion, running at a parallel (but a meaningful parallel) to every other story thread, with his insistence that his favorite star in the sky is a firefly named "Evangeline" and that they are, however improbably, in love—it is surely the most myth-like element here—while the other important thing is that Ray, the sweetest character in this Disney movie, also gets crushed to death beneath the villain's heel (but, only for a symbol of a love that's experienced a difficult birth to mystically burst forth into the night sky, the film's single most mercilessly effective "you cry now" gambit).  Ray, furthermore, is one more vector for some of this movie's gorgeous effects animation.  (The worst thing about Ray turns out to be his firefly relatives: he's designed with little orangey-red hairs that read as insectoid bristles, which is good; his relatives have, like, actual heads of hair, which is terrible.)  But this gets us to how the film looks, and sounds, since if we kept going down the dramatis personae we'd get to Facilier and Lottie.

Well, for no particular reason I'm privy to, composer Alan Menken—such a major part of the Clements and Musker legend—went to Tangled instead; not that this would've guaranteed anything better, but the latterday consensus is that Randy Newman's music for The Princess and the Frog is middling, and I'm not here to challenge that consensus.  That does not mean bad, and everything here musically is fit to purpose, on top of managing to build a coherent musical identity for this setting.  Neither of those accomplishments are nothing; I would probably be willing to trade them for one great song.  The best winds up being Tiana's optimistically-melancholy "I want" song about owning a restaurant, "Almost There," and even then, neither it nor anything else takes full advantage of the bigness of Rose's voice, except the finale of "Dig a Little Deeper", this being the song about figuring out what you really want, and Tiana remaining impervious to the idea that the status and money of a successful restauranteur still won't make her a whole person.  (Whatever else, Clements and Musker have not forgotten how to put together an integrated musical.)  There are numerous other songs—seven more, and maybe this is why this 97 minute movie has no more story than its shorter antecedents—and all but one go largely unremembered.  (I remembered "When We're Human" mostly because it made a nice triple-entendre review title; though its cool montage, and the exquisite froggy aquaballet in another one, are less remembered than they ought to be.)  But I do realize that its villain song has a huge constituency, if pretty undeservedly.

What's noticeable about the songs I've described is that it's the animation that comes to mind first, and that's certainly what happens with "Friends On the Other Side," which benefits further from things entirely to the side of the song or the sequence, for one David's silkily sinister performance of the good doctor, and for two Smith's outstanding supervision of Facilier as something like a counterpoint to Deja's Jafar—both magicians set on subterfuge, both sharing similar design parameters (in Facilier's case based on Baron Samedi, but both skinny, lanky, and with tall hats)—but Facilier's more grounded, less shrieky-crazy and more quietly-malign, and increasingly desperate to achieve his aims because he's mortgaged himself to those aforementioned other-side friends, and they're getting somebody's soul.  But I'd almost ask if "Other Side" is even a song.  It resembles one, but it might be the single Disney song most unfairly burdened with plot logistics—its analogue is "Poor Unfortunate Souls," but it has to secure two satanic bargains, and with a whole lot less preface—and so this one pushes its preface largely into the number itself, which never really manages to move beyond David speak-singing, and doesn't even get past fully-spoken asides and to something that's comfortably "a song" until 150 seconds have elapsed, out of 198 in total.  "Are you readdddy?" David calls, and I guess he means "are you ready for my number to abruptly end?", which isn't entirely true, because that's when it swerves into badass psychedelia, and there is some glory to be glimpsed in this sequence, as the Voudon rites take precedence: Facilier becoming a scintillating kaleidoscope is really attention-grabbing, but I adore how he sleight-of-hands the skull-and-crossbones on his hat down to his face, and how the skull is the only thing we're left with in the dark at the end.  But the "good part" is so short, which is frankly true of Facilier's villainous denouement, too, which needs to be longer, more involved, and at least slightly less worried that some wiener kid is going to piss themselves, and also probably not end with a gravestone with Facilier making a goofy face on it, even if the gothiness of a final confrontation in an above-ground New Orleans cemetery is great.  Happily, Facilier's awesome in between, not least thanks to his summoned servants, an army of shadows animated by Alex Kuperschmidt that, in combination with Facilier's own shadow—I have not mentioned Smith's even-more-outstanding animation of the independent entity that exists in between Facilier and every floor and wall—are hands-down my favorite visuals in the whole movie, creating the possibility of a real uncanny unease in how their interactions with the shadows of others effect real, tangible violence upon those who cast the shadows.

"Almost There" is the flipside of the coin: its visuals are equally vital to selling the song, but are functioning at full blast immediately, thanks to Goldberg's supervision of a radical formal break (though Sue Nichols is undercredited for the actual idea here): as Facilier and his shadows are, in their more subtle way, an examination of the fundamental qualities of two-dimensional animation, so is "Almost There" a flamboyant and in-your-face celebration of them.  Based on Aaron Douglas prints (I'm going to be snide and tell you Douglas is a lot more sophisticated; on the other hand, Douglas was working with still images, not moving ones), they flatten Tiana into borderless cutouts to move her with aggressively limited animation through her fantasy of an Art Deco space, itself defined by an aggressively limited color palette (searing whites and warm golds that almost meld with the warm browns of the skintones).  I do like it but not as much as those shadows—I love it, then, only an hour later, when it collides with the Shadow Man, who brings her into a full-animation version of the same fantasy, boasting the best strains of David's performance as he enacts the Last Temptation of Tiana, a thing that is surprisingly willing to cloud our Disney heroine's moral purity.  But even in the moment, it's a good, bold sequence, and bolstered on either end by something Princess and the Frog has had all along, which is beautiful lightning effects (in this case, some nice "shafts of light" stuff—also an adorably corny gag when part of the staircase collapses on Tiana's way out).

The unpalatable not-so-secret secret of Princess and the Frog's revival of Old Disney is that such a revival was impossible: I'm sure CAPS still "existed," and maybe even Deep Canvas did too, somewhere on a hard drive, but the infrastructure didn't—they were lucky that somebody kept enough animation desks around—and Disney resorted, instead, to an outside vendor, Toon Boom, and their Harmony platform, which did the same thing as CAPS, though I'm not sure you can't tell a difference.  (Harmony could, in some ways, do more: it could have supported paperless drawing, though outside of "Almost There," the Disney animators eschewed this.)  It was, anyway, maybe even an iterative improvement on CAPS's lighting and color effects, and there's a lot of showing off in this regard—it's a shiny movie, in a pleasing way, any possible gaudiness cut against by some really nice and gentle color style (mostly verdancy and golden light) that's only ever contradicted by Facilier's malign black-and-purples.  And it may be that Clements and Musker were cautious after their seven years away, or that they actively wanted to pare their style back to something classical—it would not, I think, be Azadani, who was going nuts with the layout and possibilities of CGI integration in The Simpsons Movie—but this is more committed to lateral staging against painted backdrops, and occasionally a very constrained 90 degree Z-axis staging against the same, than any Disney cartoon had been in more than twenty years, which makes it stolid sometimes, but sturdy, too.

One could say it's soothing—there are intensities here, but the overriding feature might be that it's cozy, and there's not a thing wrong with prioritizing a slower romance over high-tech adventure.  Despite some naysayers, then and now, the several year gap did not see the animators themselves lose their touch: Henn solidified his position as everyone's favorite Disney Renaissance animator of women (a position I would accord to Ken Duncan myself, but Duncan had a lot fewer productive turns at bat), bringing his skill at evoking thoughtful inner life to a heroine who's all thoughtful inner life, and is slow to realize that's her problem, and tasked further with ensuring that this groundwork was laid before turning her into an elastic and worrisomely-skinny cartoon frog (this is the other reason that that "last temptation of Tiana" is so necessary, because we don't have to pin every last atom of our identification with Tiana's struggle to an elastic cartoon frog); Haycock got another chance to do overconfident swagger but with a hero this time, after such a wonderful job on Tarzan's villain, and this is something an elastic cartoon frog could be better at than a hunky human; and Nik Ranieri, whose star shined only briefly before CGI knocked him down, was perfectly "cast" on the Kuzco-like Lottie, who is so much joyfully entitled want that her lines can barely contain her, and while she's of such little plot importance you could virtually excise her from the movie, I find her gentle satire of Disney's old gender attitudes awfully valuable, and her unusual-for-Disney design is really something (she goes from "hot" to "grotesque" on a dime with a weird flattened-circle head shape that I don't think any Disney woman had ever come close to), so I simply love watching her practically percolate with pep.  It is, needless to say, a tragedy that this all could not have inaugurated a new tradition in traditional animation, and everyone who cares will always wonder what might have been if Lasseter's plan for a WDAS that still produced hand-drawn cartoons had succeeded; but even if it wasn't quite Disney's last, The Princess and the Frog is the capstone to their art, and it's a worthy one.

Score: 9/10

*We used to have a real country.

**Then again, Tangled also cost a nightmarish amount of money, and even with a lot of that presumably being R&D defrayed by later movies, Disney's CGI cartoons continue to cost a nightmarish amount of money.

***In Michigan J. Frog's body.