very BLAND character designs

very ARTLESS backgrounds and color decisions

average music

unintresting characters

and boring story!

The only good thing about this picture was some good scenes in “Tianas dream sequence” and in “friends on the other side”
and some of the voodoo designs.

100 milions at the box office is a huge success.

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…And on, and on and on. Such pressure! With so many boxes to check, the film barely got a minute to just be good. “Less than the sum of its parts” would be a good way to describe it.

BUT, it’s still a great movie! The animation is superb and skillful, so good that it will instantly remind the world that hand-drawn animation is still something worth doing. (Thank God, no, thank Eric Goldberg!) The voice work is sublime. (Lottie!) The characters are for the most part well-rounded, and interesting. And above all, in the end, you’re enjoying yourself in a way you haven’t since Tarzan!

The problem is just that when you try to be equal to your predecessors, try so very very hard to, you don’t push the envelope, and you tend to get something slightly artificial. In ten years, we will still think of Beauty and the Beast as that Disney film that shook us to the core, that film that showed us something more sublime than we’d ever seen in our lives. And Disney will still be trying to match that film and not Princess and the Frog.

(I was just watching The Great Mouse Detective again. I’d forgotten how good it is, and after Princess and the Frog, it’s a reminder of a time when movies were born out of ideas rather than ambitions. The Great Mouse Detective certainly didn’t have a list to check off — it proudly lacks a shiny panoramic opening scene, it lacks in-the-know bits, it even lacks a romantic subplot. The only way in which it hearkens back to the classics is that it tries to be excellent on all fronts, and succeeds.)

But in these dark ages of hand-drawn animation, who’s complaining? This is more than we could have hoped for. But now that the scary part’s over, let’s hope that its success persuades Disney to keep the creative juices flowing.

So, conclusion: Is it a worthy effort? Certainly! But I hope it’s the beginning of another renaissance and not the pinnacle of it.

NOTE: The jury’s still out on Randy Newman. His music is appropriate for the film (it’s very N’awlins), but you get a sense that everyone at Disney was hoping for Menken-type material. Alan Menken’s music makes you want to jump on a garbage pail, close your eyes and swing your arms, because damn it, you want to be part of that world/have adventure in the great wide somewhere/go the distance/go out there! Randy Newman’s music makes you want to bob your head a little. So you get these huge scenes full of dancing flamingos, but set to lounge music. Hmmm.

*This was handled with taste and rose above all that controversy, it must be said. The film was not about anyone’s color, thankfully it was too busy having a plot.

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Just imagine using all that money and polish to make a GOOD movie!

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