The Princess and the Frog

Last year, Disney did a non-CG cartoon called the Princess and the Frog. I finally watched it on Netflix instant last night, just out of curiosity. I'd heard it was actually a good movie.

It starts out with all the really annoying Disney tropes: handsome prince with a silly fat butler, creepy voodoo bad guy with an even creepier shadow, two little girls who wish on a star and want to be princesses, etc. etc. We've seen all this in Disney before, but I kept watching because A) the music was good and B) I loved the black-ccents on the main characters.

Then the tropes started getting subverted and I just kept watching out of fascination. The fat butler turns into a bad guy. The whole "getting turned into a frog thing" doesn't work the way either party expects it to.

The whole "wish upon a star" thing becomes, "It's okay to wish, but if you want it to come true, you'd better follow it up with a dang lot of hard work." Which, coming from Disney, is an impressive moral, much better than Hakuna Matata or "the world owes me a living" which Goofy sang for decades.

I only had two problems with the movie: first, there were too many musical numbers. They could have cut five or six of them and the movie still would have run long.

Second, the bad guy was so creepy he kind of gave ME the cold shudders.

And at the end, his demons drag him to Hell. Alex claimed it didn't bother him, but I don't think I'll let him watch it again, just because of that scene. Maybe when he's, you know, ten or eleven.

Anyway, it was actually an impressive offering, coming out of Disney's dark ages of Let's Rewrite History. I hope they continue with the animated movies that have, you know, plots that somewhat surprise the parents. But do the bad guys really have to be so freaking scary?