Subtitle The Princess And The Frog

In this basic game, firefly Ray and his family form silhouettes of Disney princesses (and a few villains) and you try to match them to their real portrait. If you complete it successfully, then Mama Odie gives you a quick retelling of your choice of a princesses story. It is clever game with the fireflies slowly creating the picture, but has almost no repeatability.

subtitle The Princess and the Frog

There are a number of short (2-3 minute) vignettes included in the bonus materials. The Disney Legacy features animators talk about how the legacy of Disney animation influences their work today. Disney's Newest Princess feels like a Disney Channel short that introduces the movie and it's basic premise to audiences. The Princess and the Animator features the animators talking about how they worked to bring a new princess to life. Conjuring the Villain is a look at the making of villain Dr. Facilier and how actor Keith David influenced the character's development. A Return to the Animated Musical looks at how The Princess and the Frog remains a musical, but differs so much from traditional Disney musical films. The Art Galleries show story board and concept art from the movie.

Disney celebrates a modern-day classic from the directors of The Little Mermaid and Aladdin. Discover what really happened after the princess kissed the frog in an inspired twist on the world's most famous kiss. This hilarious adventure leaps off the screen with stunning animation, irresistible music, and an unforgettable cast of characters. Enter the world of Princess Tiana, a world that features talking frogs, singing alligators, and lovesick fireflies. Follow Tiana as she embarks on an incredible journey through the mystical bayous of Louisiana. Spurred on by a little bit of courage and great big dreams, Tiana and her new friends come to realize what's truly important in life: love, family, and friendship.

Disney celebrates a modern-day classic from the directors of The Little Mermaid and Aladdin. Discover what really happened after the princess kissed the frog in an inspired twist on the world\'s most famous kiss. This hilarious adventure leaps off the screen with stunning animation, irresistible music, and an unforgettable cast of characters. Enter the world of Princess Tiana, a world that features talking frogs, singing alligators, and lovesick fireflies. Follow Tiana as she embarks on an incredible journey through the mystical bayous of Louisiana. Spurred on by a little bit of courage and great big dreams, Tiana and her new friends come to realize what\'s truly important in life: love, family, and friendship.

Much has been made about Tiana (voice of Anika Noni Rose) being Disney's first African American "princess," but Disney has never been afraid of branching out. Lead females have included an Arab (Jasmine, Aladdin), a lioness (Nala, The Lion King), a Native American (Pocahontas), and a Chinese girl (Mulan). Tiana has just as much spirit as any other Disney standout (and she spends most of the film as a frog anyway). It's certainly time (or past time) for the Magic Kingdom to embrace a black character, but I suspect this has more meaning to those who write about such things that it will to the movie's target audience - children of all ages, genders, and races.

Tiana is a hard-working waitress who holds down two jobs at the eateries of New Orleans. She dreams of amassing enough money to one day open her own restaurant - a dream engendered in her at an early age and encouraged by her father (voice of Terrence Howard) and mother (Oprah Winfrey). Her best friend, Charlotte (Jennifer Cody), has an equally ambitious goal: to marry a prince. This looks feasible when Prince Naveen (Bruno Campos), a foreign dignitary, visits New Orleans. Unfortunately, he falls afoul of the voodoo of Dr. Facilier (Keith David), who turns him into a frog. The first woman he meets is Tiana, at a costume ball where she's dressed in a princess costume. He convinces her to kiss him, but the results aren't what either expects. Instead of Naveen regaining human form, Tiana is turned into a frog. Now, with the help of a jovial crocodile named Louis (Michael-Leon Wooley) and the firefly Ray (Jim Cummings), the two must avoid the shadow-creatures of Dr. Facilier while attempting to locate the voodoo priestess Mama Odie (Jenifer Lewis), who may know how they can become human again.

If there's little that's new or challenging in The Princess and the Frog, therein lies the core of its charm. The movie is delightfully "old school," if that term can be applied to how the genre looked a mere 20 years ago when The Little Mermaid reinvigorated it. The structure and composition is the result of careful planning, but it comes across as inspired. Tiana is the next great Disney princess and The Princess and the Frog is a worthy entry into a genre whose resurrection is welcome.

PRINCESS AND THE FROGHardworking and ambitious, Tiana (Anika Noni Rose) dreams of one day opening the finest restaurant in New Orleans. Her dream takes a slight detour when she meets Prince Naveen (Bruno Campos), who has been turned into an amphibian by evil Dr. Facilier. Mistaking her for a princess and hoping to break the spell, Naveen plants a kiss on poor Tiana -- thereby turning her into a frog as well. The pair hop along on an adventure through the bayous to seek the help of a powerful priestess.

and Kelvin CedenoFor over eighty years, the name "Disney" has been associated with animation. Live-action output exceeded animation in volume at Walt Disney's studio by the 1950s, but the cartoons remained a company cornerstone widely celebrated. Disney rode out the 20th century with traditionally-animated features still ranking as one of the biggest draws in the entertainment world.In those eighty years, the medium has experienced countless advances, from synchronized sound and color to sophisticated techniques involving computers. Toy Story, Pixar's 1995 entry into feature filmmaking, underscored just how significant the computer could be to animation. One after another, computer-animated movies -- by Pixar and newly-formed studios on their tail -- achieved hit status. At the same time, the returns were shrinking and costs rising on Disney's in-house feature animation. Management decided that 2004's Home on the Range would be the last of its kind, selling off animation equipment and decimating the workforce. The Disney animated feature lived on, but in CGI and, as 2005's Chicken Little illustrated, with rather different sensibilities.While fans of hand-drawn animation lamented its evident demise, a changing of the guard at Disney brought hope of resurrection. In fact, with Pixar's John Lasseter and Ed Catmull now also calling the shots for Disney animation, traditional methods were soon set to return. Amidst all this change, the gap in "2D"-animated projects would end up being just slightly longer than the time elapsed between Lady and the Tramp and Sleeping Beauty. After animated portions of the predominantly live-action Enchanted (done by the independent studio of '90s Disney animator James Baxter) seemed to prep us, the hand-drawn method made its full-fledged return with The Princess and the Frog, number 49 in Disney's malleable official canon. There is good reason that The Princess and the Frog feels like an absolute return in spirit and style to Disney's most recent animation heyday. The film is a musical comedy written and directed by Ron Clements and John Musker, animation veterans responsible for The Little Mermaid and Aladdin, two of what some Disney fans call the "Fab Four" classics released from 1989 to 1994 (the others being Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King). Princess aspires to a similar type of entertainment, one as heavily inspired by Broadway musicals.Set in 1920s New Orleans, the film tells the story of Tiana (voiced by Dreamgirls' Anika Noni Rose), a young black woman. Inheriting the work ethic of her parents (Oprah Winfrey and Terrence Howard), Tiana is rarely idle while waitressing around the clock at two restaurants. She dreams of opening her own establishment, to be named Tiana's Place, which she foresees serving the people her family's signature southern cooking with colorful local flavor. For now, it's just a dream as she fills her dresser with coffee jars of tip money.Tiana's best friend, southern belle Charlotte (Jennifer Cody), excitedly shares the news that a real prince will be visiting their city. From childhood, Charlotte has dreamed of marrying royalty and her decent, wealthy father "Big Daddy" La Bouff (John Goodman) has already made plans for the handsome foreigner to attend a ball at the family mansion. Hailing from the (fictional) Mediterranean country of Maldonia, Prince Naveen (Bruno Campos, "Jesse") arrives with a big secret; his parents have cut him off, leaving him broke. Semi-voluntarily, Naveen and his servant Lawrence (Peter Bartlett, "One Life to Live") pay a visit to New Orleans voodooist Dr. Facilier (Keith David), who provides them with a complimentary tarot card reading and unrequested bonus.At the La Bouff ball, an event which should clear the path between Tiana and her dream restaurant's fixer-upper location, Naveen reveals himself to be not the stuffy looker with whom Charlotte is excited to waltz, but a small, slimy talking frog. In the hopes that he'll return to human form as in the well-known story of The Frog Prince, amphibian Naveen persuades Tiana to kiss him. Reluctantly, she does and it triggers a transformation, but it is hers into froghood.Adjusting to their reduced dimensions and new biology, Naveen and Tiana brave swamp and bayou in the hopes of finding blind voodoo priestess Mama Odie (Jenifer Lewis) and having her make them human again. Joining the two on the journey are trumpet-playing alligator Louis (Michael-Leon Wooley) and Cajun firefly Ray (Jim Cummings). Plenty of original songs, composed and arranged by Pixar favorite Randy Newman, turn up throughout the film. All but one are performed by characters and the exception is sung not by Newman (whose own voice hasn't been heard in a Pixar film since A Bug's Life) but by New Orleans native son Dr. John. As the setting mandates, Newman's creations take on a jazzy sound with shades of blues and gospel. The numbers serve familiar needs, comfortably aligning with the songs created for Disney's '90s Renaissance features. They're generally agreeable, advancing story in a fun way.Much of The Princess and the Frog is fun, if a little familiar. Clements and Musker seem to have been energized by their time off (their last collaboration was 2002 flop Treasure Planet and last comparable musical was 1997's Hercules). The duo hasn't forgotten what made their biggest hits so popular; this spunky mix of character, story, and song feels close to those they've previously supplied, without seeming tired or overly derivative. If this film doesn't strike you as being as winning and magical as past triumphs, it could be that the past 15-20 years have hardened you. It could also be that this lacks the sweetening power of nostalgia. Or, like me, you could be a little underwhelmed by the personalities and comedy.Tiana and Naveen are solid leads, whose clashing backgrounds and personalities make them suitable for the kind of romantic comedy arc the film gives them. Charlotte and her father are strong peripheral characters who are less predictable than you'd expect. In Dr. Facilier, a man whose shadow has a life of its own and who boasts having "friends on the other side", we find one of Disney's strongest villains in a long, long time.It is beyond these early introductions that the film's characterization efforts stumble. We get one goofy caricature after another: the gentle giant gator with jazz band dreams, the lovesick lightning bug with the funny accent, a trio of hillbillies seemingly descended from the Gogan family of Pete's Dragon, and, to top it all off, the wacky, wrinkled Mama Odie. Each of these creations seems designated to score laughs from little ones. But the broad antics are more distracting than diverting. They threaten our investment in the story and the leads and come close to derailing the picture. I hope that I come to warm to the sections involving these personalities in future viewings, but after three, I am doubting it. On their own, most of the characters have some charms (with the exception of obnoxious Odie, who reminded me of the kind of thing I might have seen on Disney Channel's "The Proud Family" before changing the channel). When thrown into the mix one atop the other, though, they weigh down on the film, revealing it to be less adept as slapstick laughfest than as earnest fairy tale. Despite earning plenty of accolades from critics, The Princess and the Frog didn't exactly supply the "happily ever after" for traditional animation at Disney. Following a substantial promotional push from the studio, the film struggled to cross the $100 million mark domestically. Still playing in cheap theaters, the film finds its North American gross slowly approaching the $105 M cited as its production budget. That puts it in the same neighborhood as Hercules and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, if you ignore a decade's worth of considerable ticket price inflation. The numbers aren't a far cry from Feature Animation's modest-performing CGI films Meet the Robinsons and Bolt, but no doubt Disney was hoping (and many were expecting) they'd be a lot higher. In the wake of Princess' soft performance, there has been news of one computer-animated film similarly set in the southern U.S. (King of the Elves) getting stalled and another hand-animated fairy tale (The Snow Queen) being shelved. And Feature Animation's next release, the long-awaited Rapunzel, has been curiously renamed Tangled to avoid the girls-only connotations believed to have hurt Princess.The aspect of The Princess and the Frog that once dominated its production coverage seems worthy of addressing only now as basically an afterthought. I'm referring to Tiana being touted as Disney's first African American princess. The racial implications of that seem pretty minor, although some have speculated a connection between this design and the film's underperformance. For most of the film, Tiana (whose original name Maddie was apparently changed in response to preemptive complaints) isn't a princess or even a human. The marketing oddly chose to hide the "two frogs" focus that forms the bulk of the film and instead emphasize the image of a pretty woman in a fancy dress and tiara. Aside from one repeated ambiguous remark, race is ignored. We see that the well-off characters are white, while black characters have to work hard for their humbler living. But with no vilification or social commentary in sight, the film can't easily be charged with political correctness or progressivism.Nine days after leaving the Oscars empty-handed, The Princess and the Frog comes to DVD and Blu-ray in single-disc releases on each format plus a 3-disc combo pack that combines them and adds a digital copy. 041b061a72