Princess and the Frog isn’t nearly the heaping pile of shit it looks like it would be. Someone gave me a bootleg and I enjoyed the crap out of it. Disney returns to hand drawn animation, Broadway style musical numbers, actually developing fkking characters within a coherent storyline and flavors it with a spicy blend of humor, drama and – yeay! someone dies! – thumbs up.
Plus they can finally inject some personality into Disneylands New Orleans Square now that they have a movie that takes place there.
FrogPrince does look a lot like Prince Eric but I don’t think there’s much of a template to the Disney dudes outside this comparrison so I let it slide.
The villains had a little more depth to them as well: Lawrence didnt start out with bad intentions but was tempted into villainy which he later had doubts and regrets over and Dr Penis/Phallus/ShaddowMichaelJackson seemed to me to stay within a reasonable character profile.
I liked how there were nice people and cruel people, heart warmers and skeptics, charitable people and greedy people – of both races and it never appeared forced. you never, as you do with Pocahontas, see a jerk with X skin and know its just a matter of minutes till they balance it out with a jerk with Y skin. They even cleared the “work hard and don’t wait for handouts” + “womanizers outta settle down” + “think outside of your current view” + the all the other little anecdotes sprinkled about without sounding preachy and forced. the more i think about this movie, the more im so proud it wasn’t an embarrassing Fail.
If you have an ear for voices though, watching a dude with Goliath from Gargoyles voice doin a soft shoe (Dr F) and hearing Tigger (Ray the fly) with a Cajun accent could get distracting here and there.