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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.

Last December, we pointed out that on the announcement of the 2010 slate from Walt Disney Pictures, the upcoming animated feature Rapunzel was listed as a “working title.” This squared with a couple of comments I had seen on animation-related blogs; most noticeably, the comments section of the Animation Guild’s blog featured speculation that the new film would have a name change before release. I was never able to firm up any of these rumors – after all, who would change the name of such a prominent film right before it was to hit theaters?

Well, apparently Disney would. The Stitch Kingdom news site pointed out today that Disney had secured a number of different domain names relating to two specific titles: The Thief and the Tower and The Hidden Tower. These names have popped up before; an anonymous comment on the Animation Guild blog from early in January said that they hoped the new title would be “nothing dumb like The Thief and the Tower.” The Hidden Tower was also mentioned in a recent thread.

The reason for this abrupt name change on a film that’s been in development for a decade comes, as most terrible ideas do, straight from marketing. The Princess and the Frog, while successful, did not turn out to be a mega-hit as Disney had hoped. All of a sudden Disney execs seem to be in a panic, and are blaming Frog’s under-performance on its “princess” aspects.

This is both hilarious and tragic. Those who have seen The Princess and the Frog will know that it’s far from a traditional “princess” tale. In fact, much of the film’s storyline is a direct slam on the creepy princessploitation mythos Disney marketing has been pushing on young girls for a few years now; after all, the character made to look the most ridiculous throughout the whole picture is the one who most longs to become a princess. One doubts the film’s heroine would ever be caught dead in the Bibbiti Bobbiti Boutique, which makes it all the more ironic that Disney tried to market the film that way.

Marketing which, of course, failed… which means blame the movie, right?

What a lot of people seem to not understand is that Princess and the Frog’s problems had little to do with the film itself and a lot to do with the product that preceded it. Disney, in their attempts to wrench as much money as possible from young girls and their parents, infantilized their animated classics to an obscene degree and created the view in the public’s eyes that Disney films – and fairy tales in particular – are just for little kids. They’re doing the same thing to parks these days – you can see it in almost every ad. Princess and the Frog might have had some story issues, but the fact that it was a fairy tale wasn’t one of them. Princess and the Frog didn’t bring itself down, this did. Now Disney is tasked with reversing a decade of marketing and trying to convince people that, wait, maybe these films aren’t just fodder for babysitting your toddlers, and that maybe there is a difference between classic Disney features and Cinderella III.

It’ll be hard, and it will probably take a few solid films to turn around public expectations. I’m not sure Winnie-the-Pooh is the way to go about that, but what do I know?

The point is, it looks like the clever folks in the executive suite are, instead of acknowledging the real problems, going to make a purely cosmetic change that will not address underlying issues but instead merely confuse the target audience. Rapunzel is one of the best known fairy tales of all time – do you actually think that The Thief and the Tower is going to send people running for the cineplex? I guess UP was such a hit because people just love that direction. Think how much money it would have made if they’d called it Old Guy and the Flying House? Box office gold!!

All you have to do is read the (admittedly anonymous) comments on the TAG blog to get a hint at the toxic atmosphere that still pervades Disney’s feature animation department. Sure, there will always be cranks and naysayers, and most of those people commenting probably don’t work at Disney anyway, but these are stories that get told time and time again and it makes one wonder if any meaningful changes have actually been made since the Pixar merger. I think that obviously things are better, but there’s a long way to go. If an idea as stupefying as this name change can get any traction at all, it just goes to show that we’ve got a long hard road ahead.

For what it’s worth, I’ll also point out the hilarity of Disney’s animation marketing department fleeing in panic from anything princess-related (awful rumors on the TAG blog suggest that The Snow Queen is now shelved), thinking that well is now dry, while the parks division in Florida has broken ground on a very expensive expansion that is 100% princess. Left hand, meet right hand.

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.

With the release of Disney’s first animated fairytale in many years, fans get to experience what was once an annual ritual – the release of a new musical soundtrack. Originally intended for long-time Disney composer Alan Menken, The Princess and the Frog was eventually re-assigned to John Lasseter’s self-professed favorite composer, Randy Newman. In this instance, Newman’s presence makes sense; his roots in the New Orleans musical culture fit well with the film’s setting, and his wry and witty lyrics mix with stand-out vocal performances by the film’s cast to create a thoroughly enjoyable soundtrack.

My listening experience with this album was slightly odd due to the fact that I’ve seen only part of the movie, amounting to about four of the songs. With the visuals for these tracks already in my head, I had a much quicker connection to those numbers. In the roughly two weeks since I received the album, though, I’ve grown familiar with the rest of the album and it all meshes nicely. Newman’s songs cover a range of styles from the Louisiana region, providing a nice variety and keeping things from getting stale.

Skipping the album’s first track – more on that later – takes us to the first of the film’s songs, a melodic prelude that you might have heard in the film’s trailer. Performed by Anika Noni Rose, the voice of the film’s heroine, this little prologue sets the tone of the film nicely.

The next track kicks up the tempo with an upbeat tour of the Crescent City, Down in New Orleans. One of the great things about this soundtrack is getting Randy Newman’s songwriting without the downside of Randy Newman’s singing. Instead, our introduction to the film’s world is performed by New Orleans musical legend Dr. John – a perfect fit for the material. His bluesy, boogie-woogie tempo makes this Dixieland-inflected piece an appropriately energetic way to start the film.

It became codified in the 1990s that every Disney fairy tale had to have an “I want” song, in which the “princess” in question would sing about her hopes and wishes. Almost There fills that role in Princess and the Frog, but with a noticeable shift in tone. Instead of pining for lost love or adventure, Tiana (Anika Noni Rose) asserts her vision for the future. A waitress with a life-long goal to become a restaurateur, Tiana doesn’t sing about what she wants to happen – she sings about what will happen. It’s very affirmative and upbeat, and Rose’s voice is a superb fit for the character. It’s technically proficient, but also full of good humor and charm.

Her voice is so good, in fact, that you find yourself hating that this is her only solo number in the film. That’s obviously necessary for story reasons (this isn’t some 3-hour musical from the 1960s, after all), but her voice fits the character so well that it leaves you wanting more. A few previous Disney features, notably The Lion King and Lilo & Stitch, have released a second soundtrack with music “inspired” by the film. Far be it from me to suggest anything to Disney marketing, but I’d kind of like to see a Newman-produced album of jazz, blues, and songbook classics featuring the voice cast of the film.

Disney musicals also need a villain number, and so we get Keith David’s Dr. Facilier and Friends On The Other Side. This piece could only have been in an animated film, because if there had actually been real scenery, David would have devoured it whole. They might have had to actually build a few sets for him to chew on anyway. Dr Facilier is larger than life, and indeed this song is strongly evocative of Poor Unfortunate Souls from The Little Mermaid. It’s the most operatic piece in the soundtrack, incorporating quite a bit of dialogue and plot into its lyrics. This makes it a little more true to the Disney model, but David’s booming voice is perfect for the character and the song’s bluesy undertones and he really makes the most of it.

When We’re Human is a jazzy Dixieland piece featuring the now-transformed Tiana and Naveen (Bruno Campos) as well as the jazz-loving alligator Louis (Michael-Leon Wooley). Veteran trumpeter Terence Blanchard contributes his considerable skills to this song, which underscores the markedly different goals of the characters (Tiana want to become human again to get back to work on her restaurant; gadabout Naveen wants to get back to the ladies). The song’s pretty fun, has some nice musical moments, and moves at a brisk pace.

We’re introduced to Jim Cummings’s Cajun firefly Ray with the zydeco-infused Gonna Take You There. This is probably the most comedic piece on the album, and while it is indeed catchy it’s my least favorite of the tracks due to my general indifference to zydeco.

Cummings fares much better with the next number, the Cajun waltz My Belle Evangeline. The relaxed tempo conveys the appropriate feeling of moonlight on the bayou, and there’s more great trumpet work by Terence Blanchard. Thankfully, despite the fact that Ray seems to be the film’s comic relief, they play this song pretty straight. In many ways, it’s a descendant of Kiss the Girl from The Little Mermaid, and it’s a lovely song that might be well-served by a cover version in the future (if only Robbie Robertson and Levon Helm would make amends!).

The soundtrack peaks with the gospel blowout Dig a Little Deeper, featuring Jenifer Lewis (as Mama Odie) and the Pinnacle Gospel Choir. This is a huge number, with quick, brassy lyrics, and it leaves one feeling like you’ve been to a revival yourself. It’ll be wild on the big screen.

The last song on the soundtrack is a reprise of Down in New Orleans by Anika Noni Rose, and it’s the perfect way to end the film. Rose totally blows it out, and the performance is so lively that it feels like the curtain call at a packed Broadway show. Did I mention that I’m totally crushing on her voice? This number will no doubt leave fans hyped and ready for whatever Disney has coming next (just try and forget for the moment that it’s Winnie-The-Pooh).

The songs on this album are pretty consistently great – consistent in a way that Disney soundtracks haven’t been in a while. The sad exceptions to this are the seven excerpts of the film’s score that flesh out the remainder of the tracks. New Orleans has such a long musical tradition in so many genres, it seems shocking that these seven tracks from the score are so blandly orchestral. True, people rarely listen to these soundtracks for the purely musical sections; after all, the big set pieces of these films are the songs themselves. Still, with all the superlative work that artists like Michael Giacchino have been doing on animation soundtracks recently, one comes to expect more that a run-of-the-mill underscore with some light music cues underlining the action.

Newman has done good scoring work before, and there are bits and pieces on this album that hint at greater Dixieland or jazz possibilies. The bulk of the score, though, seems sadly underwhelming, conventionally orchestral, and highly forgettable.

What I wish I could forget, though, is the aforementioned track that leads off the album – a mind-numbingly bland piece of R&B called Never Knew I Needed. This song, which I assume plays over the film’s end credits, is the conceptual descendant of the “hit single” covers from the Disney animated soundtracks in the 1990s; these dull, adult-contemporary radio ready singles by artists like Celine Dion provided the flavorless, synthesized soundtrack for a million elevators and dentists’ waiting rooms in the previous decade.

This isn’t to say that the song, by someone called Ne-Yo, is really awful or tasteless – it’s just breathtakingly, astoundingly boring. Of course, that statement applies to my general opinion of all modern R&B anyway. Again, going back to the New Orleans music tradition, they couldn’t find a more appropriate way to make a single for the film? Heck, get Harry Connick, Jr. if you want the radio-friendly vibe. The problem, of course, is that Disney is no longer peddling to the middle-of-the-road adult crowd. This single is aimed, like everything else, at the Disney Channel market, and it’s the first truly pandering move I’ve seen from this film’s marketing so far. What’s funny is that they’ve taken a genre and a label – Ne-Yo comes under license from Def Jam Records – that tends towards the scandalous, and filed off any rough edges to make it unthreatening enough for the Disney Channel pre-tweens and their moms. What’s left is neither tonally appropriate for the film, or even an interesting song in its own right. At least in the 90s they stuck these at the end of the album; this time, we get it stuck at the first so you have to fast forward every time you pop in the CD.

But that’s one track out of seventeen, and that’s certainly not a bad slugging percentage. The songs from the actual movie itself are catchy and fun, and musically interesting. I’m looking forward to seeing them all in context on the big screen, and I would recommend this disc to anyone who is a fan of animated musicals, New Orleans, or singing amphibians. It’s fun to see Disney getting back to its roots, and doing it in style.

The Princess and the Frog: Original Songs and Score can be purchased online at Barnes & Noble.

Early last month, the first five minutes of The Princess and the Frog appeared online. You’ve most likely seen it already, but I’m excited about the impending release so I don’t care. Early reviews have been overwhelmingly positive, and the fact that merchandise has been selling out for weeks now despite the fact that the film isn’t a sequel or “franchise” picture is a hopeful sign. I want this movie to be huge. I want this to be a smack in the face to every idiotic suit who thought that earlier, lesser films from previous years failed because they were traditionally animated.

I want this movie – a traditionally animated film that’s actually good – to make such a sickening amount of money that every studio starts scrambling to start up their shuttered animation units and every animator in New York and L.A. has as much work as they can stand. I want this project-to-project hiring and firing mindset to stop, and for people to sign fat, long-term contracts. Without those animators on contract but between projects, we’ll never get those inspired make-work projects like Goldberg’s Rhapsody in Blue.

Anyway, this is the first sequence of the film. It introduces us to Tiana and her friend Charlotte as children; soon after this clip ends, we transition to characters as adults. This was part of the film that was shown at D23, and it cracked me up because it seems to be taking a direct jab at the “princess” phenomenon and mindset.

One last note: while some of the animation in this clip is complete, some shots are still rough animation. That being said, here you go:

And it might be just me, but young Charlotte is reminiscent of Darla from Mark Dindal’s sadly unappreciated 1997 film Cats Don’t Dance. And her cat reminds me of the feline Yzma from Mark Dindal’s slightly less unappreciated 2000 film The Emperor’s New Groove.