I was seriously expecting Dr. Facilier or his “friends” to come back and use all the floats in the parade or something to try and take over New Orleans. This would be followed by a fight where all the main characters would use their individual talents to stop him. It would finally end with the good guys winning (of course) and Tiana or Naveen uttering some phrase from earlier in the film for that nice feeling of ironic circular structure. Unfortunately, this marvelous climax only lives in my moist brains.

Still, this film was leaps and bounds beyond Disney’s last attempt at 2-D animation with “Home on the Range.” *shudder*

Triumphantly,

Gideon

What you see as a response to Disney films I saw as more of an homage to them. Whereas in, say, Enchanted the main character actually had to grow and compromise, Tiana gets everything she wants at the end. She marries the prince (who she’s known for a full 24 hours, most of which he was a douchebag during).

I got the message of figuring out what you need instead of what you want, but what did that end up being? Technically she needed help and not to rely solely on herself, but that was presented, multiple times, as her needing to find a man.

I don’t see Disney films as having easy solutions. Belle had to endure a hell of a lot. Ariel, Simba, Aladdin, all of these characters fought, quite literally, for their dreams. It’s been a long time since the days of Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, and I think Disney had already proven they are past that. That said, what does Tiana actually do? She follows an alligator, she gets advice from what is essentially a fairy godmother, but then only accepts it when she has to.

I think this film had a lot of potentially good theses, but it definitely doesn’t explore them in a meaningful way. But that’s ok because at the end of the day it is a fairy tale. She gets her fairy tale ending, whether or not she actually needed it.

In The Frog Princess, wishing on a star is not enough, and neither is hard work. And it’s not really about needing a man to be happy either — I’m going to have to take issue with you on that one, Lovejoy. If that’s what you took away from it, maybe you need to “dig a little deeper.” The themes underlying the plot are more themes about figuring out what it is you need, and how that may differ from what you want. It’s actually surprisingly deep for a Disney flick, as each of the characters, in their own ways, abandon what’s best for them in pursuit of their dreams. To see these themes glibly written off as traditional Disney vapidness is a bit dismaying, because all those trappings are included as misdirection rather than direction.

In my estimation, The Frog Princess represents a real evolution in the way this type of story is approached. It’s Lasseter’s tacit acknowledgement that Disney recognizes the unsatisfying way these stories have been presented in the past; that easy solutions aren’t fulfilling, and that it’s not always good for dreams to come true — even if in the end they do anyway.