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.

Wall-E: an inconvenient mirror everyone must look into

Wall-E is going to be one of the most important movies of this decade. That is my fearless prediction. It is not just a milestone in animation, nor is it just a milestone for Pixar's ability to tell engaging stories in surprising ways, but it's also likely to make a difference with regard to social attitudes in the United States.

In the book "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" Phil Dick paints a picture of a society that is not only one facing the aftermath of a regional thermonuclear war, but also that is drowning in its own detritus. The slang word for trash is "Kipple," and Kipple seems to its observers to spontaneously generate and also reduce useful items to more of itself. The humans who either will not or cannot leave a blighted Earth find themselves overwhelmed by Kipple. Although much of the book makes it onto screen in the classic movie Blade Runner, the whole subplot of how the remnant of humanity deals with Kipple didn't make it to the movie.

Like the Kipple-ized word of "Do Androids Dream...", the world that little Wall-E, a ruggedized trash compactor on tracks, inhabits is choked off by trash. He has worked non-stop for 700 years, and has made little dent in the great mounds of junk that has littered the industrial landscape. There were literally millions of his kind manufactured, but only he has survived. He's really, really good at what he does...the ziggurats of compacted trash that share the landscape with the abandoned skyscrapers of what is for all indications Manhattan are rapidly built by this little bot.

His only companion is a cockroach. However, this roach has evolved into an elegant sliver of insecthood, probably twice as big as the legendary Palmetto Bugs residents of the Southeastern US have to fight, and seemingly impervious to crushing blows that would have destroyed its ancestors. It communicates wordlessly, but eloquently. And this is the theme of the first half of the movie: wordless, eloquent communication. Pixar did not take the easy way out and have talking robots and talking bugs: all the emotion of the first half of the movie is communicated with little to no speech.

In his 700 years of existence, Wall-E has basically grown himself a personality. He collects cool items he finds amidst the trash, and one day he finds the coolest item of all: a little sprout of a plant. Coincidentally, a probe spacecraft has landed on earth, sending out probe droids, EVE units, looking for the same thing. Wall-E sees one, and gets a mad crush on her. She's strictly business, however, scanning the landscape for something she never seems to find.

Eventually Wall-E manages to persuade EVE to visit his little shelter, inside the guts of some sort of derelict construction droid. It is there EVE finds what she's been searching for, and goes into plant preservation hibernation mode. Wall-E is baffled by this turn of events, thinking she has malfunctioned somehow, and becomes her self-appointed protector. He follows her off planet, onto the Starship Axiom, where the social satire aspect of the movie is crystallized.

It seems the vast majority of critics, although almost universally captivated by the first half of the movie, are somewhat alienated by the second half on the starship. However, in a lot of respects, the Swiftian humor of the predicament of the Earthlings on their endless cruise is the point of the whole film. Unlike Kung Fu Panda, there is no lingering or lame jokes over the "fatty fat fat fat" issue. Humanity, after 700 years of very cushy living and micro-gravity, has indeed become soft and weak and flabby. But instead of beating us over the head with it, it is established as fact for purposes of the story and we move on.

No, the most important aspect of the humans and their lives is their constant consumerism, and how powerful it has made the last standing corporation. Buy n' Large Corporation has replaced everything in society: it has swallowed up all the other corporations and even the governments of the World. The little live-action clips of the CEO of this gargantuan operation are a clue to how dominant they are. And even aboard the Axiom the constant drumbeat to consume mass quantities is incessant. Of course, all this consumption leads to all kinds of waste, which is dealt with in the waste disposal hold by monstrous versions of Wall-E.

Wall-E is a call to re-examine the consumption-mad society we have had since the end of World War II. And coming from Disney/Pixar, it is a call far more likely to be heeded by families than the one given in the documentary An Inconvenient Truth and the much less artful Happy Feet. One suspects that there might actually be a lot of interesting conversations between parents and children after seeing the movie.

The movie ends on an ambiguous note, resolved only by the end-credits sequence where the traditional Disney "happily ever after" resolution takes place. I would have rather they kept the ambiguity, even if it meant losing the end-credits song co-written by Thomas Newman and Peter Gabriel. I've been a Gabe fan for literally decades, it's cool to see him get a crack at doing a song for Pixar. Maybe he'll 'play out' the next Macworld Jobs keynote? That would be cool. Do it live, Gabe.

As is typical of Pixar, there is no big musical number unless you count the ones on Wall-E's videotape of Hello, Dolly. And that's good. I've noticed this has also rubbed off on Disney and on their competitors. You don't see many animated features done in Musical Comedy style anymore. And that's a good thing. Even more crucially, it is an inspired move that a relatively obscure movie musical becomes little Wall-E's obsession: it could have been done with a more familiar one like Singin' In The Rain or Top Hat; or even Disney properties like Mary Poppins or Beauty and the Beast.

It seems much more random, and hence more believable, that a movie musical made in the space after the decline and fall of the big movie musical in the late '50s and the Disney revival of the genre in animated form in the '90s would be Wall-E's tutor about things romantic. It took guts to ask Disney to get rights from News Corp. for this chestnut, when they could have succumbed to "corporate synergy" instead.

Oh yeah: as a votary of the Cult of Mac, it was amusing that this was the first Pixar movie with a lot of Mac references. It's nowhere near the reigning champion for these sort of references, the anime TV series Serial Experiments: Lain, but it was amusing to this Mac geek that when Wall-E gets his solar charge for the day he reboots with not just the familiar Mac "P-RAM is OK" chord, but the original version of the chord heard on the Quadra 700 and its contemporaries. EVE was actually designed by Jonathan Ive, designer of the iMac series, the iPod and other Apple products, complete with shiny white plastic surfaces and sleek styling. Playing with my copy of Mactracker just now, I just realized that EVE's reboot sound is quite reminiscent of one used in only one Mac: the fabled 20th Anniversary Edition. These are references none but dedicated Mac geeks will get. And look for the appearance of an iPod Video in Wall-E's hovel. I suppose this all qualifies as the "corporate synergy" I decried in the last paragraph. But somehow it doesn't seem as repugnant as if they had dumped songs from a Disney musical in the movie. Yeah, I'm a fangirl. Sue me.

This is going to own both the Animated Feature Oscar and the Annies. But then again, everyone knows that.

Pixar redeems themselves: Ratatouille cooks.

Leave it to Brad Bird to save Pixar's reputation after Cars. Ratatouille is going to own. Big time. Bird seems to be the first person to really get the knack of doing cartoony CGI human characters that don't look like crap. And Our Rodentine Hero...c'est magnifique!

I don't like the "deus ex machina" aspect of the deceased chef, Auguste Gusteau, becoming Remy's guardian spirit. Too neat. Too tidy. Oh well, it's a big part of the movie. At least he's not made of stone and fairly crying out to be thrown into a concrete recycling machine like the wacky sidekick gargoyles in the last movie where Disney went a la Francaise.

Brad Bird did sentimental without being sappy in Iron Giant. The Incredibles was action, action, action 98% of the time, with only a little sentimentality. This one you might want to bring your kleenex for, because you needed it with IG.

Interesting that the one animated movie that didn't blow goats last year featured a mouse or rat or whatever he was. Also this IS just a clip. This might be the entirety of what's good in the movie, and I run the risk of having to eat crow (in sauce Bearnaise, mais bien sur!) if this turns out to be crap.

Nine minutes of Ratatouille can be found at http://home.disney.go.com/index for a "limited time." Have at it. Yomigaeru iyaaan RAAAT!