The Princess and the Frog (U)

Alison Rowat's Review

What, no 3D glasses? No whizz-bang special effects whipped up by computer? No chance to zoom in on every last nose hair of each character?

How quaint, and how lovely too. The Princess and the Frog, Disney’s return to hand-drawn animation, is a charmer.

While not up there with classics such as Dumbo, Snow White, or Up, Ron Clements and John Musker’s film shows the Mouse can still make a decent sized noise when it comes to traditional animation.

Not that technical considerations figure large, if at all, when watching this tale of a waitress with ambitions. This is a film that invites you to simply sit back and enjoy it.

Fittingly set in New Orleans, it’s a big, easy watch. You might be forced to tap your foot to the Randy Newman soundtrack, but otherwise, relax.

Tiana (voiced by Anika Noni Rose) dreams of one day opening her own restaurant. If she was like her friend Charlotte she’d ask her rich daddy for the money. But Tiana is not, like Charlotte, a princessy kind of girl.

With her father dead, and having grown up poor, Tiana has had to work hard for everything. Even more so after a smooching session with a frog – a long story involving a visiting prince – turns her distinctly green.

There has been a lot of comment about the Tiana character being the first African-American Disney princess. The film itself turns out to be as relaxed about this as it is about everything else.

In being so subtle, Clements and Musker (The Little Mermaid, Aladdin) make their point in a quiet but powerful way.

The usual big names feature in the voice cast – among them Oprah and John Goodman – the songs are dandy and the second string characters are strong (Louis the jazz-crazy gator is a real honey). Add a sprinkling of left field Pixar wit – John “Toy Story” Lasseter is executive producer – and the result is a delightful 97 minutes.

Paul Greenwood's Review

Disney make a valiant attempt to take us back to the traditional hand-drawn fairytale after years of uninspired computer generated fare, but The Princess and the Frog arrives as a mixed bag.

Our heroine is Tiana, a waitress in 1910s New Orleans who takes a shine to a visiting European prince. Through an ill-explained chain of events, the prince is turned into a frog by a sinister sorcerer, and when Tiana kisses him, she also turns into a frog, forcing the pair to journey through the bayou in search of the voodoo queen who can return them to human form.

For all of new Disney boss John Lasseter’s assertions about going back to storytelling basics, the story is one of the weakest elements here. Tots in the audience were heard to ask “What’s happening?” and it’s a perfectly valid question.

The swampy ragtime vibe is atmospherically realised, but the film never quite develops its own personality, borrowing from past glories like The Little Mermaid and The Emperor’s New Groove.

In fact it so desperately wants to be The Little Mermaid (with which it shares its directors) that it all but recreates the character of Sebastian in the shape of a Cajun firefly. A few of the songs are strong, but there may be a couple too many in an attempt to cover up for the shortcomings in the narrative.

And while it’s still better than a good percentage of the 3D muck that passes for animation these days, there’s a long way to go if Disney are to recapture their second golden age from the early 90s.