Nicholas Thurkettle

The Princess and the Frog
Directors: Ron Clements & John Musker
Writers: Story by Ron Clements & John Musker and Greg Erb and Jason Oremland, Screenplay by Ron Clements & John Musker and Rob Edwards, based on the story The Frog Princess by Ed Baker; music and lyrics by Randy Newman
Producer: Peter Del Vecho
Featuring the Vocal Talents of: Anika Noni Rose, Bruno Campos, Keith David, Michael-Leon Wooley, Jennifer Cody, Jim Cummings, Peter Bartlett, Jenifer Lewis, Oprah Winfrey, Terrence Howard, John Goodman

I recognize what they’re doing – the broad humor and the good heart, the way colorful ink is made to imitate life, the fairy tale story that proudly wins its happy ending. It is familiar but shocking, because it makes you realize just how long it has been since you saw it. It’s Disney Animation.

This is not to say that the Walt Disney Transglobal Entertainment Conglompire has failed to put out cartoons in recent years. But it felt so distressingly like they hated their own legacy and character, like they had no confidence that children still worked the way they did even 15 years ago when The Lion King was enrapturing them. When the budgets and staffs were slashed, when spreadsheet-inspired sequels to classics were outsourced to quickie TV animators, and finally, when they announced that they were through with 2D hand-drawn animation, and would be switching entirely to digital like their competitors at Pixar and Dreamworks, I wondered why all these suited bigwigs could have such poor taste as to grin at a funeral.

But with Pixar heads John Lasseter and Ed Catmull brought in to take the reins of the animation studio that inspired them and so many other artists in its heydays, we have the privilege of watching this one corner of Disney re-discover, and re-embrace, its true nature. The Princess and the Frog might not rank in the masterpiece class of Disney’s long roll call of animated features – the format they essentially invented with 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs – but it brings with it a palpable breath of joy. You get to see them remembering what they do, and that it feels good.
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