Progress City, U.S.A.

I just wanted to post a brief note that The Boys: The Sherman Brothers’ Story is now available for download on iTunes. I never gave this film an official, full review after seeing it last year at the D23 Expo, but it’s fantastic. Directors Gregory V. Sherman and Jeff Sherman do an excellent job at relating a very personal tale that will surprise even the most devoted Disney fan.

I recommend that you seek it out any way you can, but for now it can be found on iTunes here.

Somehow this evening I stumbled across a particular piece of video that instantly brought back some memories.

Back in the 1980s, home video was a big deal. And, increasingly, Disney began to enter into a market that it had been reluctant to consider before. The first waves of live-action home video releases were basically trial balloons, and consisted of a mix of A-list titles and forgotten flops. The Disney animated canon was slower to emerge on the home market, as the company remained intent on sticking to its age-old theatrical re-release strategy (a concept that continues to influence the absurd “Disney vault” concept today).

Anyway, those video releases of the early 1980s were heavily branded; from the signature clamshell cases to the awesome “neon Mickey” logo, there was a great deal of comfortable familiarity with each release.

One of the other elements included on each videocassette was this fantastic little advert, which served to promote all the other films that Disney had released for rental. It’s so wonderfully of its era, and it flashes me back to those exciting trips to the local video store to rent some Disney films for the weekend. Would it be Swiss Family Robinson or The Absent-Minded Professor? That, a collection of Donald Duck cartoons, and a rental of Metroid for the NES and I’d be good to go.

This is one of those bits of video that, even though one might not have seen it in years upon years, is still as familiar as if you’d seen it five minutes ago. The kicker is that this promo was actually put onto the Disney videocassettes after the main feature! Disney was content not to force the ad on viewers, and the heck of it is that I remember watching through the end credits of films specifically to watch this compilation. It helped that those older films had little or no end credits, and the ad could begin immediately after the title card announcing “THE END – A Walt Disney Production”, but it’s still pretty amazing that they’d stick it at the end of the tape instead of the beginning.

Take a look and feel the nostalgia. Also, note that there was a shorter and more common version of this promo, which I could really probably recite in my sleep. Quite a difference from the promos Disney puts on their releases today, eh?

Let’s just cut to the chase – I’m a big fan of The Great Mouse Detective.

I’m also a firm believer that this modest 1986 feature is one of the most underrated gems in the Disney animated canon; more than just a solid stepping stone on the way to the later renaissance of feature animation, it’s a very entertaining film in its own right with more than its share of big ideas, funny moments, and interesting animation. To say that the film is overlooked is an understatement; it’s received little attention from the company since its release more than twenty (!) years ago, and I’d venture to guess that a number of fans have never even seen or heard of it.

The Great Mouse Detective (I prefer, rather pedantically, to call it by its development title Basil of Baker Street) has returned to home video via the rather absurdly titled “Mystery in the Mist” edition. Apparently all earlier releases were either some degree less mysterious or misty. I couldn’t detect the difference, but I assume it must be there since it’s in the title.

Anyway, this new edition, which hit stores on April 13th, 2010, is a rather bare-bones affair, with a brief making-of feature that was pulled from an earlier DVD release as its only bonus feature of note. The only new material here is a bizarre little featurette only tangentially related to the film, as well as the requisite slew of new trailers and promo videos. But, for the uninitiated, let’s first take a look at the film itself.

The Film

Dr. Dawson and Olivia Flaversham meet Basil of Baker Street, the Great Mouse Detective

In 1985, the Disney animation studios reached what is considered their lowest ebb when The Black Cauldron flopped upon release. As the recent documentary Waking Sleeping Beauty points out, Disney was defeated at the box office that year by the bottom-drawer TV spinoff The Care Bears Movie. A year later, in July of 1986, The Great Mouse Detective arrived in theaters.

The film was a smaller, leaner production than The Black Cauldron; that earlier release had been in development for around a decade, while Mouse Detective was made on a much smaller budget and a much tighter schedule. It was also the first of the Disney features to be predominantly created by the new generation of talent at the studio; directing alongside veteran storyman & animator Burny Mattinson and animator David Michener were Ron Clements and John Musker, who would famously go on to direct The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, and most recently The Princess and the Frog.

Based on a series of stories by author Eve Titus, The Great Mouse Detective takes place in the fog-shrouded gaslight era London of 1890. It depicts a world in which mice live in a society parallel to our own, with their own houses, pubs, and palaces carved out of the urban clutter. The titular Basil of Baker Street is a detective of great renown in the animal world; his signature magnifying glass, pipe, violin and deerstalker hat mirroring those of his more famous upstairs neighbor at 221B Baker Street, the human detective Sherlock Holmes.

Dr. Dawson and Basil of Baker Street consult with a new client

From his office beneath Holmes’s townhouse, Basil has made a name for himself by solving innumerable crimes through his combination of forensic science and good old-fashioned detective work. Even the great Basil’s skills, though, are taxed when faced with the nefarious schemes of his mortal nemesis (and the world’s greatest criminal mind) – the vile Professor Ratigan.

We’re introduced to Basil and his world via young Olivia Flaversham, daughter of a great mouse inventor and toymaker, who has just seen her father mousenapped by a gang of thugs. Alone on the streets of London, Olivia meets Dr. David Q. Dawson, just returned from the war in Afghanistan (!); as the rodent stand-in for the famous Dr. Watson, Dawson acts as our narrator throughout the film. The two meet up with Basil, enlist his help in finding Flaversham’s father, and in the process uncover an elaborate scheme by the evil Ratigan that threatens the very fabric of the Empire itself.

The insidious Professor Ratigan

The film is great fun; it moves at a very quick pace but never seems rushed or frantic. The characters are all appealing, and there’s some really fantastic voice work across the board. Most notable is Vincent Price’s work as Ratigan, a larger than life character that Price later would say was one of his favorite roles. Ratigan is a great villain and actually quite menacing; more to the point, he’s interesting, which always helps.

Basil himself is great fun as a character, exuding a kind of manic energy that is both simultaneously in control of every situation but also just a hair’s breadth from running completely off of the rails. Basil is cool but awkward, confident and insightful but often oblivious. He’s a really fun character that Disney has completely abandoned – it occurred to me as I watched that while it seemed obscene to make two or three sequels to Cinderella, it would be perfectly natural and actually quite worthwhile to continue the serialized exploits of Basil. Barrie Ingham, who voices Basil, and Val Bettin as Dr. Dawson play well off of each other, and their brief appearance together in the making-of featurette was far too brief for my tastes.

The young Ms. Flaversham is equally well-executed, taking a character that could be irritating or saccharine and making her genuinely sweet. Her father, inventor Hiram Flaversham, receives a familiar Scottish brogue courtesy of Scrooge McDuck himself, Alan Young. Long-time character actor Candy Candido contributes his trademark gravelly croak to “a peg-legged bat with a broken wing,” and the great Basil Rathbone himself has a brief cameo as the voice of Sherlock Holmes.

Visually, the film has its highs and lows. The production design is by turns moody and cozy, and goes a great job of creating a very lived-in world for the characters. There are a lot of neat ideas and even “Easter eggs” – look for visual tributes to Dumbo, the Firehouse Five, and even the airship Hyperion! Overall the animation is quite good, but there are some glaring exceptions. Character animation on the leads is mostly great; Basil is dashing, and evokes Errol Flynn at times. Dawson is suitably pleasant, and young Flaversham is as cute as a young Scottish mouse should be. Their animation is fluid and full of detail, as are most incidental characters – there’s a lot of interesting character design here, and even bit roles and background characters seem very evocative of the period. Where things get rough, though, are the group scenes; the animation seems much more crude in the musical numbers especially. In one particular song the mouths of the “chorus” seem out of sync with the lyrics, and this makes me wonder if something musically was changed very late in the process. But while the crowd scenes seem dodgy due to a lack of time or money (or both!), there’s still a lot of great animation to be found. The exception among the main characters, unfortunately, is Professor Ratigan, who is hampered on occasion by lead animator Glen Keane’s trademark…. overexuberance.

No mention of the film’s animation would be complete without discussing the famous climax inside Big Ben’s tower at Westminster Palace, which marks the earliest prominent use of computer-assisted animation in a Disney feature. Computers were used to render the complex machinery inside the clockwork mechanism, allowing for complex and fluid camera movements within the whirling gears and cogs. The effect still works; perhaps due to its relative simplicity, or the appropriate meshing of technique and subject matter, the scene within Big Ben is still exciting, well staged, and impressive. It remains among the great action finales in Disney films and is a far more organic integration of computer-generated imagery than even many recent features.

Seriously, it’s really cool

In the end, perhaps one of the most entertaining aspects of the film is how different it feels from anything you’d get from Disney today. Everything aside from the title feels like it never saw a focus group, and there’s loads of stuff that feels downright bizarre in today’s pasteurized world – both Basil and Ratigan smoke, booze of various sorts flows freely throughout (“Rodent’s Delight”!), people are drugged and kidnapped and murdered, stilettos and daggers fly through the air, people wave guns around, and, oh yeah, there’s totally a showgirl mouse doing a striptease.

Yeah, you heard me.

I’ll just say that if you ever wanted to hear Melissa Manchester sing a song she penned for a showgirl mouse in a rundown sewer-side tavern, this is the film for you. There are a couple of other songs in the film by Henry Mancini, who also contributes the musical score.

Yeah, seriously, I was totally not kidding

All in all it’s a good time, and well worth checking out if you’ve missed it over the years.

The DVD

As mentioned, this new release is titled, rather ridiculously, the “Mystery in the Mist Edition”. Aside from a new transfer there’s nothing new of worth here; if you have the previous pressing of the disc you’re not missing anything. Well, unless you care that the new transfer includes the film’s original title cards whereas the previous DVD’s titles are from the film’s 1992 re-release when it was billed as The Adventures of the Great Mouse Detective.

Video & Audio

It looks good; really good, in fact. Most of the film’s action takes place in the span of a single night so the film is generally darker than most, but the colors in the new transfer were richer than I remembered. It’s far from washed out and it’s mostly free from dust and various other artifacts of its age. It’s good to see Disney at least giving a lesser-known film a respectful digital cleanup. The film is presented in the 1.78:1 aspect ratio.

The soundtrack, in Dolby Digital 5.1, is nice and clear, but due to its age doesn’t feature a lot of fancy surround effects. There’s some nice swooping sounds when Basil and Ratigan are soaring around London in dirigibles, but otherwise it’s just a good, high-quality audio track.

Bonus Materials

There’s not a lot here as far as bonus materials, which is a real shame. The making-of featurette, The Making Of “The Great Mouse Detective” (7:50) is ported from the previous DVD release and looks to have come directly from some television special in the 1980s. It’s fun to see young animators like Glen Keane at work, as well as Vincent Price and the other voice talent. Roy E. Disney also makes a welcome appearance. But it would have been even better to have some current interviews, and perhaps a better look at the actual creative process behind the film and the groundwork it laid for later features.

Also from the original DVD release is a Sing-Along Song for Professor Ratigan’s number, The World’s Greatest Criminal Mind.

New to this release is an odd little nut of a feature called So You Think You Can Sleuth? (4:40). From the blurb on the DVD package, I thought this was going to be one of those awful set-top games that appear on every release. Instead, it’s a short summary of the history of private detectives and forensic science, which culminates in a “mystery” for the viewer to solve. You’re presented with a mystery, conveyed via static black-and-white photos, in which you must determine whether your mother, father, sister, or slouchy unemployed uncle stole all the cookies from the kitchen. It all happens so quickly that you don’t really get a chance to realize how strange it all is until it’s over.

And that’s pretty much it. There are the requisite trailers for upcoming Disney films, which are pushed via the irritating “FastPlay” feature, and this really creepy thing with the actors from The Suite Life trying to hype kids up to pester their parents into buying a Blu-ray player (ironic, since Disney didn’t see fit to release The Great Mouse Detective on Blu-ray). That little gem is even listed as a “Bonus Feature” on the DVD package. Sad. Then there’s one more promo video, which is perhaps the strangest thing I’ve ever seen on a Disney DVD. It starts off like a trailer, and for the life of me I thought it was a promotion for the next video in the Tinkerbell franchise. Oh, look it’s Pixie Hollow. Oh, Pixie Hollow is in danger. Oh, it’s because of DVD piracy.

What?

Yes. According to Disney, and I swear this is true, DVD piracy will DESTROY THE MAGIC OF PIXIE HOLLOW FOREVER. So the next time you start up bittorrent, please remember: you’re killing Tinkerbell. Sleep tight, kids!

The Shallow Stuff (aka the Package)

The Great Mouse Detective comes in a standard-issue black keepcase with a cardboard slipcover. The cover art is the typical eye-gougingly awful Disney marketing artwork with off-model characters crammed in the frame accompanied by bare-bones Adobe Illustrator fonts. There’s no artwork on the disc, and no inserts in the case aside from a coupon for 100 Disney Movie Rewards points and a flier for, again, Disney Blu-ray.

In Summary…

I find this film really, really enjoyable. I think it’s underrated and fun, and really kicked off the renaissance of Disney animation in style. Yet it’s hardly heeded even in fan circles; in the recent film Waking Sleeping Beauty little is said about it except for the controversy surrounding its title change, and much more attention is given to the subsequent Disney release Oliver & Company. Perhaps this is understandable as Oliver was a more profitable release; while The Great Mouse Detective was a modest success it was bested at the box office by Don Bluth’s An American Tail. But The Great Mouse Detective has aged far better than Oliver; the story feels more timeless and less calculated.

While this “Mystery in the Mist” edition has little to recommend it in the way of bonus features, it’s still worth checking out if you’ve passed on previous releases or somehow missed the film altogether. The film’s the thing, after all, and this is a good one.

Click to buy

Walt Disney Animation Studios recently released their latest effort, 2009’s The Princess and the Frog, to home video on DVD and Blu-ray disc. The film, highly publicized as Disney’s first traditionally-animated release since 2004 and their first fairy tale since 1991, also received a great deal of attention due to its protagonist – the first black lead in a Disney animated film, and the first black Disney “princess”.

So, you know, no pressure. With animation fans seeing the film as a deciding factor in the future of traditional animation at Disney, and the project’s significance as the first greenlight of the Lasseter era of Disney feature animation, the studio dug deep to try and recreate the magic that ushered in Disney’s second golden age twenty years ago with The Little Mermaid. They brought back directors Ron Clements and John Musker, Disney vets who had directed Mermaid and several other films before eventually leaving the company. Many other animators, like Eric Goldberg, also returned to Disney after departing in the diaspora following former CEO Michael Eisner’s decision to switch the company entirely to computer animation. The Princess and the Frog would be, Disney hoped, the film that vaulted them back to prominence once more.

With all this baggage circulating in the background – the long-awaited return of hand-drawn animation with its future hanging in the balance, not to mention the vast number of pitfalls provided by the race issue – it’s not surprising that the film itself occasionally got lost in the shuffle. But while the picture itself isn’t a home run, hampered by story issues as well as stylistic nitpicks, it’s still a solidly entertaining offering with some lovely visuals, good music, and engaging vocal work.

The Film

If you’re reading this blog, you’re probably a Disney fan, which means that by now you’re at least somewhat acquainted with the story. Tiana, born to a poor black family in jazz-age New Orleans, dreams of opening her own restaurant. Naveen, a visiting prince from the fictitious nation of Maldonia, is a wastrel gadabout who leads a life of leisure but has had his purse-strings cut by his parents. When Naveen is turned into a frog by voodoo conman Dr. Facilier, it leads to the traditional series of madcap hijinks and self-actualization. The froggy Naveen and the also-transformed froggy Tiana must make their way through the bayou with a trumpet playing alligator and redneck firefly to find a voodoo priestess who can turn them back to their human selves. So, you know, your usual.

The first act moves along at a good clip and introduces the characters efficiently and effectively. We get Tiana’s backstory without too much needless melodrama, and we quickly are shown her ambitions and how hard she’s willing to work to achieve them. The upbeat tempo of the story is aided by Randy Newman’s peppy New Orleans-inspired score and songs, which help to set the stage for the film and move things along.

The story starts to drag in the middle, as the two frogs go on their adventure in the bayou. Here the films starts to feel episodic, and I can’t help but wonder if this is an effect of the balance of power being more in the hands of the animators. At the very least, there seems to have not been a clear voice making the hard calls on what to cut, and the result is that some sequences – most egregiously the scene with the redneck hunters – feel straight out of the more turgid Disney films of the late 1970s. I’m sure they were fun to board and animate (and are, usually, generally entertaining), but they grind the film to a halt. The real problem with these shenanigans is that they elbow out scenes with more character development that would help in making the characters’ arcs – especially the budding froggy romance – seem less rushed and arbitrary.

The rushed feeling isn’t helped by the fact that the film has too many characters; I can think of two that could be completely excised without any harm to the narrative whatsoever. Louis, the trumpet-playing alligator, is a hilarious character with plenty of good bits and great voice work, but he takes up a great deal of screen time without adding anything to the story. He doesn’t even lead the two frogs through the bayou; that task is left to Ray the firefly. Why is Louis there?

The same can be said for Naveen’s manservant, Lawrence. Aside from being visually unpleasant with his squishy chimp-like features, he only serves to provide some comic relief when he betrays Naveen and, using voodoo shapeshifting magic, takes the prince’s place in wooing wealthy heiress Charlotte LaBouff. Why Dr. Facilier needs this incompetent lackey to act as his proxy is unclear, and it would make far more sense for Facilier to just transform into Naveen himself and cut out the middle-man. It would also eliminate the need for Lawrence at all, and save us from some needless slapstick sequences in the middle of the film.

The ending of the film is a mishmash, with so many balls in the air that everything is forced to come together rather haphazardly. There are some really nice turns here, and some truly poignant moments, but there’s also a lot of rushed exposition and a heapin’ helping of deus ex machina. Still, although it stumbles to the finish line, the film ends on a really strong note with perhaps its strongest asset – Anika Noni Rose as Tiana, belting out one of Newman’s jazz numbers.

Visually, the production design was spectacular and a lot of the work on backgrounds, layout, and effects animation was really wonderful. There are a few excellent sequences where the animators play with the style a bit, and I enjoyed these greatly. The first, during Tiana’s number Almost There, visualizes the restaurant she hopes to build in a lavish, art-deco inspired graphic style. Facilier’s big song, Friends On The Other Side, features a great deal of effects work and swirling, black-lit voodoo masks. It almost hearkens back to the experimentation in the package films of the 1940s, and these are by far the most interesting sequences in the film. I seem to differ with most reviewers, though, in that I have a problem with some of the character animation.

A great deal of the animation in The Princess and the Frog is fantastic, don’t get me wrong. They do fairly well in not using a lot of the clichés and visual shortcuts that permeated latter-day feature animation releases. But there’s a general inconsistency in the tone of the animation that really bothers me. Simply put, a lot of the characters seem like they’re from different movies altogether. Some, like Tiana, are drawn in a caricatured but somewhat realistic style – they stay on model, and seem to occupy the same physical universe as the rest of us. Others seem to squash and stretch at random, limbs flopping around without any underlying physiology and eyes bugging out like old Warner Brothers cartoons. There are far too many extreme poses used for the sake of a gag – whether it be a smashed, disfigured frog or someone’s hair standing full on end in shock. You can have exaggeration and caricature while maintaining the “plausible impossible” – a textbook example being Bill Tytla’s work on Stromboli for Pinocchio. But too many of the gags in The Princess and the Frog seem straight out of the notebook of some CalArts Chuck Jones fanclub. And some of the work is positively Bluthian. Special notice for this inconsistency should go, once again, to the trio of hunters that the two frogs encounter in the swap. I don’t know what movie or Kricfalusi TV show they wandered in from, but it’s a completely different universe than the rest of the characters we’ve seen.

A big example of this is on a character that’s received a lot of plaudits from the animation community – Eric Goldberg’s work on Louis the alligator. Now I’m a great fan of Goldberg’s, and have a great deal of respect for him. But this character is all over the place visually, which is fine for a blue genie but less appropriate for a mere mortal alligator. Again, I’m sure it was fun to animate and shows a great deal of skill – and his work for the film has garnered a number of animation awards – but it’s too “big” for my tastes. Too “loosey-goosey”.

On the other hand, I’ve seen a lot of animation “academics” speak ill of Nik Ranieri’s work on debutante Charlotte LaBouff, but it’s my absolute favorite work in the entire film. Charlotte, too, is a “big” character, devouring the scenery whenever she’s around. But you also get a sense of structure; all that energy is packed into a single, well-defined form that still seems to follow the niceties of physics and anatomy. Charlotte’s a hilarious character, with lots of subtle movements tucked into her big, dramatic flourishes. It’s hilarious work and Ranieri should be proud.

Final praise should go again to the voice cast – to Anika Noni Rose for her sympathetic work as Tiana, as well as her sublime singing voice; to Keith David for his fantastic, growling work as villainous Dr. Facilier; to Jennifer Cody (Charlotte) and Michael-Leon Wooley (Louis); and lastly to Jim Cummings – the most pleasant surprise of the entire film, as the Cajun firefly Ray.

I was prepared to hate this character. He appeared, at the outset, to be the kind of dippy sidekick that you tend to enjoy only for the sake of campy awfulness. But while he did get the lamest jokes in the film – the flatulence jokes as well as the “my butt is a lightbulb” gags – he wound up being shockingly entertaining and sympathetic. In fact, he runs the risk of stealing the entire film in the third act; in the end, his willingness to take up action to affect the outcome makes him the hero of the finale far more than either Tiana or Naveen.

One cannot discuss The Princess and the Frog without addressing the issue of race, not only because the film takes place in Jim Crow-era New Orleans but also because Tiana’s place as the first black Disney heroine was a huge part of the public narrative behind the film’s release. Mostly the race issue is ignored within the film itself, an issue which some find absurd. Typically, I would say that it’s unnecessary for a film to be “required” to address any specific issue, but with these characters, and this time, and this place… well, it’s an issue.

That’s not to say that I wanted the film to underline these points. It’s better done subtly, and I like the dissolve from the ritzy mansions to the less-scenic row houses as Tiana takes the streetcar home from work. Unfortunately, several changes in the film’s story were made early on to appease critics, and that somehow muddled the world of the film. Tiana’s mother was originally intended to be a cook in the LaBouff household, rather than a freelance seamstress who made dresses for the spoiled young Charlotte. This would lead to Tiana (originally called Maddie) growing up in the household, and eventually becoming chambermaid to the wealthy girl. That original storyline would explain their close relationship far more realistically than in the finished film, where they have an undefined friendship that, while nice to see, seems improbable for the era.

In fact everyone seems on their best behavior racially in The Princess and the Frog which, again, while being pleasant, seems at odds with history. New Orleans was more cosmopolitan than most southern cities of the era but everyone mingling and hobnobbing across social and economic barriers makes the issue more obvious than it might otherwise be. While I wouldn’t suggest that Disney do anything as trite as using the frog transformation as an obvious metaphor for “it only matters who you are on the inside,” it does seem that there are several thematic threads drifting through the film unrelated to each other. It would have served the story better, I think, to pick one and have something to say about it rather than just giving lip service to many different themes.

The result is that The Princess and the Frog feels like a film that’s supposed to have a message, but it’s unclear what that message is. The thesis, revealed by voodoo priestess Mama Odie towards the end of the film, is that you have to “dig a little deeper” and “find out who you are.” Essentially, if you can’t get what you want, you have to get what you need.

It’s hard, though, to see how this applies to Tiana. We see her working hard at the start of the film, taking two difficult jobs to save money to open the restaurant that was the dream of her and her late father. The film plays with the notion that she’s working too hard and not enjoying life, but it’s hard to find fault in someone determined who’s busting their tail to make their dream come true. Although she’s billed as a Disney princess, Tiana is actually the antithesis of the mindset typical to animated fairytales. She has no interest in adventure or romance, she just loves to cook. And what’s wrong with that? I actually found myself wishing I was a little more like her during the first act, which doesn’t usually happen in cartoons. Her determination hasn’t made her hard or bitter, it’s just hard work in pursuit of something she loves.

Yet somehow there’s a false equivalence between Tiana’s situation and that of Naveen, a layabout ladies’ man with no obvious skills or abilities besides smooth talk and a pretty face. I think the movie’s telling us that they need to meet in the middle, somehow, but if I were her I’d be just as irritated with him as she was. Let’s face it, if you’ve been turned into a frog by a witch doctor and are trying to survive in a dangerous bayou, you might not have any interesting in stringing up the banjo and having a hoedown.

And in the end, of course, they fall in love – although it feels rushed and not completely natural. Perhaps if we’d had some indication that Tiana did want more than her restaurant, that she wanted a little excitement and romance but was keeping it on the back burner because she thought that’s what she had to do, then her journey would seem more necessary and believable. In the end, after all, she just winds up where she wanted to be in the first place – her restaurant.

The Discs

As is their fashion, Disney has released three versions of Princess and the Frog for home theaters. A single-disc DVD, a single-disc Blu-ray, and a combo package that includes both those discs with a third containing a digital copy of the film. I’ll save you all the audiovisual chatter – the film looks incredible on both Blu-ray and DVD, and the various surround mixes are of the quality that home theater fans have come to expect.

The Single-Disc DVD

Disney continues their trend of feature-light DVD releases with this disc, which features a handful of deleted scenes and one real gem – an audio commentary by John Musker and Ron Clements, who wrote and directed the film, and producer Peter del Vecho.

Four deleted scenes are presented as story sketches and rough animation, with each clip featuring an introduction by Musker and Clements. These scenes are intriguing, as a few of them present elements of character development that were left out of the final feature. One scene, in which Tiana’s mother Eudora is prevailing upon her to settle down and have a family, illustrate a possible alternative to Tiana’s hardworking single life that is never explored in the finished film. Another scene, with Naveen in his frog form, features a very different character design that is both more frog-like and far more visually appealing than his final appearance.

A music video by Ne-Yo for his song Never Knew I Needed rounds out the extras, along with the obligatory interactive game and an assortment of trailers.

The Single-Disc Blu-ray

The Blu-ray release contains all the extras from the DVD version, as well as an assortment of new material. Most prominent is the 22-minute “making of” documentary, Magic in the Bayou: The Making of a Princess. There are also six short featurettes that were originally released to promote the movie’s release in 2009. They focus on the characters from the film, as well as the legacy of Disney animation. There are a number of art galleries detailing the film’s development, which is nice to see, and an excellent and unheralded feature – a workprint version of the film that can be viewed with picture-in-picture along with the finished product. That’s a very cool extra, and something that I’d love to see for every animated film.

Blu-Ray Edition + DVD + Digital Copy

This edition, as has become common practice, combines the Blu-ray disc, the DVD disc, and a third disc with a digital version of the film that you can download to your computer or mobile device.

In Summary…

Overall I found The Princess and the Frog to be highly enjoyable if flawed. While obviously the story needed to be streamlined, even when the plotting dragged there was always something worth watching. Most of the characters were well realized, the voice acting was great, and the music suited the proceedings perfectly. In fact, it’s hard to get many of those ditties out of your head afterward.

The future of Disney animation is murky at the moment, with no further traditionally animated films announced beyond 2011’s Winnie-the-Pooh. But while The Princess and the Frog didn’t smash records at the box office last year, it’s a more than welcome addition to the Disney canon and a film whose characters, animation and music will continue to be appreciated for years to come.

Disney dropped the deets today on the upcoming home video release of their recent animated feature The Princess and the Frog. The film hits store shelves on March 16th, 2010; of course, its also possibly still playing at a theater near you so if you haven’t yet – see it.

The release, unsurprisingly, follows their recent pattern of releasing a DVD, a Blu-Ray, and a DVD/Blu-Ray combo pack. No surprise there. The combo pack also includes the now-common “DisneyFile” – a version of the film suitable for portable video devices or home computers.

Details? You want details?

SINGLE DISC DVD
$29.99 (SRP)
Pre-order here
Releases March 16th, 2010
Widescreen (2.35)
5.1 Dolby; English SDH, French and Spanish Subtitles

Bonus Features:

• Deleted Scenes
• Audio Commentary by John Musker and Ron Clements (co-writers and directors) and Peter Del Vecho (producer)
• “Never Knew I Needed” music video by Ne-Yo
• What Do You See: Princess Portraits — A bayou-style quiz tests viewers’ knowledge of all of Disney’s beautiful princesses. Ray’s firefly family creates twinkling portraits of each princess and if the player correctly identifies her, they can enjoy a tongue-cheek mini re-telling of that character’s story.

SINGLE DISC BLU-RAY
$39.99 (SRP)
Pre-order here
Releases March 16th, 2010
1.78:1 Aspect Ratio
English 5.1 DTS-HD ; English SDH, French and Spanish Subtitles

Bonus Features include everything from the DVD release plus:

• Magic In The Bayou: The Making of A Princess — Co-writers and directors John Musker and Ron Clements take a freewheeling, behind-the-scenes look at the making of Disney’s newest animated film as it grows from an initial concept to a lavish animated film set in the enchanting world of New Orleans and the surrounding bayous.
• The Return To Hand Drawn Animation
• The Disney Legacy
• Disney’s Newest Princess
• The Princess and the Animator
• Conjuring The Villain
• A Return To The Animated Musical
• Bringing Life to Animation with an introduction by John Musker and Ron Clements.
• Deleted Scenes introduced by the filmmakers
• Art Galleries — A collection of storyboard art traces the visual development of The Princess and the Frog’s rich gallery of characters and settings.

BLU-RAY + DVD COMBO PACK
$44.99 (SRP)
Pre-order here
Releases March 16th, 2010

The combo pack contains all of the above, plus the digital DisneyFile copy of the film.