The Princess And The Frog

Today, I decided to go see James Cameron's Avatar at 4:20. Sadly though, it was sold out. Luckily, two other movies were gonna play around the same time, Planet 51 and The Princess And The Frog. I pondered,"Hmm, a traditionally animated Disney film directed by John Musker & Ron Clements(Aladdin, Treasure Planet, Little Mermaid), or a CG animated film where the alien visitor plot has the roles reversed and, from the trailers, comedic writing that would make me bang my head against the chair(a la The Spirit)?" So I went to see Princess and the Frog.

Basically, a prince from an obviously made-up country(I think) gets turned into a frog by a witch doctor(played by Keith David) while his jackass of a butler gets a talisman where he will appear as the prince as long as it is filled with the princes blood. The frog escapes from the witch doctor and meets our workaholic protagonist and mistakes her for a princess(The movie was inspired by The Frog Prince BTW). So after kissing him, the girl is turned into a frog. That's the basic jist of it.

This movie basically has the the same feel as the Musker/Clements films from the Disney Renaissance, only instead of taking place in a Eurasian country with music by Alan Menkin, we have it take place in New Orleans with music by Randy Newman. Also, our main character, Tiana, is African-American. Nice change of pace guys.

Tiana, IMO, is probably one of my favorite Disney heroines so far(if not ever). She's really likable and actually seems to have depth, unlike most of our princesses from the DRenaissance(No, that's not a misspelling).

Prince Naveen is kinda like if Lumiere was a main character.

The witch doctor, aka Shadow man, aka Dr. Dacilier is a pretty cool villain since he has voodoo on his side.

Ray, the Cajun firefly they meet up with, is a pretty fun character. Also, he's voiced by Jim Cummings, which is odd because usually when Cummings has a role, I can ALWAYS tell it's him, but here, I had no idea. Good job Jim.

Charlotte is Tiana's best friend who is essentially the only main Caucasian character and she's a spoiled brat of a rich girl who's obsessed with princesses with a pushover fat, rich dad(who's voiced by John Goodman). Also she's blonde.

...Yeeeeeaaaaaaaaaahh. Does anyone else kinda think that Charlotte is a sort of racist stereotype of white people? I understand that people may think that white people "deserve it" for our "history" with blacks, but the thing of it is, racism is wrong no matter who it's directed towards.

Other than that, I like this movie.

EDIT: That last part was the dumbest thing I've ever written, and I've had some doozies.

(Note from 2014): This is STILL the stupidest fucking thing I ever wrote.