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BRIEF FILM SYNOPSIS
Walt Disney Animation Studios presents the musical THE PRINCESS AND THE FROG, an animated comedy set in the great city of New Orleans. From the creators of “the Little Mermaid” and “Aladdin” comes a modern classic tale, featuring a beautiful girl named Tiana (Anika Noni Rose), a frog prince who desperately wants to be human again, and a fateful kiss that leads them both on a hilarious adventure through the mystical bayous of Louisiana.
THE PRINCESS AND THE FROG marks the return to hand-drawn animation form the revered team of John Musker and Ron Clements, with music by Oscar-winning composer Randy Newman. (Walt Disney)
But make no mistake—hand-drawn does not mean musty and irrelevant, especially in this age when Disney’s A Christmas Carol features such elegant motion-capture technology, when Fantastic Mr. Fox has updated stop-motion animation with engrossing results, and the computer whiz kids at Pixar regularly hit it out of the park with likely Oscar nominee for best picture Up. Of course, The Princess and the Frog sits squarely inside the Disney formula: It features a headstrong heroine—a waitress named Tiana (Dreamgirls’ Anika Noni Rose) toiling in 1930s New Orleans, dreaming of opening her own restaurant. (And in the tradition of such indelible classics as Mermaid’s “Part of Your World” and the yearning lyrics of “I want much more than this provincial life” in Beauty’s “Belle”, Tiana has her own “I want” song, “Almost There.”) There are talking animals—a jazz-loving alligator named Louis (Michael-Leon Wooley) and a Cajun firefly named Ray (Jim Cummings). And last but not least, there is the adaptation of a classic fairy tale: A prince named Naveen (Nip/Tuck’s Bruno Campos) is laid low by Dr. Facilier (Keith David), a dark-hearted dabbler in the dark arts, who transforms him into a frog, needing the kiss of a princess to restore him.
But directors Ron Clements and John Musker (Aladdin) manage to pack a lot of invention inside the iron-clad Disney formula too. For one thing, they’ve introduced Disney’s first African-American heroine. For another, they’ve put a delicious twist on the fairy tale: When Tiana kisses Naveen, the amphibian prince stays the same…and the heroine is also transformed into a frog, mainly because she isn’t really a princess. The most hilarious inversion of all? Tiana only kisses froggy Naveen because he promises to help her open her restaurant if she does!
