Sunday November 29, 2009

A treat for the senses

By ROUWEN LIN

Cultural, musical, hand-drawn, Disney’s first fairy tale set in America captures the charm and warmth of old New Orleans.

YOU know times are changing when the fairest of them all is black. Tiana, a young, attractive African-American woman, is Disney’s ninth princess to grace the big screen, in the new animated feature The Princess and the Frog. She’s independent, hardworking, intelligent, strong-willed – a departure from the typical fairy-tale damsel in distress – and an aspiring chef who dreams of owning her own restaurant.

(The past eight idols in Disney’s lasting and highly lucrative series of “princesses” are Snow White, Cinderella, Aurora, Ariel, Belle, Jasmine, Pocahontas and Mulan.)

Fairy-tale romance: Princess Tiana and Prince Naveen. – All photos courtesy of Disney Enterprises, Inc

There’s a prince in the picture in the latest but he’s neither a dragon slayer nor the key to awakening from a deep slumber. Prince Naveen, who hails from the fictitious land of Maldonia, is spoiled, irresponsible and thoroughly broke (though the package comes complete with dashing good looks and heaps of charm).

His love for music and dance brings him to New Orleans, the legendary birthplace of jazz, and his presence catches the eye of Dr Facilier. The tall, lean and malevolent Dr Facilier dabbles in voodoo and has a plot to take over New Orleans. He promises Naveen the riches of the world, but tricks him and turns him into a frog instead.

While the original Brothers Grimm fairy tale (The Frog Prince) has a quick fix for this inconvenience (the girl kisses the frog, he reverts to his princely form, and they live happily every after), Disney’s version offers a twist to the tale: when Tiana kisses the frog she transforms into a little green amphibian too.

Much to her disgust, she finds herself flicking out her frog tongue to catch flies for dinner. But the waitress from New Orleans has bigger issues than culinary taste to worry about: how on earth is she going to revert back into her human form? And what is she going to do with her exasperating, conceited sidekick?

Accompanied by Louis, a trumpet-playing alligator, and Ray, a lovesick firefly, the duo brave the majestic bayous of Louisiana and the mighty Mississippi in their search for a cure. With a bit of luck, magic and a blind old woman with a pet snake on their side, anything can happen on their journey. It is, after all, a fairy tale at heart.

Walt would be proud

The unconventional aspects of the film aside, The Princess and the Frog also marks Disney’s return to hand-drawn animation, an art form closely identified with the founder Walt Disney himself from the days of Snow White more than 70 years ago, a bold move in an age dominated by computer-generated fare. The fact that Disney’s last hand-drawn animated film, Home on the Range, in 2004 was a flop makes the decision more of a mystery.

Poles apart: Naveen (left), the slacker, is nothing like the hardworking Tiana.

But John Lasseter, chief creative officer of Walt Disney Animation Studios and executive producer of The Princess and the Frog, believes there is an audience for hand-drawn animation.

“It is a gorgeous art form that was stopped because it was thought that the audience only wanted to watch computer-generated animation. I always felt that it’s not the medium that determines whether a movie is entertaining but somehow hand-drawn animation became the scapegoat for bad storytelling,” he says at a recent media conference in Los Angeles.

Making a reference to Walt Disney Animation Studios, the Academy Award-winning animator adds: “If there’s a studio in the world that’s going to do the highest quality hand-drawn animation, it should be the studio that started it all.”

New Orleans, here we come

The voice cast of The Princess and the Frog features Anika Noni Rose as Tiana, Bruno Campos as Prince Naveen, Keith David as the menacing Dr Facilier, Jim Cummings as Ray, the love-struck Cajun firefly, Jenifer Lewis as the mystical Mama Odie, and Michael-Leon Wooley as the trumpet-playing alligator Louis. Completing the list are Oprah Winfrey and Terrence Howard as Eudora and James, Tiana’s loving parents.

Producing stunning artwork is one thing, but Lasseter says what keeps him going is the desire to produce a film that will bowl the audience over with its characters, plot and attention to detail. Having brought back hand-drawn animation when he returned to Walt Disney Animation Studios in 2006 (he was formerly with Pixar which was bought over by Disney that year), the animation stalwart says: “It’s all about entertaining the audience with great characters and great stories – you want to make them cry, and you want to make them laugh, you want to give them a movie that they want to watch over and over again. That’s my goal as a filmmaker.”

Describing the animation style in The Princess and the Frog as “so classically Disney”, he points out that it’s also a musical where the characters break out in song Broadway-style to the tunes of Oscar-winning composer Randy Newman.

The bustling 1920s French Quarter in New Orleans depicted in the movie.

“The directors (Ron Clements and John Musker) wanted Randy to do the music. Randy used to spend every summer in New Orleans when he was a child, so he knows the music there,” says Lasseter, who and the Pixar team were notably honoured with the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice International Film Festival in September.

Featuring seven new songs in a range of styles (jazz, blues, gospel, zydeco), Disney’s first fairy tale to be set in America promises to be a treat for the senses.

While it was Lasseter’s idea to set it in New Orleans, the idea of having an African-American lead character came from Clements and Musker, the team behind films such as The Little Mermaid and Aladdin.

“John Lasseter wanted to set in New Orleans and we pitched the idea of having an African-American lead character to him. It just felt natural for the 1920s New Orleans setting. It was something that had never been done before and it was a challenge that we wanted to take up,” says Clements.

A seaport city founded by the French, ceded to the Spanish, and sold to the United States, New Orleans is a melting pot of cultures. The directors spent a week visiting the French Quarter and the Garden District (first suburban neighbourhood of New Orleans, developed between 1892 and 1900), went on a Bayou tour (Ray, the firefly, was inspired by their “very funny” Cajun tour guide, according to Lasseter) and spent a day with a voodoo priestess.

This first trip to New Orleans became the basis of the script and visual development, says Clements.

“With all the cultural, historical, visual and magical ideas that the great city offered us, it seemed really fitting for a fairy tale. The Jazz Age added an element of nostalgia and musicality. It’s an ideal place to set the film because it has its own identity and is so different from the rest of the country,” adds Musker.

Race issue

Although the film is revolutionary in the sense that it features Disney’s first African-American princess, the choice of colour has been the topic of much debate, more so than any other considerations pertaining to the film.

It doesn’t help that New Orleans was once a slave port and had the largest slave market in America. Critics are having a ball pointing out details in the film that are supposedly discriminatory.

First of all, there’s the issue that Disney’s first African-American princess spends most of her screen time as a bright green frog rather than a black human. Also, the fact that the male hero hails from a fictitious land, Maldonia, and is obviously not black (but instead dubiously olive-skinned) is a bit of a touchy subject. Then, of course, there’s the uncanny timing of Barack Obama’s inauguration as the first black president of the United States early this year.

Lasseter scoffs at the suggestion that young Tiana’s family bears resemblance to the president’s family.

“We started on the film in 2006. It’s not like we could have predicted that we would have President Obama in the White House this year. It’s just absolute coincidence,” he says.

Coincidence or not, Disney had plenty of criticism to deal with even in the early stages of development. The lead character was initially named Maddy (short for Madeleine) and was described as a chambermaid, a servant’s role that was historically accurate. Critics found it too close to slavery for comfort, and her name sounded too much like “mammy”, a reference to matronly African-American women who were domestic help in the slave days, and was hence racist. In mid-2007 Disney changed the name to Tiana.

“We did a tremendous amount of research for this film, as we do with all our other films. It was very important for us to make the characters as real and believable for today’s audiences. We spoke to people from the African-American community and we went down to New Orleans to soak in the sights, take lots of pictures, and talk to people,” says Lasseter, pointing out that the music and food of the city found its way into their hearts and, as a consequence, the film.

More than 50,000 photographs of local iconic images, including buildings, restaurants and the Garden District, were taken to use as reference and inspiration.

“I always tell my filmmakers that you need to do tons of research because you don’t know where the inspiration is going to come from. So, we did our homework and tried to tell a story with a character that would make everyone proud and happy,” he says.

It don’t matter if you’re black or white

For every person up in arms over political correctness in a fairy tale, there is probably – and hopefully! – one who wants nothing more than to immerse himself in the magic of hand-drawn animation and the story it crafts.

Former Disney employee, Floyd Norman, who was the only African-American animator at the studio in the 1950s and 1960s, wrote in an article published by Jim Hill Media some months back: “Overly sensitive people see racial or ethnic slights in every image. And in their zeal to sanitise and pasteurise everything, they’ve taken all the fun out of cartoon making.”

Having been involved in Disney classic animated films such as Sleeping Beauty, Jungle Book, Mulan and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Norman says: “We live in incredible times – a time I could not even have imagined while sitting at my Disney desk back in 1956. A black man might be elected President of the United States and the Walt Disney Studio might surprise us with a black princess.”

Well, both the president and the princess are here now.

Lasseter says: “It has been over a decade since Disney’s last princess fairy tale, Beauty and the Beast, in 1994. We haven’t had something like that in a while and we are really excited over The Princess and the Frog.

“There’s just something so special about a sincere fairy tale, a musical, and hand-drawn animation. That’s something I don’t think the audience will ever outgrow.”

‘The Princess and the Frog’ leaps into cinemas nationwide on Thursday.

eCentral

Sunday November 29, 2009

A treat for the senses

By ROUWEN LIN