The Princess and the Frog??? - Page 2

[Storm Bride]

Originally Posted by Smokering

I like Meg too. Hercules is a VERY patchy film, but Meg's spunky attitude and the song "I Won't Say (I'm In Love)" go a long way towards redeeming it!

I'm very back and forth on Hercules...but I like Meg.

Esmerelda I'm not keen on, but only because I was disgusted Disney took such an awesome book and made it - well, compare Phoebus in the book and movie and you'll see what I mean. I'd love to have been a fly on the wall at the meeting where some genius says "So, there's this book about rape and deformity and evil priests and racism, and at the end the heroine is hanged because her lover is a scumbag and the main character twines his deformed body around her corpse until he dies - I think it'll be really good for the preschool demographic". "Sure, sounds great, but we'd better tone it down - hey, how about a song about lust?" Cue a film which successfully managed to be neither appropriate for kids nor remotely true to the books. Bizarre!

I've never read the book, so I didn't know about any of that. I'm not surprised, though. Disney adaptations are...bizarre. I have read most of the original Tarzan novels, and I can say they took a whole lot of huge liberties with those, too. OTOH, those books were pretty weak in a lot of ways, anyway (I enjoy them, but I still see the weaknesses).

The trouble with Disney adapting genuine ethnic folktales is the people whose folktales they picked aren't likely to be super-impressed. Disney's track record with race is hardly glowing, you know? If I were a minority I might not be too thrilled at a big American company sanitising and cute-animal-sidekickising my nation's history and turning the story into McDonald's cups. (Heck, I wasn't too thrilled at them Disneyfying "my" literary heritage with some of their Western tales!) So it's possible Disney's actually trying to avoid offending people. Maybe.

My guess is that none of those things are even on Disney's radar. In some ways, that's a good thing, as you point out.

I agree about the glamour thing too, although I'd prefer they had less glamorous females for other reasons. I notice they sell Tiana dolls in the green wedding dress she wears for oh, twenty seconds of screentime, not her everyday clothes! (At the Disney shop website, anyway; maybe they sell "waitress Tiana" or "restaurant Tiana" elsewhere?)

I can't stand the glamour. But, it's definitely the focus of the princess line. Belle's kind of the same. The merchandise has her in her yellow ball gown, which she only wore at the beginning. For that matter, I don't think Aurora wore her dress for that much time, either...although the dress had its own screen time. The only ones I can think of who really wore their "official" outfits for any significant amount of screen time are Jasmine and Snow White.

[kcstar]

DH and I thoroughly enjoyed The Princess and the Frog. DS hasn't seen it yet.

Mulan *is* based on a very old Chinese poem, I saw a translation when I was Googling some years ago.

[Smokering]

She was a historical or quasi-historical figure, wasn't she, Mulan? Like Pocahontas. I thought it was one of Disney's Vaguely Based on Fact movies.

I really can't stand Ariel in her pink ballgown. I realise the lineup of princesses would look a little odd if one of them had a tail, but the pink dress was so not her... and clashed with her hair to boot.

Yes, the Hunchback of Notre Dame is insanely depressing. Phoebus totally takes advantage of Esmerelda while being engaged to another girl, and then lets her get hanged at the end... Quasimodo kills Frollo by pushing him off the top of the Cathedral... and the book ends with a weird epilogue in which a hunchbacked skeleton is discovered under the Cathedral, entwined with the skeleton of a woman to the extent that they can't separate the two. Cheery stuff. And in the book, Quasimodo is really a gypsy who was swapped at birth with Esmerelda... because we all know that such a pretty and virtuous girl as Esmerelda couln't possibly be a real gypsy. Oh, and she gets tortured by the Church into confessing... something. Witchcraft? I haven't read it for ages. Victor Hugo had an interesting mind...

[sapphire_chan]

They could make the prince non-white in Rapunzel, since he's supposed to come from another land anyway. Only I don't think the bit where he goes blind would go over well. Hang on, it's Disney, he won't be going blind anyhow.

As for PATF, it fit my impression of New Orleans quite well, but the only thing I really know about the city comes from "A Free Man of Color" by Barbara Hambly (set in 1833) and "License Invoked" by Jody Lynn Nye (set in 199X). From that limited view, it seems like New Orleanders spend most of their time too busy being part of New Orleans to get on anyone else's case about not really being part of New Orleans because of the color of their skin.

Which is where most overt racism comes from, imo, "you don't belong because you're different."

It's kind of hard to show subconscious racism in a kid's movie that isn't about that.

[weliveintheforest]

another aspect of the movie to keep in mind, is it's kind of scary at some parts. I know some kids are fine with it, but the voodoo stuff was a bit intense for my kids, especially when i have no good way to explain it.

[tinybutterfly]

I just saw it tonight and LOVED it!

[Cutie Patootie]

Originally Posted by weliveintheforest

another aspect of the movie to keep in mind, is it's kind of scary at some parts. I know some kids are fine with it, but the voodoo stuff was a bit intense for my kids, especially when i have no good way to explain it.

My kids are 4 and 6 and it was waaaaay to scary for them...the voodoo stuff and the actual killing of the little bug guy. We almost walked out of the theater. I myself loved parts of it, but overall didn't love the whole thing. I thought it was a bit "floppish".

[f&p'smama]

Originally Posted by Cutie Patootie

My kids are 4 and 6 and it was waaaaay to scary for them...the voodoo stuff and the actual killing of the little bug guy. We almost walked out of the theater. I myself loved parts of it, but overall didn't love the whole thing. I thought it was a bit "floppish".

Yes, it was waaaaay too scary for my girls, too. They were close to 5 when we saw it. They were so upset they were crying. It wasn't the voodoo part that scared them, they didn't understand that, though they thought that part was creepy. It was the alligator chasing Tiana and the prince. We actually had to leave the theater for a while to calm down and talk again about movie and how kid movies always end happy.

They were upset again when the voodoo man stomped on and killed the bug. I thought that was cruel and upsetting, too. They just showed cold blooded murder, which I guess was acceptable to Disney because it was bug they killed, but it was an endearing character. They still ask me about why he killed the bug on purpose and we saw the movie in December.

That said my kids aren't used to Disney movies. It's the first they've seen. They've only seen mellow TV shows like Little Bear and Curious George. My friends whose kids are used to the scary and often violent Disney movies liked it.

I liked the message a lot about the value of hard work and we've talked about that a lot since the movie. I also liked that they had a black princess and the music was great.

[SparklingGemini]

Originally Posted by f&p'smama

My friends whose kids are used to the scary and often violent Disney movies liked it.

My DD was just 2.5 when we saw it in the theater. That was her first movie going experience and her second Disney movie, the first being Finding Nemo. Up 'til then she has watched only Sesame Street and Toot & Puddle and only a handful of times.

She LOVED, absolutely, positively ADORED the movie. Yes, she didn't care for The Shadow Man but then, you aren't supposed to like him, are you?

Anyway, I think that it is possible that a child can enjoy a movie without having been exposed to scary and violence regularly.

[ellairiesmom]

Our DD was just a couple months past 2 when we saw it & it was her 1st movie in the theater. We also went with my sis in law & 3 yo niece.

Neither one of them were scared at all. They both talked about the "bad man" after but we had no issues with nightmares or anything at all. They loved the movie.

I really enjoyed it as well. The music was great & I really felt like they captured New Orleans. I get what some people are saying about Tiana being presented as a waitress & low income, but I guess I looked at it as more of a success story, the gal works hard & makes her own dream come true.

[sapphire_chan]

Originally Posted by ellairiesmom

the gal works hard & makes her own dream come true.

What I especially liked is that getting married and becoming human again didn't end her dream, instead her dh put his work into it too.

[St. Margaret]

After DD kept talking about the voodoo guy being her favorite part of the show at Disneyland (they did a riverboat show), and learning more about the strong Tiana character, we decided to give it a whirl one movie night. DD liked it, but asked a lot of questions, whereas we were all trying to watch and hear and couldn't answer her b/c we didn't know yet... seemed like a lot more than with a Tinkerbell movie. I still don't love how the people spend most of the movie as frogs (I was excited about an Af-Am princess! ) and yeah parts were very mature, but DD mostly just liked the spooky looking voodoo ghost shadows. The kid always likes gothic type stuff, the big cat's head in Alladin at the show at CA Adventure, etc... so she's an odd duck.

[Smokering]

Sounds like a potential Coraline/Nightmare Before Christmas fan.

[St. Margaret]

Originally Posted by Smokering

Sounds like a potential Coraline/Nightmare Before Christmas fan.

She loooooved the haunted house at Disneyland when it was done up at NBC, and I am a huge Gaiman fan, so as soon as she's old enough...