The Disney magic — not to be confused with the delights of its Pixar subsidiary — is finally back, after a decade in the animated wilderness, with the tunefully delightful, crowd-pleasing “The Princess and the Frog.”
In case you’ve been hiding under a lily pad, the film’s heroine is famously the studio’s very first African-American princess. This handsome production is also Disney’s first hand-drawn (with a few digital tweaks) feature cartoon since the dreadful “Home on the Range” five years ago.
The racial angle and the technology are less important, in this case, than the fact that Walt Disney Animation is back doing what it does best — musical romantic adventure with magic — after 10 years of unfortunate forays into barnyard humor and science fiction (see the same directors’ “Treasure Planet” or, better yet, don’t.)
This clever, politically correct update of the Grimms’ “The Frog Prince” is set in a gorgeously rendered 1920s New Orleans, where spunky, orphaned Tiana (voiced by Anika Noni Rose of “Dreamgirls”) dreams of opening her own restaurant.
Her very blond friend Charlotte (Jennifer Cody) — daughter of the wealthy Mardi Gras king Big Daddy (John Goodman) — less ambitiously dreams of marrying the racially ambiguous Prince Naveen (Latino actor Bruno Campos), playboy heir to the throne of a mythical country.
Naveen, as you might imagine is more interested in Tiana, who is so focused on her goals that she couldn’t be less interested in the handsome womanizer. But they are thrown together through the magical machinations of the shadowy Dr. Facilier (the great character actor Keith David, perfectly cast).
As part of a plot to gather up all of the Crescent City’s souls, the good doctor turns Naveen into a frog. And when Naveen persuades a very reluctant Tiana to kiss him in an attempt at a cure, she turns into a frog, too.
That launches the two of them on a quest through artfully rendered bayous, where they encounter some wonderfully colorful characters, including a jazz-loving alligator named Louis (Michael Leon-Wooley) and a love-struck Cajun firefly (Disney standby Jim Cummings).
These new, slapstick-prone friends lead the way to Mama Odie (Jenifer Lewis), a 107-year-old voodoo queen who serves as this story’s Wizard of Oz for Naveen and Tiana, who have become more than friendly by this point.
The songs by Randy Newman — working in the jazz, blues, gospel, zydeco, Dixieland and Broadway idioms — are very catchy, belted out in style by a great voice cast. I especially liked Dr. Facilier’s big spooky number “Friends on the Other Side” and Mama Odie’s showstopper, “Dig a Little Deeper.”
Overall, the film is not quite up to “Aladdin” and “The Little Mermaid” from the same directing team of Ron Clements and John Musker, not to mention the recent string of masterpieces from Pixar.
Though Pixar’s John Lasseter oversaw “The Princess and the Frog,” the story development isn’t as sophisticated. A body-swapping subplot is needlessly confusing, the emergence of the central romance could have been handled with more finesse and there are some awkward references to other Disney classics.
Still, there’s more than enough magic in “The Princess and the Frog” to enchant an entirely new generation of Disney fans and their parents. Tiana is a worthy addition to the Princess Hall of Fame.