Somewhere around 2004 Disney shut down their animation studio and disbanded it. The future was computer animation, not hand-drawn stuff. Their competitors found themselves awash with well-trained talent.
In 2009, Disney released a new hand-drawn cartoon, The Princess and the Frog. They built a whole new animation department. It uses computers, of course, but the important parts are still hand drawn.
It’s Disney’s first princess of color. If you don’t count Pocahontas, who I guess is not officially a princess and is a different kind “of color”. In the US were natives ever considered “colored” or were they just Indians?
In this case the prince is from India. So the British would consider him of color. In the US, I think we’d just think he was Indian.
It’s interesting that in the US it’s OK for Asians and Africans to mix romantically.
The voodoo man really reminds me of Samuel L. Jackson, but it’s not him. The white gal really reminds me of Rue McLanahan, but it’s not her. The white guy reminded me of John Goodman, and guess what?
(I was scarred by a Disney cartoon after I got out of college. It was Bambi, and so not the film I remembered from my youngster days. It seemed kinda creepy…)
The animation is pretty. The story is pretty good too. For once you get a lesson that includes the notion that working too hard and not paying attention to how good you got it is a bad thing! And the music by Randy Newman is fine, but I don’t recall any of the tunes.
I’m told they get Cajun and Creole confused, but I don’t know those things. I was personally a little disappointed with how the firefly’s love interest turned out, but that’s just the kind of romantic I am.
If you got a kid, you could do worse than to put this in the disc player. If you don’t got a kid, it’s still an interesting choice. Who does the alligator remind you of?
