The Princess and the Frog
Directed by Ron Clements and John Musker
Fantastic Mr. Fox
Directed by Wes Anderson
The old ways aren’t dying out without a fight. At a moment when the movie industry is betting its future on the seamless merger of computer-generated imagery and live-action performance–a cold and hard kind of cinematic magic that drains the life from the medium–two glorious new movies offer object lessons in the wonders of old-fashioned, hand-hewn filmic legerdemain. Both are nominally for children. You would be crazy to miss either just because one is about a fox and the other is about a girl and an amphibian and a kiss gone wrong.
The fizzy and exuberant new Disney feature The Princess and the Frog was made in classic style–drawn, frame by frame, primarily by hand (although with plenty of computer assists). It is the first work of traditional animation the studio has produced in the old-fashioned manner since the lousy Home on the Range (2004), and it is a creative renaissance for the Walt Disney brand.
Since Disney began funding and releasing the brilliant work of Pixar in 1995, the studio’s own animated films have been, not to put too fine a point on it, godawful. Movies like Treasure Planet and Meet the Robinsons gave no hint of the extraordinary streak of great animated features that began with The Little Mermaid in 1989 and continued with Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and The Lion King–pictures that revolutionized the movie business for the better by reminding its solipsistic, sybaritic, and often unmarried executives that children and their parents were really quite a large and profitable market.
Disney did itself in after 1995–or rather, its own chief executive, Michael Eisner, did Disney in by foolishly and expensively (at a cost of nearly $300 million) ridding himself of Jeffrey Katzenberg, who had supervised the studio’s animated comeback. Katzenberg went on to cofound DreamWorks, and he almost instantly created the first true rival to Disney’s dominance as the great kid-film studio by releasing Shrek.
Disney seemed to throw in the towel a few years ago by merging with Pixar and giving its animated division to Pixar’s chief, John Lasseter. The fare that came afterward with the Disney name was just third-rate would-be Pixar, uninspired and computer-animated with little flair. Not this time. The two-dimensional look of The Princess and the Frog, with vibrant purples and yellows that delight the eye in the very first second the movie begins, is so old it’s new. It’s actually startling to see an animated film that doesn’t render its characters in a three-dimensional perspective, and it makes The Princess and the Frog seem not anachronistic but entirely fresh.
The whole movie is like that. Its writer-directors, Ron Clements and John Musker, also made The Little Mermaid and Aladdin before faltering with Hercules and Treasure Planet, and they have returned to their own glory days with wild brio. The setting is New Orleans in the 1910s and ’20s, rendered with the same painterly sheen as the London of Peter Pan and 101 Dalmatians.
The story involves a hard-working black waitress named Tiana who wants to open a restaurant. (There’s a dazzling sequence in which we see her dream of a restaurant as a moving, dancing Jacob Lawrence illustration.) One day, a footloose prince named Naveen comes to town to enjoy the jazz, and gets himself crosswise of a voodoo priest. Now a frog, the penniless Naveen hands Tiana a line about giving her money for her restaurant in exchange for the kiss that will turn him human again. Repelled but in need of cash, she does what he asks and finds herself, instead, transformed into a frog as well.
True to Disney form, the movie has a sensible aphoristic message for children: Dreaming only gets you halfway to what you want, and what you want isn’t necessarily what you need. These homilies are delivered in the best possible way, through pulsating song. The Princess and the Frog is the first full-scale Disney animated musical since Beauty and the Beast, and the score, by Randy Newman, takes delicious advantage of the musical heritage of Louisiana. There’s Dixieland jazz (played by a snaggletoothed bayou gator), zydeco (sung by a crazily accented firefly), Creole waltzes, swamp blues and gospel, as well as two requisite Broadway-style show stoppers, “Almost There” and “Dig a Little Deeper,” one of which is certain to win next year’s Oscar for best song. The loving craft Newman displays in these songs is mirrored by the painstaking craft of the movie’s -construction, both in its visual panache and its beautifully paced storytelling.
Another form of atavistic child’s storytelling–stop-motion animation, in which figurines are moved ever so slightly frame by frame–is given a workout in Fantastic Mr. Fox, which is among the most purely charming movies I can remember. It’s cute in the best possible meaning of the term; watching it makes you smile, giggle occasionally, and remain in a state of becalmed pleasure throughout.
The joke here is that its director, Wes Anderson, and his co-screenwriter, Noah Baumbach, have written an utterly contemporary script (based on a Roald Dahl novel) about a charmingly feckless fellow and how his charming fecklessness places his family and his community in jeopardy–and then put their halting, arch, ironic dialogue in the mouths of foxes, badgers, and hedgehogs. The movie’s utter lack of interest in evoking anything even remotely realistic gives it a thrillingly playful quality. It’s a little like being an adult and finding oneself able to enter into a child’s fantasy play with Fisher-Price little people.
Wes Anderson is responsible for some of the most annoyingly mannered indie movies of our time (The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic, The Darjeeling Limited), but his hyper-fussiness in matters of design and costuming and other sideline details is absolutely central to making the conceit of Fantastic Mr. Fox work. Anderson is appallingly precious when he directs in live action, but it turns out it’s okay, maybe even more than okay, to be precious when you’re working with tiny bendable dolls.
These are, along with the wildly dissimilar and entirely adult A Serious Man, the best American movies of the year. They are soulful at exactly the moment the movies need a little soul, since that is exactly what is being drained from them by a technological revolution that threatens to turn the cinema from a popular art into just another streaming video.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.
