3+1 Short Paragraphs: The Princess and the Frog

 2009, d. John Musker and Ron Clements - Disney+

I'm slowly working through both the Princess and Renaissance-era Disney pictures, and not finding a whole lot of joy in most of it.  They don't feel like they were made for me to enjoy.  They never have.  They feel very much like the refined output of a factory that has a specific consumer profile, and hey, more power to those people that they were made for, and do enjoy them.  The straight, white, gen-xer male that I am has, and continues to have, more than enough product targeted at him. But I really like movies, and I like to see things that reach and try to be different.  Pixar came along in the middle of the Disney Renaissance and kind of embarrassed them making Toy Story, A Bug's Life and Toy Story 2 all which appealed to all types of children and parents, feeling contemporary and entertaining in a way that musical princess/romance/fairy tale movies just weren't, and hitting audiences in a way that made Disney seriously question what they were doing.  The course correction away from "girl-centric" features, into non-musical things like Atlantis and Treasure Planet basically sunk both the art form of American-originated hand-drawn animation and the princess story for nearly a decade.  With Disney suddenly under Pixar's influence in the late-aughts (rather than vice versa), The Princess and the Frog was the return, short-lived though it was, but it showed that some lessons had been learned in the intervening years.

From the title alone, The Princess and the Frog is so pointedly an attempt at recapturing the little-girl-princess market, but the story, and how it's told, feel like a distinct deviation. It's a story set in 1920's New Orleans, but it breaks from a lot of the tropes that they had established with The Little Mermaid (another Musker and Clements picture).  Tiana is a hard working young Black woman with a dream she's dedicated to fulfilling: saving her money to open her own restaurant, the same dream her father had but died before he could realize it.  She's self actualized which is quite a refreshing switch for a Disney Princess (which she isn't yet).  The film is also astutely aware of the economic and racial disparity in New Orleans, but only plays at it subtly, not seeking to make the whole affair too uncomfortable.  It's a visiting prince (from a made up, Spanish-ish nation, which gives only the skightest feel of Netflix's live action princess romances) that sets the town abuzz, and catches the attention of Dr. Facilier, the Shadowman, a voodoo priest and trickster. He set into play an overly complicated scheme to acquiring riches to pay down some debts he owes to some very vengeful spirits.  In the process the prince is turned into a frog. Tiana, kisses the frog to help him out of his jam, and turns into a frog herself, and they wind up on the run together.

The film puts the pair on a bayou adventure seeking out a voodoo priestess, and they meet some charming friends along the way, including a trumpet playing gator named Lewis and a creole firefly named Ray who is in love with a star. The quartet and their journey is a lot of fun, like a Pixar movie, putting the audience into a reality that's quite a different perspective on the world... a frog's eye view if you will.  While the romance between Tiana and Prince Naveen feels somewhat forced, it also doesn't feel like the goal the film is trying to get to.  It may be a flaw, or a strength depending on your perspective.  Of course, Tiana becomes a princess by marrying Naveen in the end, thus validating the title of the film.

The film is quite enjoyable but at the same time, there's definitely cultural criticism that can detract from the enjoyment of Disney's first Black princess musical romance, such as the fact that there's a big opening sequence with music from Dr. John, a white jazz musician (he's from New Orleans, I guess is the reasoning here) and that the music and songs of The Princess and the Frog (which are admittedly quite good...I learned Keith David can sing and he's amazing) come from Randy Newman.  It just seems a little off key to include these two figures as the musical representation for this film.  And the exact same criticism leveled against Soul (Pixar's first film with a Black lead character) is somehow apparent in a Disney film released a decade earlier, where the character's visual representation as a Black person on screen is taken away from them. It's kind of astounding that it happened again.  Just like Soul, there is an entertaining product here, but in both cases it just calls out to the fact that maybe in this Millennium you need to originate your stories with Black leads with Black creators.  That's not to say that all stories with Black characters have to be created by Black creators, but if the only Black stories you have are only originating from white creators, that's a real problem that needs addressing.