This review first appeared in The Colorado Springs Gazette. To read this review at its original source, click here.

Disney’s The Princess and the Frog is like a visit from an old friend after a long time spent apart. While Pixar has preserved and exponentially advanced the Disney standard, there is something comforting about traditional, hand-drawn, 2-D animation. For those hoping The Princess and the Frog will be a throwback to the films of their childhood, a Broadway-inspired musical extravaganza of the sort you thought they stopped making ever since Woody and Buzz Lightyear appeared on the scene, I have great news: your hope is not misplaced.

All her life, Tiana (Anika Noni Rose) dreamt of opening a restaurant where she could feed the hungry city of New Orleans on the gumbo recipe passed down to her from her parents (Terrance Howard and Oprah Winfrey). It was a dream her father encouraged. It’s fine to wish upon a star, he told her, evoking Disney scriptura, but hard work is what really makes the difference. It turns out to be a lot harder than Tiana ever anticipated when she finds herself transformed into a frog, the unfortunate result of kissing Prince Naveen (Bruno Campos) who was already laboring under the curse of Dr. Facilier (Keith David), an evil voodoo witch doctor. The prince assumed, as we all would, that the kiss of a beautiful woman would return him to his human form once again.

It’s not easy being green. That’s what Naveen and Tiana discover as they flee to the bayou in search of Mama Odie (Jenifer Lewis), a sagely swamp mystic with the power to break Dr. Facilier’s curse. Along the way, they are aided by Louis, a trumpet blowing alligator (Michael-Leon Wooley), and Ray, a snaggle-toothed Cajun firefly (Jim Cummings). As the spoiled prince and the uptight wannabe restaurateur learn to overcome their animosity, they discover that if they are to defeat Facilier’s curse, they must first figure out how to work together.

The Princess and the Frog is a jazzy, dizzyingly colorful extravaganza that hearkens back to Disney’s golden age with catchy, fun song numbers and animated dance routines. It evokes the magic and the majesty of yesteryear (as well as other sources, such as The Three Stooges), while doing what Disney does best: acquiring a well-known story and turning it on its ear. While most films wait until the end to reveal the twist, The Princess and the Frog springs it in the very beginning, making the transformative kiss the “Once Upon a Time” rather than the “And They Lived Happily Ever After” moment.

Much has been made of The Princess and the Frog’s groundbreaking racial composition. While Tiana is not the first African-American character in Disney’s history (1946’s Song of the South featured several black characters, but is also deemed, by today’s standards, to be racially insensitive), but she is the first African-American heroine. Up till now, Disney’s princesses have been, well, snow white (Pocahontas, while not technically a princess, being the only exception). However, despite what you might assume, Disney predominantly ignores rather than addresses the racial elements of its story.

This disregard is easy when your black character spends 75 percent of the movie being green. When Tiana is human, she cavorts around with her best friend, who is white, raising nary an eyebrow in the early 20th century Southern setting. In fact, at the end no one seems to care when she marries the dashing prince (come now, hardly a spoiler!) who is neither white nor black, but some sort of mysterious combination of both by virtue of his fabricated, vaguely European origins. This, it must be admitted, is an idealized South, a Disney South, in which everyone is indeed colorblind. For some, this unwillingness to address race head on combined with an aversion to take the casting to its natural conclusion will be tantamount to pouring salt on an already festering wound. Others will see it as a step in the right direction, a spunky African-American heroine who comes from a loving, complete home and overcomes great odds to ensure her dreams come true.

© Copyright 2009 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.