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The Princess and the Frog

Traditional 2D animation is back courtesy of the rejuvenated Disney Animation Studios. The original hand drawn art form, which created Disney and made it what it is, makes a welcome and long overdue return after the virtual standardisation of filmed animation as 3D CGI. It is perhaps ironic then that the people who were arguably responsible for that trumping by 3D are the ones who have brought the original 2D style back to us. And so Disney Animation, under the overall stewardship of John Lasseter and the wizards at Pixar, gives us The Princess and the Frog, a movie that takes its audience back to Disney basics with a charming, funny, magical, musical fairytale adventure in the best traditions of the genre.

It’s New Orleans in the 1920’s and Tiana is a young woman who wants to follow her father's dream by opening her very own restaurant. She works hard, two jobs, non-stop, giving up any sort of fun or chance of a wider life by being solely focussed on achieving her one and only goal. Love and romance is the furthest thing from her mind. It’s interesting that Tiana is a very modern and career driven ‘realist’ Disney 'princess' – which makes her rather different from her previous Disney kin. Anyway, Tiana gets mixed up with visiting Prince Naveen who’s financially broke and in New Orleans looking for a rich bride to marry for her money. Except that when Tiana meets him, Naveen has been turned in to a frog by the wonderfully sinister voodoo sorcerer Dr. Facilier as part of his evil plan to gain control of the city and appease the dark forces from ‘the other side’ whom he owes bigtime. Frog Prince Naveen, mistaking Tiana for a real princess at a fancy dress ball, asks her to kiss him to break the spell (as in the old fairytale). Tiana is repulsed, but, seeing an opportunity, she makes a deal with the frog prince: if she agrees and he returns to human form he’ll then help her to get her restaurant. Naveen agrees. And so she lays a smacker on him…with unexpected results for them both. The frog pair then head off together on an adventure in to the bayou to find a way to break the spell and return them both to human form. Along the way they make some new friends, get in to various amusing scrapes with hunters and wildlife, and learn more about each other, themselves and what it is they both really need from life, which is likely different to what it is they each might want. As with all Disney fairytales The Princess and the Frog is full of strong and positive messages for kids with the prime one here being about being open to life and all its possibilities, to take time to look around and see what you might be missing. To keep an open mind and embrace new things that might come along. Basically to chase your dreams but make sure you live life while you do.

Technically The Princess and the Frog is top notch. The film looks beautiful. There is something about hand drawn animation and painted backdrops even the best CG can’t quite capture. There is a soulful, human feel to it. And the design and animation on show here is top quality. The depiction of New Orleans and the surrounding countryside looks and feels wonderful and very atmospheric with the film using many of the city’s real locations including Bourbon Street and the creepy and evocative Lafayette Cemetery. Of course, being Disney, it is a heightened and overall ‘nicer’ representation of the real city and the time period (racism doesn’t seem to exist here.) But for this film that approach feels right and can be forgiven. The character designs are mostly realistic with humans looking human and not particularly stylised or with exaggerated features. The designers have more fun with the non-human characters such as Louie the trumpet playing Alligator and Reggie the Cajun firefly.

Now, being a New Orleans set musical, jazz is gonna have to play a major part. And it does. The jazz styles of the time pervade almost every aspect of the film and virtually every tune, which range from big band and trumpet driven numbers to more soulful southern ballads. The songs by Randy Newman are all very good and help tell the story and sell the characters while making for some uncontrollable toe tapping. Then there’s the voice cast. They are all spot on. I especially loved Jennifer Cody as grown up Charlotte, Tiana’s rich, flighty, shallow yet kindly friend since childhood. She has a wonderfully funny scene with her daddy in the café Tiana works in where she’s not letting her ‘big daddy’ get a word in edgeways. Then there’s Ritchie Montgomery as Reggie the Cajun firefly who longs for his one true love Evangeline. He is also great and helps provide Reggie with the films’ most heartfelt storyline, which forms part of the motif for the entire film and also harkens back to a previous Disney classic of old. And a special shout out goes to the great Keith David as Dr Facilier, the downright creepy and evil voodoo dude. He looks like Baron Samedi in Live and Let Die and gives the film a really cool, dark and scary edge. He even conjures up some shadow demons from the other side to hunt down our froggy heroes. I could see some young kids being kinda freaked out at these nasties as well as by some of the other weird and scary imagery on show here. And that’s great. Just what a proper fairytale should be.

Being a big kid I really enjoyed The Princess and the Frog. It knows exactly what it is and does what it sets out to do beautifully. The script is familiar and traditional yet always interesting and fun while providing a nice modernist edge to its heroine. As with the best of Disney it also gives us some wonderful and memorable supporting characters. The film looks lovely and the old style jazz inspired music is catchy and often infectious in its energy. The film may not have the same depth or emotional impact of Disney and/or Pixar’s absolute finest but The Princess and the Frog is still a darn good family film made with real care and love. It also reminds us of the wonderful artistry and atmosphere of traditional animation, of just how special that medium is and how it should never be lost to film. And to think it took the intervention of a 3D animation company to remind us. Nice one Pixar.

Geek Happenings: Books

The Good Fairies of New York



This week I finished reading Martin Millar’s comic/fantasy The Good Fairies of New York, an earlier novel by the Scottish author of Lonely Werewolf Girl. This one was first published in 1992 and is a lot shorter in length and less accomplished in its prose and overall story. Don’t get me wrong, it is still a lot of weird, subversive, punk fun while being an easy and funny read. It’s just not as well written or smartly plotted or vibrant as LWG.

Two Scottish thimble fairies called Heather and Morag accidentally end up across the pond in New York. The pair are both wannabe punks rebelling against the ancient traditions of their fairy clans by dying their hair and starting a fairy punk band adapting traditional fairy music to a punk style. After accidentally causing havoc in Scotland Heather and Morag flee their home and somehow end up in New York where they meet a couple of humans they deem in need of their special fairy help (they are ‘good’ fairies after all.) One of the humans is Dinnie, an overweight and antisocial young guy who is secretly in love with his neighbour, the sweet, artsy, new age beauty Kerry…who happens to be the other human in need of fairy help. Kerry is desperate to win a local arts fair with her flower alphabet, but she is also secretly very ill with Crohn’s Disease. At the same time Heather and Morag are being tracked by suspicious local Italian and Chinese fairies plus by other Scottish fairies sent to bring them home to face the (traditional) music. And we also have a rebellion brewing by English fairies in Cornwall against the enforced industrialisation of their fairydom by the cruel and despotic Cornish fairy king Tala. Add in the ghost of Johnny Thunders, the dead lead singer of the New York Dolls who has come back to look for his original guitar, and you get one truly bizarre tale. Needless to say all these crazy threads come together as the story goes on. And it is mostly rewarding and a right old laugh.

This is the oddest, most bizarre story about fairies I’ve ever read (although, granted, I haven't read many), being as it is full of punk music, bloody fights, fairy sex, human pornography, colostomy bags plus lots more equally freaky stuff. But, as with Lonely Werewolf Girl, Martin Millar writes great characters and has a wonderful knack for offbeat, surreal humour. I laughed out loud a fair bit reading this, though not as much as with Lonely Werewolf Girl. A fun and freaky book but it just has a few too many different story strands to keep track of and the prose is rather more basic than that of Lonely Werewolf Girl. Good but not great.

A Little Princess

Having recently rewatched the wonderful 1995 film of A Little Princess I’ve gone and bought a new edition of the original novel. It is a classic and I’m really curious how it works as a book in contrast to the brilliant but altered Alfonso Cuaron film that I adore. As I type I'm about ten pages in to chapter one and it is beautifully written taking its time to set up the character of Sara who is currently on her way to the school with her father.

I have a few other books on the pile to read too, including another Martin Millar one called Lux the Poet. And I really have to get around to reading I Am Legend, don't I Dawn?

A Little Princess is a little gem

You might think this is an odd film for a bloke in his late thirties who's a horror and sci fi geek to love. But it isn’t. At heart I’m a big softy who also loves films and stories in general that can make an emotional connection – as long as the themes and ideas strike a chord. And they most certainly do in this film.

I hadn’t watched A Little Princess for a long time. But today I was looking through my DVD’s and for some reason it just leapt out at me. I’m glad it did. I remembered it as being a very good film but had forgotten just how beautiful it is both thematically and artistically. It was originally recommended to me not long after it first came out in cinemas back in 1996, but back them I didn’t bother, dismissing it as just another boring kids film. It took me a while to finally see it, catching up with it on TV one Christmas. And I was instantly captivated. In the hands of Oscar nominated Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón who made Y Tu Mamá También, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and Children of Men, A Little Princess is a shining gem.

The story goes like this: It is 1914 and young Sara Crewe (Liesel Matthews), an imaginative and kind-hearted girl, is brought from India to New York by Captain Crewe (Liam Cunningham), her British Army officer father. She is enrolled in the same private boarding school her mother attended as a child. Her father then departs for Europe to rejoin the British Army to fight in the trenches of the First World War. Sara quickly becomes popular with her schoolmates, capturing their imaginations with colourful, magical tales of India and of its gods and goddesses. But tragedy eventually intervenes, which leaves Sara destitute and at the mercy of the schools nasty headmistress, Miss Minchen (a truly hissable Eleanor Bron.) To cope with her grief and her new station in life, Sara becomes a close friend of the schools child servant Becky. Along with Becky, Sara escapes her horrible new life by going further in to her world of stories and fantasy.

A Little Princess is adapted from the classic 1904 novel of the same name written by Frances Hodgson Burnett who also wrote The Secret Garden. This film version from 1995 changes several elements of the original novel including moving the school from England to America, moving the time period forward to the outbreak of the First World War and reinventing the entire resolution of Sara’s story. I haven’t read the book but the story as told here works perfectly. Thematically this film also works perfectly, at least for me. The exploration of childhood and what it means to be constrained as a child by often stupid seeming rules that quash an exhuberant and vivid imagination, a gift to be treasured and one that most of us will eventually lose once we've grown up. To allow imagination to soar is a wonderful thing as is encouraging freedom of expression and creativity for its own sake. The ability to imagine, to dream, to wonder…it is fundamental to who we are. And sometimes, for some of us, it can be our only means of escape, a way to freedom.

And then there is the look and the design of this film. It is simply gorgeous with detailed and lavish sets that were built almost entirely on a studio back lot in Burbank, California. The cinematography by Cuarón’s regular DP Emmanuel Lubezki is sumptuous and elegant. For the Indian/fantasy scenes it is dreamily colourful while being suitably crisp and grim for the reality of the dirty streets and alleys of New York.

The cast is excellent with young Liesel Matthews imbuing Sara with an inner strength, warm hearted kindness and an open honesty that never lets you think of her as being remotely spoiled or silly. Eleanor Bron is wonderfully cold and cruel as Miss Minchen. You can sense in her a real sadness and bitterness that comes out as a kind of jealousy towards poor Sara. All the young actresses playing the girls in the school are great especially the little one who plays Lottie, the ‘possessed’ girl with the screaming fits. She made me laugh.

A Little Princess is a carefully crafted, beautifully rendered piece of work coming from a top-notch filmmaker. Like the best films of Pixar it is too good to just label as a children's film, it trancends that. It is a film that deserves a place on the shelf of every family and of every genuine film lover.

Trailer:

A Little Princess 1995 (Trailer) - MyVideo