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A girl (voice by Anika Noni Rose) meets an amorous amphibian (voice by Bruno Campos) in “The Princess and the Frog.” |
Walt Disney’s musical “The Princess and the Frog” celebrates an entertaining and overdue return to classical, hand-drawn animation that has been kicked to the cultural curb in an era of gleaming, sanitized CGI and magically morphing stop-motion.
More important, “The Princess and the Frog” introduces the first black heroine to appear in a Disney animated feature.
To be sure, these are both laudable achievements in the annals of Disney animation, even if the movie represents a mishmash of recycled Disney conventions, and the young, black heroine spends most of her screen time as a green frog cleansed of her human ethnicity.
The story takes place in New Orleans during the 1920s when a happy-go-lucky nuclear black family meets with strife when their loving dad dies, leaving behind a wife and a plucky daughter, Tiana, determined to open her own restaurant and serve the food her father would have liked.
Her best friend is an infectiously excitable rich white girl named Charlotte (slammed into vocal warp-drive by Jennifer Cody) whose own father, a drawling, Southern aristocrat named “Big Daddy” La Bouff (John Goodman), adores and dotes on his little girl.
Stepping over this sanitized setup (this is, after all, a fantasy) the plot kicks in when the grown-up Tiana (Anika Noni Rose) meets a talking frog who asks her to give him a kiss and change his life. (Read more…)