Kiss that frog...

OK, Disney's put out their first hand-drawn animated movie in five years and the first also under the leadership of Pixar's John Lasseter. The Princess And The Frog. A lot is riding on this movie, and it looks like Avatar might have taken a little wind out of its sails. But overall it is one beautiful confection, the most physically beautiful drawn domestic animated movie I've seen since Lilo and Stitch, and it has nothing to apologize for in its depiction of post-Plessy v. Ferguson race relations in New Orleans.

Let's get the racial issue out of the way right up front. New Orleans has had a far more nuanced race relations situation than any other place in the Southern United States. For example, Faubourg Treme is a historically integrated community in NOLA where in the 19th Century CE a gumbo pot of ethnicities, including free Blacks, lived shoulder to shoulder. This racial mixing annoyed the more racist population of the rest of the state of Louisiana, and eventually climaxed in the Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision, which held that "separate but equal" facilities for Blacks and Whites were AOK. This stood until Brown v. Board of Education, the decision that desegregated the public schools in the US.

The depiction of a Caribbean prince wooing both an aristocratic White woman and a working-class Black woman, the latter being our protagonist Tiana, in 1920s New Orleans, is not out of line. Even after Plessy the traditional (for New Orleans) blurred color line was constant. However blurred the color line was, it was still present. And The Princess And The Frog portrays the truth about it without making a huge deal over it.

In one of the early scenes of the movie, you see Tiana and her mother leaving the home of a wealthy White family where the mother worked as a seamstress. They leave out the back "servant's entrance." They board a streetcar and find their place in the back of the streetcar, and the ride takes them to their working class Black neighborhood. I am not sure, but Tiana's neighborhood looks like it's based on the Ninth Ward before the 1927 Mississippi Flood. You see Black families living in small, crowded houses, and Tiana's dad sharing a huge pot of gumbo with the neighbors. It's an instant party. These are people living in bleak circumstances, but true to the spirit of the city that gave birth to Jazz they eke whatever happiness they can from simple things like food and music. The scene is brief in terms of screen time, but it's very, very true. It's light-years from the racial myopia of Song Of The South.

Tiana loses her genius chef dad to World War I, and supports her family as a waitress. She still carries a "dream from (her) father"...a desire to open up her own restaurant in a vacant building formerly a sugar mill. This dream is so ingrained in her she, unlike most Disney Princess characters, doesn't care a whit about handsome princes, not even Prince Naveen, the light-skinned Caribbean Creole Prince of a fictitious island kingdom. Invited to a party by her childhood friend, the spoiled rich white girl her mom sewed for, she is not entirely impressed by the handsome playboy who was looking for a rich girl to marry because his parents cut him off from his wealth.

The sinister Dr. Facilier rewards Naveen's desire for riches by turning him into the eponymous Frog. And of course, the only way of breaking the spell is the kiss of a princess...or a sufficiently wealthy heiress. Naveen mistakes Tiana for a princess, and asks her for a kiss. She's grossed out, but does it anyway. The kiss backfires, and as the official trailer makes evident, she's now a frog as well.

The whole movie is full of affectionate homages to elements of animation history. When Tiana dreams of her restaurant, the sequence becomes a homage to Tex Avery's classic '30s streamline moderne cartoon, "Page Miss Glory."



And the sinister Dr. Facilier? He's very very Cab Calloway in Fleischer-land. If you've already seen the movie, the animation of Calloway as Koko The Clown in the Fleischer masterpiece "Snow White" will be very familiar.



But what's not traditional here is that Tiana is no passive figure. She is a true "Self-rescuing Princess" who actually is way more active in finding her way out of her predicament than her "Handsome Prince" Naveen. She has a dream, a plan and is strong enough to see that dream through regardless of any help she might get along the way. For her, love is a distraction. It takes being turned into a frog and being disappointed initially by the good Voudoun shamaness Mama Odie to send her looking for comfort in the green slimy arms of Naveen.

This is the first time in a long time in any animated musical where the "showstopper" numbers don't literally stop the show, but push the storytelling forward. It helps that Randy Newman, who lived in New Orleans from shortly after his birth to age 11 and splits his time between there and Los Angeles ever since, is the one writing the words and the music. The original choice was Alan Mencken, who probably doesn't know what it means to miss New Orleans. Instead of faux-Jazz, faux-Zydeco and faux-Dixieland, you get Newman's take on the real music of the region. Newman is perhaps the best composer regularly doing animation scores, along with his cousin Thomas Newman, and he seems to have a real love of the medium and a flair for telling stories through words and music.

In a lot of respects, this is the first 2D Pixar movie. John Lasseter's hands are all over this, even though he only gets producer credit here. This is a glorious return to form that bodes well for the future of 2D at Disney/Pixar. The blockbuster Avatar has unfortunately made Princess' box-office sledding kind of rough. But Disney has already said they have green-lit two more 2D movies and is developing more. My dream is that they reach across the Pacific and do a co-production with a top-tier Japanese studio like Production IG. Anime, and independent animators in Europe, has kept the torch burning for hand-drawn animation. It's good to see Disney (or more accurately Disney/Pixar) back in the game.

Apparently "Princess" won't be the last drawn animated feature at Disney

Right now, The Princess and the Frog is in extremely limited release, showing at the Ziegfield Theatre in New York City and at the biggest screening room at The Walt Disney Company Studio in Burbank. The latter is history-making: the first time the studio has been opened to a public event. However, this Friday is the big day for the movie, the first hand-drawn animated feature for Disney since the ill-fated Home On The Range.

Thankfully it looks like it won't be the last. Disney has committed to at least two more drawn features, and hints are that more will be on the way.

The first one does not sound promising: yet another go-round with Winnie The Pooh. Disney has had more luck than they're entitled to with their bastardization of AA Milne's gentle classics, and the residents of the Hundred-Acre Wood are a bunch of tame characters, albeit tame characters with neuroses.

But the second announced feature is more promising. It is The Snow Queen, the first traditional fairy tale the Disney Animation people have taken on in years. No "attitude," no modernization, no Jazzing it up, this will be a fairy tale taken straight out of the Eastern European classic tale.



A character that elegant and with that much realism would fail horribly in CGI because inevitably it would fall right down into the Uncanny Valley. Animators have found that in order to make an appealing CGI character you have to go the opposite direction from realism into cartooniness. This is why Up's humans succeeded. This is why The Incredibles' humans succeeded. This is why every freaking Zemeckis CGI opus has failed miserably. Even Jim Carrey's rubber-faced brilliance could not save the Zemeckis A Christmas Carol from being a zombie puppet show. It is why I don't hold much hope for Avatar in spite of all the hype and the admittedly beautiful visuals. I was not a fan of the feature-length Blue Sky Pictures version of Horton Hears A Who, but the Dr. Seuss derived character designs were definitely on the cartoony side and worked.

However, drawn animation abstracts us enough from flesh and blood reality to make character designs like that work. One need only look to Japan to see the realistic design of many of their action-adventure characters working brilliantly. I'm thinking of Batou and Kusanagi in Ghost In The Shell and the officers at NERV in Evangelion 1.0. If you remade Eva and Ghost in CGI and kept the same kind of drawing style you'd wind up where Squaresoft took the Final Fantasy movies...right down into the Uncanny Valley.

The Japanese have shown us that drawn animation definitely has a place, no matter what Jeffery Katzenberg says. It's good that Disney is not placing all their traditional animation chips on Princess and the Frog no matter what the speculation up to now has been. It seems like Lasseter and Iger believe 2D has a place in this 3D obsessive world of American animation. And that makes me feel real good about the future of American animation.

Tekkonkinkreet: yet another classic Japanese mindf**k anime

On July 1st, I went to see not one, but two movies. One was SiCKO, of which I will only say two words: SEE IT. (This does not apply to people who live in rational countries with single-payer health care.)

The other was Tekkonkinkreet. Based on the manga "Kuro to Shiro" (Black and White), the curious name of the movie is three Japanese words mashed together: in English, those words are IronConcreteMuscles. Perhaps not in that order.

Two feral children, Kuro, the older and fiercer of the two, and Shiro, the younger and more childlike/childish, live in the decay of Treasure City. Is the city in Japan, or somewhere else in the world? It is left very much up in the air, as you see verbiage in English, Thai and Hindi on buildings alongside the Japanese Kana and Kanji. There are some references that are very Japanese, however: the city is being carved up by rival Yakuza gangsters, some of which might actually be Yakuza from another planet. After the Yakuza chew through some of the lesser young toughs of the city, they find that dealing with Kuro and Shiro is much harder than it seemed it would.

The movie shifts between the world as it is, and the inner lives of the two feral boys. They are linked together telepathically, and you are not sure at times from whose point of view you are looking at the story. You wonder how much of the story is going on in real time, and how much of it is actually going on within their minds. This is not new: movies have been playing around with this for decades, and so have artists like Dali and Rene Magritte. At times things get so surreal and hard to follow it will probably take several viewings to untangle, and I have yet to only get the benefit of one. You get the feeling, however, that the effort is worth it.

This movie marks the first time an American working in the Japanese animation industry has directed an anime feature. Director Michael Arias was born in Southern California, and through a circuitous chain of events learned animation and computer programming at NYU, then returned to California to work in computer special effects at places like Digital Domain. He then went to Japan to work alongside the artists of Studio Ghibli as their digital effects programmer, beginning with Mononoke Hime. Before Tekkonkinkreet, Arias is best known for his involvement in The Animatrix, an assemblage of 9 Matrix-universe animated shorts which arguably is the best of the sequels to The Matrix.

It is in the best interest of the animation industries of both America and Japan to come together in these kind of hands-across-the-Pacific collaborative efforts. Considering the state of the industry in both countries (the US is almost dead, Japan is struggling) it is likely that collaboration will not make matters worse, and will likely help both to revitalize.

Tekkonkinkreet is going to be coming to theatres this weekend. It is likely to be released to DVD quite soon after this, but seeing the movie in a theatre with a huge screen and excellent sound is well worth it.