THE PRINCESS AND THE FROG

There’s been much fanfare about Disney introducing its first animated African-American “princess” character, but the project into which they’ve dropped her isn’t one of their strongest offerings.

Set in New Orleans, the story finds waitress Tiana (voiced by Anika Noni Rose), dreaming of opening her own restaurant to honor the memory of her late father (voiced by Terrence Howard). While she wistfully stirs the gumbo pot, an irresponsible foreign prince named Naveen (voiced by Bruno Campos) sails into town, attracts the attention of nefarious witch doctor Dr. “Shadowman” Facilier (voiced by Keith David), and is promptly turned into a frog. It’s all part of a very elaborate and never fully clear plan by Facilier to take over the city, but that’s not important. The key plot point is: prince becomes frog and, in a clever voodoo-y twist, winds up turning Tiana into a frog, too, when she reluctantly tries to kiss him back to humanity.

The newly amphibious pair then set out on a bayou adventure in the hopes of tracking down a reclusive voodoo priestess who might break Facilier’s spell. Along the way, they encounter a lovable crocodile named Louis (Michael-Leon Wooley), who wants nothing more than to play trumpet in a jazz band, and spunky Cajun firefly Ray (voiced by Jim Cummings), who’s filled with all kinds of colloquialisms and is madly in love with the evening star, which he mistakenly believes is another, faraway firefly he’s named “Evangeline.” Together, this rag-tag group wind their way along rivers and battle Facilier’s henchmen... and, not surprisingly, the bickering frogs soon begin to fall for each other But how will they become human again?

As whimsical and colorful as TPATF sounds, it had stretches of time where it dragged, and a lot of it seemed strangely familiar, as though the film had been patched together with pieces of other, more successful Disney movies gone by. Louis’ song about living in the swamps had a very Baloo-the-Bear vibe to it; Ray could easily be Jiminey Cricket’s hillbilly cousin; Prince Naveen is as self-absorbed as The Emperor’s New Groove’s Kuzco; and even Tiana feels like an amalgam of any combination of plucky animated heroines before her.

And the animation itself didn’t really seem as polished or as refined as Disney’s classic animated films... nor as stylized or slick as its more recent offerings (like ... New Groove). The film possessed a decidedly Saturday-morning-cartoon look about it, with very “loose” character renderings that didn’t always remain consistent from scene to scene, and I almost wondered if it had originally been intended as a straight-to-DVD release.

All that said, TPATF does have its charms. The music is wonderful, and Ray has his own glow-y subplot that was really quite poignant and beautiful. I’m giving the film one extra slice for him alone. There are some laugh-out-loud funny moments and, because it’s a Disney film, at least one or two that will make you cry, and the action is populated by enough quirky, goofy characters to keep kids more than entertained.

It’s not as groundbreaking as you might expect, but still a solid choice for a family outing this holiday season.