Disney Review: The Princess and the Frog, Tangled, Winnie the Pooh

I'm blogging through all the feature films released theatrically by Walt Disney Animation Studios! For more information on the project, you can visit my introductory post here. You can see an overview of all the posts in the series here.

Hey there, good movies.

Read the previous entry in this series here.

UPDATE: You can read the next entry in this series here.

49. The Princess and the Frog (2009)

OH MY GAUUUWWWWWD, the cel animation is back, y'all! When Lasseter took over, he cranked the traditional animation department back up and promised to alternate between CGI and cel releases. This only lasted long enough to give us two cel-animated features, because of course it did, but The Princess and the Frog is the first one, and it looks so beautiful I could cry. I don't think it would be hyperbole to put this in the top five best-animated films the studio ever did; its characters are lovingly and expressively drawn, their movement is fluid and well-choreographed, and best of all, computer animation had sufficiently advanced since the '90s that its intrusion onto the drawn models in the film feels less like a violation of the movie's world and more like a nifty accessory that enhances the film's particle and lighting details. Plus, the movie is rife with creative touches that go beyond sheer technical prowess—for example, the way that the Shadow Man's shadows creep along surfaces in angular caricatures or the way the movie becomes an art deco installation come to life during the "Almost There" sequence. The whole thing is just visually sumptuous in the best way possible, and I love, love, love the experience of letting this imagery float into my eyeballs.

It's a lucky thing that The Princess and the Frog is so gorgeous to look at, though, because the rest of it is... ehhh.... There are good, non-visual things about this movie, don't get me wrong: I like that Tiana is a businesswoman (a first for the lucrative, regressive princess brand), and even if there aren't any all-time-great tunes here, the music is lots of fun, and Randy Newman feels like a better fit for the New Orleans setting than, I dunno, Alan Menken, given that Newman partly grew up in New Orleans and is musically associated with the region, largely thanks to "Louisiana 1927." It's also worthwhile that Disney finally made an animated movie with a black protagonist, but there we start to run aground of the Issues. Even putting aside the fact that Disney, in their infinite wisdom, somehow decided that their first African-American protagonist should spend 75% of the film as a frog and not, you know, visibly black. There's also the uncomfortable parade of racial/regional stereotypes that fill out the supporting cast. None of that, though, is as bad as the gobsmackingly terrible decision to set the movie in Jazz-Age New Orleans, present the racial inequalities explicitly within its expository opening minutes (there's a shot that pans from the regal white part of town to the shotgun-shack black part of town, in case you forgot about the effects of Jim Crow and stuff), and then act like this is just some hunky dory situation where everybody gets along and all you need to overcome systematic hardship is love and hard work, like, "La de da, what's racism?"—this isn't quite Song of the South's romanticized don't-call-it-slavery sharecropping, but it's on the same path. Like, what were you thinking, Disney? This was such an easy problem to avoid; just make the villain some rich white dude trying to make money off the black characters instead of another black character using magic to be evil or whatever. Oh, and besides all this, the story just isn't that good, flitting from plot point to plot point without really developing anything more than their usually jokey setup (wtf is up with the zydeco firefly, folks). Plus, it wastes an excellent Keith David vocal performance (is there any other?) on a villain who, though visually neat, is something of a muddle as far as characters go, and that's probably a good symbol for the movie as a whole.

I made a joke on Letterboxd about how with the combination of beautiful animation and questionable racial messages, The Princess and the Frog makes it feel like the Disney Renaissance again, but that's not quite true. The Princess and the Frog has none of the serious pretensions that weighted '90s Disney, which is both a blessing and a curse—blessing for the way it lacks the stultifying self-importance that made a few of those movies a drag, curse for how the film is so frothy light that it feels inconsequential even when it isn't. Plus, as far as themes go, The Princess and the Frog's subversive elements seem to be missing the point of a lot of the Renaissance's commentary, which makes it feel like a "one step forward, two steps back" kind of situation. Like, yes, Tiana is independent and wants to own her own business, but she does kind of need a man to do it, at least according to the narrative logic, even if she says otherwise—an inconsistency that might feel more in-step with the typical Renaissance themes of "yeah, women should be independent if they want, but you know deep down they want to get married, too" if the story's love interest wasn't such a pig. I mean, he's actually a frog, but what I mean is that Prince Naveen is a real sexist heel in the worst way and that there's no reason but the narrative's silly machinations for he and Tiana to end up together by the end. It's like the movie saw Beauty and the Beast and Mulan's mockery of chauvinism and thought that sounded like a good idea, too, but then it forgot that the heroine shouldn't end up with the chauvinist. Oh, you know, Gaston's been hounding Belle the whole movie, so I guess they should get married to each other, right? Blerg. It would be infuriating if the movie took it more seriously, but again, the movie's touch is so light that nothing really lands with much impact, even its flaws.

Which is why my overall reaction is, despite some intellectual reservations, a slobbering, goo-goo-eyed adoration of the freaking animation here. Because it's AMAZING. There's only one more of these cel animated features left, and I'm glad Disney pulled out the stops before moving on to CG for the foreseeable future.

50. Tangled (2010)

My wife once remarked how much of a shame it is that The Princess and the Frog was followed immediately by Tangled, as it basically guaranteed that Disney's first African-American protagonist would be overshadowed by yet another white one. And... that's basically what's happened. It's not that people dislike or have forgotten The Princess and the Frog, but there's no question that Tangled (and definitely the upcoming Frozen) eclipsed its previous movie many times over.

One has to wonder how much of this has to do with the extent to which Disney hasn't yet given an African-American protagonist the full-on princess-movie format—sure, The Princess and the Frog has elements of that story and Tiana was included in the Princess branding, but it's hardly a pure distillation of the Disney Princess Movie archetypes, what with its emphasis on the working class and animal transformations and its lack of true yearning (Tiana's desire song is less I Want than I Have a Stiff Upper Lip), and in a lot of ways, the same is true of Mulan and Pocahontas, too (other women of color incorporated into the Princess canon). In fact, if you look at the history of the princess movie, there's the uncomfortable fact that the most archetypal iterations of the genre—Sleeping Beauty, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast—are the ones given to white protagonists, which could possibly indicate that Disney views its most popular and enduring storytelling format as a primarily "white" property. More kindly, it could be that these movies simply don't want to graft European conventions onto people of non-European descent, though given how thoroughly Disney imposes Christian (or at least "Western," whatever that means) values onto all of its movies, even those telling non-European tales, I wouldn't bank too much on that defense.

Even if we give Disney the benefit of the doubt and suppose that the reason The Princess and the Frog is less traditionally a Princess Movie because of some intent to highlight the unique culture of people of color, there's still the issue of relative quality. Because while The Princess and the Frog is jazzy and distinctive to Tangled's archetypal beats, there's no getting around that, through implicit racism or just the luck of the creative lottery, Tangled is simply the better executed of the two. And by a long shot, too. Verily, it is, with the possible exception of Moana, the best CGI-animated Disney movie to date. This is in no small part thanks to Alan Menken back in the saddle again writing Disney music, which gives Tangled that breezy, sweeping, o-so-Menken heart (love ya, Randy Newman, but this just isn't your ballgame). The film is also grounded by an absolutely stellar vocal performance from Mandy Moore as Rapunzel, who delivers both her dialogue and her sung parts with a vibrancy and expression that makes Rapunzel absolutely come alive—by my book, Rapunzel is the best-acted Disney princess since Belle, which isn't so much a critique of the actors in the interim but just a testament to how good Moore is in this role. There's also, like, legitimately non-irritating comic relief, largely because the comic relief characters (Pascal the chameleon and Maximus the horse) are silent, relegated instead to pantomime and other unobtrusive and kind of charming forms of humor.

Oh, and the animation. I've griped a lot about the transition to CGI, and I still stand by my earlier critiques (and the amazingness of Princess and the Frog's cel animation); but Tangled does look very good. Using non-photorealistic rendering (which Bolt had also used, though not to nearly so intense an effect), the movie looks something like a cross between a mainstream CG-animated film and a moving painting. The effect is frequently breathtaking, particularly in the mid-film sequence of scenes that involves Rapunzel and Flynn arriving at the kingdom and culminates in the lantern-lighting scene—it's all so vivid and gorgeously designed, and it shows a better visual flair for editing and shot composition than any Disney movie since... I dunno, Brother Bear, probably. There's also just the design of the movie, looking halfway between a traditional fairy tale and a modern cartoon, and specifically the rendering of Rapunzel's famously long hair, in both regular and glowing forms. The hair is super impressive, actually; you look at Disney movies made not too long before Tangled, and you see CGI hair as these awkwardly chunky polygons, and while Rapunzel's hair doesn't look exactly realistic (it kind of looks like a mass of fine spaghetti, and the movie can't, for example, ever make up its mind exactly how long her hair is, at some points indicating that it's enough to completely envelop a room in its folds and other times being small enough to carry in a small bundle), it works magnificently within the movie's aesthetic. And that's the secret: Tangled knows when to resort to caricature and when to resort to realism, and how to do so within a consistent artistic sensibility, something very few Disney movies with CG animation have been able to manage. Even if I do decide that Moana is the better overall movie of Disney's CGI features, there's no contest that Tangled is the best-looking CGI film Disney's made yet. It's stunning.

If there's a weak link, it's the villain, Rapunzel's abusive, gaslighting Mother Gothel, who is using Rapunzel's magic glowing hair to retain her youth—sort of a throwback to the early days of Disney, where the villains were all women jealous of how young and beautiful the protagonists were. She's fine, I guess, but there's nothing particularly charismatic or even visually interesting about her. Which is too bad, since these princess movies have a pretty good track record with villains. Otherwise... yeah, this is just a really solid film that I like a ton. Moving on...

51. Winnie the Pooh (2011)

Back when this movie, Disney's theatrical sequel to The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, came out, I went to see it in the theater, because Winnie the Pooh is the best. It turned out to be just me and this mother and her young children in the theater, which was awkward until the second the opening credits rolled and I became completely oblivious to everything except how delightful every inch of this movie is. I dunno if the mother, clutching her kids close to protect them from the scary weird twentysomething riveted by a movie clearly made for five year olds, felt any better, but I had a great time. In fact, I think the only two theatrical experiences that topped Winnie the Pooh for me that year were Tree of Life and Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (2011's a weird year for movies). It's my favorite Disney movie of the decade by a comfortable margin, and it's on my short list not only for the best animated films of the decade but the best films of the decade, period. Is this surprising to anyone? Y'all already know I love Winnie the Pooh. Y'all already read my treatise on the original movie. And this is basically more of the same.

I mean that. Winnie the Pooh is, at times, shockingly similar to The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh. There are small updates—Zooey Deschanel sings some songs (music in general plays a much bigger part in the film, and unlike The Many Adventures, you wouldn't be wrong to call Winnie the Pooh a musical); there are some instances of computer animation, particularly in the "Everything Is Honey" sequence; the screenplay is slightly more jokey than the classic Pooh stories. There are a few characters who aren't quite the same either, most significantly, Rabbit, whose original incarnation I could never imagine, for example, donning a fake military hat and doing evasive maneuvers. But on the whole, this is pretty much exactly the same as those classic shorts: Pooh wants honey and is a silly old bear, Tigger bounces, Kanga and Roo do nothing, the animals misunderstand words and take those misunderstandings to absurd degrees, the characters are aware of their being just illustrations in a book, etc. etc. Putting aside the brief computer flourishes, the animation is still basically the same, too, a seriously impressive recreation of the sketchy xerography of the original movie (including even details like the dark scribbles that shade Tigger's stripes), and while we're talking recreation, I'd be remiss not to mention Jim Cummings's stunningly good work mimicking Sterling Holloway's original Pooh and Paul Winchell's original Tigger voices; those voices are so central to those characters, and Cummings nails it (though unfortunately, not all of the rest of the cast fares so well, but eh, can't win them all, and after all, this isn't Cummings first gig as Pooh and Tigger anyway—he'd been working in those roles for various Disney projects since the '80s). So yeah; we're treated to a pretty stunning Pooh Bear revival, just with some slightly new stories—the Winnie the Pooh expansion pack, if you will. AND THAT'S BEAUTIFUL. The world needs more thoughtful, meticulous evocations of classic Winnie the Pooh (as opposed to, say, the callow and ugly way that Disney has milked the brand ). It's not a retread; it's a public service.

Honestly, the biggest difference between Winnie the Pooh and the old Pooh stories is the way this new one is so enthusiastic about the possibilities of its own animation, so you know I don't mind that. Winnie the Pooh takes the meta framing of the old Pooh stories and runs with it, having its characters bounce off letters and hang off periods and even at one point stack the letters into a ladder to get out of a pit; the text is a prop in its own story, and the film is relentlessly inventive with the way it deploys this device. This is something you could only do in animation, specifically something you could only do in this particular type of animation, where the characters look sketchy and roughly drawn enough to appear convincingly as storybook illustrations come to life, and Winnie the Pooh is totally in love with just the dance of these characters and their letters moving across the screen. This comes to a head in the wonderful end credits, which involve the characters running, climbing, and playing with the text of the credits as it scrolls up the screen. Then there are the musical sequences, two of which feature completely different animation styles (my favorite being the chalk animation of "The Backson Song") that push the characters and the aesthetic in fun new directions for the sheer pleasure of seeing an animated experiment. This is pure worship of the medium. I'd be hard-pressed to name a Disney movie outside of the two Fantasia features so obsessed with animation for animation's sake. It's incredible.

Winnie the Pooh is slight, a mere 63 minutes (53 without the end credits), but it's slight in the best way, a sweet, frothy, and eye-popping hour without a dull or empty second in its runtime. It's also the last cel-animated feature Disney's done—not sure why Lasseter reneged on his alternating-CGI-and-cel promise, but I'm pissed. So if for nothing else, we can savor this movie as the swan song of a wonderful tradition. But oh, there is so much more than just that to savor in this treasure of a film.

Anyway, join me next time for what should be the second-to-last post in this series. We're almost at the end!