The Princess and the Frog

NO BULL The prince impresses Tiana with the size of his vocal sac.

Back in the 1990s, Disney ruled the animated roost with a curious fusion of old-fashioned storytelling and Broadway-esque tunes. With The Princess and the Frog, Disney goes back to the old formula, this time with Randy Newman composing the songs. Princess is pleasantly nostalgic, with a few gentle winks at Disney past (little girls obsessed with being princesses) and some catchy tunes. You won’t have the Pixar “wow” feeling; instead, you’ll get something comfortably familiar.

Tiana (Rose), whom Disney has been trumpeting as its first African-American heroine, dreams of opening her own restaurant, but along the way she gets tangled up with a visiting prince (Campos) who has been turned into a frog by a voodoo priest. When Tiana also gets turned into a frog, they set out to find an old woman who can reverse the spell. Though the animators take the soft-focus-background style too far, the film generally looks great in the way that hand-animated films do. The writers tiptoe carefully through the minefield of racial representation (Cajuns may have more to object to here than African-Americans), and the story has just enough twists to keep it fresh.

• Now playing.
• More film reviews
•
• More Film articles