The Princess and the Frog began production in July 2006, under the working title The Frog Princess. It marked Disney's brief return to traditional animation, as it was the mainstream animation studio's first traditionally animated film since Home on the Range (2004). Musker and Clements, directors of Disney's The Great Mouse Detective (1986), The Little Mermaid (1989), Aladdin (1992), Hercules (1997), and Treasure Planet (2002) returned to Disney to direct The Princess and the Frog. The studio returned to a Broadway musical-style format frequently used during the Disney Renaissance, and the film features a score and songs composed and conducted by Randy Newman, well known for his musical involvement in Pixar films such as the Toy Story franchise.
The Princess and the Frog premiered at the Roy E. Disney Animation Building on the Walt Disney Studios lot in Burbank on November 15, 2009, and first opened in a limited release in New York City and Los Angeles on November 25, followed by its wide release on December 11. The film received largely positive reviews from critics, who praised the animation (particularly the revival of the hand-drawn form), characters, music, voice acting (particularly David's), and themes; however, it was criticized for its depiction of Louisiana Voodoo and alleged historical negationism of its depiction of the Southern United States during the Jim Crow era. It was a qualified success at the box office: it somewhat underperformed Disney's targets yet finished in first place in North America on its opening weekend and grossed around $271 million worldwide (becoming, in the process, Disney’s most successful traditionally animated film since Lilo & Stitch in 2002). It received three Oscar nominations at the 82nd Academy Awards: one for Best Animated Feature and two for Best Original Song.[4]
In New Orleans during the Roaring Twenties, a young woman named Tiana is devoted to opening her own restaurant, a dream she shared with her late father. She works two waitress jobs to save enough money for her own restaurant, leaving her no time for a social life. In early 1926, Naveen, the arrogant prince of Maldonia, arrives in New Orleans. His parents have cut him off from the family fortune, so he intends to marry Charlotte La Bouff, Tiana's best friend. In order to convince her to marry Naveen, Charlotte's father, wealthy Eli "Big Daddy" La Bouff, hosts a masquerade ball in Naveen's honor, for which Charlotte hires Tiana to make beignets, paying her enough to buy a dilapidated mill to convert into her dream restaurant. Naveen and his valet, Lawrence, encounter Dr. Facilier, an evil and powerful voodoowitch doctor who plans to rule New Orleans. Facilier transforms Naveen into a frog and Lawrence into a doppelganger of Naveen, using a voodoo talisman containing Naveen's blood. Facilier intends for the disguised Lawrence to marry Charlotte, then to kill her father with a voodoo doll so he can gain the La Bouff fortune.
At the ball, Tiana learns she has been outbid for the mill. Upset, she accidentally spills beignets and sauce on her outfit, so Charlotte lends her a princess costume. Feeling disheartened, she begins wishing on a star when Naveen appears in frog form. Thinking Tiana is a real princess, Naveen asks her to kiss him to break the spell. Tiana reluctantly agrees since Naveen can give her enough money for the mill. However, she is transformed into a frog as well. The two are chased into a nearby bayou, where they meet a jazz-loving alligator named Louis. When they explain their predicament, he tells them of Mama Odie, another voodoo practitioner who lives in the bayou. Naveen convinces Louis to take him and Tiana to see Mama Odie so he would ask her to turn him into a human as well to accomplish his dream of being a professional jazz musician.
However, Louis does not know the way to Mama Odie; a Cajunfirefly named Ray, who knows Mama Odie, helps the three. During the journey, Tiana and Naveen begin developing feelings for each other, especially after Naveen learns to be more responsible. Meanwhile, the talisman disguising Lawrence as Naveen begins faltering; it needs a steady supply of Naveen's blood to function. Facilier asks his "friends on the other side" (a legion of voodoo spirits) to help retrieve Naveen, and they grant him an army of shadow demons to do his bidding. The demons discover Tiana and her group in the bayou; Mama Odie rescues the group.
Mama Odie tells Naveen the spell can only be broken with a princess's kiss. Tiana realizes that since Big Daddy has been crowned Mardi Gras king, Charlotte will be a princess until midnight. The group hitches a ride on a paddle steamer back to New Orleans, during which Naveen tells Ray about his love for Tiana and plans to propose marriage to her. After talking to Tiana, Naveen selflessly decides against proposing, since transforming him and Tiana into humans and financing Tiana's restaurant is contingent on him kissing and marrying Charlotte. The shadow demons capture Naveen and bring him to Facilier, who uses his blood to replenish the talisman. After Ray tells Tiana of Naveen's love for her, Tiana heads to the Mardi Gras parade to find Naveen, only to see the disguised Lawrence marrying Charlotte. Heartbroken, Tiana flees the scene.
Ray rescues the real Naveen and steals the talisman, which he gives to Tiana before Facilier mortally wounds him. Facilier offers to make Tiana's dream come true in exchange for the talisman. Realizing that she would be dishonoring her father by accepting, Tiana destroys the talisman. With Facilier's plan foiled, the voodoo spirits drag him into their world for failing to pay back his debt. After Lawrence is arrested, Tiana reveals her love to Naveen. Charlotte is moved by this and agrees to kiss Naveen so he and Tiana can be human together, but as the clock strikes midnight, Charlotte is no longer a princess, so Tiana and Naveen remain frogs. Ray dies shortly thereafter and is reincarnated as a star. Tiana and Naveen are married by Mama Odie, and since doing so makes Tiana a princess, both are restored to human form. They later return to New Orleans to legally marry and open Tiana's restaurant.
as Tiana, an African American 19-year-old waitress and aspiring chef / restaurateur. She is an intelligent, hardworking, and independent young woman but works so hard that she often forgets about other things in life such as love, fun, and family.[5]Mark Henn was the supervising animator for Tiana.
Anika Noni Rose
as Prince Naveen, the prince of Maldonia. Naveen is a 20-year-old musician and playboy who has been cut off from his family's riches until he learns the value of responsibility. Randy Haycock served as the supervising animator of Naveen in both human and frog form.[6]
as Louis, a friendly yet neurotic trumpet-playing alligator whose dream is to join a jazz band. His name comes from the famous jazz artist and trumpeter, Louis Armstrong. Terence Blanchard did the trumpet playing for Louis. Eric Goldberg, the supervising animator of Louis and other miscellaneous characters,[6] won the Annie Award for Character Animation in a Feature Production for his work on the film.[8]
Michael-Leon Wooley
as Charlotte "Lottie" La Bouff, a 19-year-old wealthy European-American débutante and Tiana's best friend since childhood who dreams of marrying a prince. Though she is initially spoiled and self-centered, she has a heart of gold and cares deeply for Tiana's well-being, going as far as giving up her chance to be a princess when she sees that Prince Naveen and Tiana are truly in love. Nik Ranieri served as the supervising animator of Charlotte as an adult and child.[6] Jennifer Cody won the Annie Award for Voice Acting in a Feature Production for her performance.[8]
Jennifer Cody
as Ray, a middle aged Cajun firefly. He and his vast family are close friends with Mama Odie, so he offers to help the frogs get to her. Ray has an unrequited love for the Evening Star, which he believes is another firefly named "Evangeline" (a reference to the 19th-century Longfellow poem).[9] Mike Surrey was the supervising animator for Ray. Ray's name comes from the blind pianist Ray Charles.[6]
Jim Cummings
as Lawrence, Prince Naveen's valet, whom Dr. Facilier recruits as a partner in his scheme by transforming him to look like Naveen using a blood charm. Anthony DeRosa was the supervising animator for the Lawrence character, whose design was influenced by the Mr. Smee character from Peter Pan.[9]
Peter Bartlett
as Mama Odie, a blind, 197-year-old voodoo priestess, who serves as the film's "Fairy Godmother figure". Andreas Deja was the supervising animator for both Mama Odie and her pet snake, Juju, and was nominated for the Annie Award for Character Animation in a Feature Production.[8][10]
Jenifer Lewis
as Eudora, Tiana's mother, who wants to see her happy and worries that Tiana focuses too much on her dream of owning a restaurant.[11]Ruben A. Aquino animated both Eudora and her husband, James.[6]
Oprah Winfrey
as James, Tiana's father, who helped instill a strong work ethic in Tiana
Terrence Howard
as Eli "Big Daddy" La Bouff, a very wealthy Southern sugar mill owner and father of Charlotte La Bouff. While he spoils Charlotte with everything she asks for, he is a loving and generous man and loves Tiana's cooking. Duncan Marjoribanks was the supervising animator for La Bouff.[6]
John Goodman
Ritchie Montgomery, , and Paul Briggs as Reggie, Darnell, and Two-Fingers, three bumbling frog hunters who try to catch Tiana and Naveen as frogs. Their resemblance to The Three Stooges has been noted.
Don Hall
and Jerry Kernion as the Fenner Brothers, two antagonistic real estate agents who eventually sell Tiana the sugar mill under duress after initially refusing because someone else was offering to pay for it in cash and because they believed Tiana could not manage it because of her "background".[12]
Corey Burton
and Emeril Lagasse as Ian and Marlon, two of a congregation of wild and hot-tempered alligators who try to eat Tiana and Naveen as frogs
Disney had once announced that 2004's Home on the Range would be their last traditionally animated film. After the company's acquisition of Pixar in 2006, Ed Catmull and John Lasseter, the new president and chief creative officer of Disney Animation Studios, reversed this decision and reinstated hand-drawn animation at the studio.[13][14] Many animators who had either been laid off or had left the studio when the traditional animation units were dissolved in 2003 were located and re-hired for the project.[15] Lasseter also brought back directors Ron Clements and John Musker, whose earlier works include The Great Mouse Detective (1986), The Little Mermaid (1989), Aladdin (1992), Hercules (1997), and Treasure Planet (2002).[16][17] The duo had left the company in 2005, but Lasseter requested their return to Disney to direct and write the film and had let them choose the style of animation (traditional or CGI) they wanted to use.[9]
The film's story began development by merging two projects in development at Disney and Pixar at the time, both based around "The Frog Prince" fairy tale.[9][15] One of the projects was based on E. D. Baker's The Frog Princess, in which the story's heroine (Princess Emma) kisses a prince turned frog (Prince Eadric), only to become a frog herself.[15] The other was based on Ralph Eggleston's pitch of The Frog Prince set in gangster-era Chicago.[18]Jorgen Klubien separately claimed that a story he was developing at Pixar tentatively titled The Spirit of New Orleans served as inspiration for the film.[19]The Princess and the Frog returns to the musical film format used in many of the previously successful Disney animated films, with a style Musker and Clements declared, like with Aladdin and The Little Mermaid, had inspiration from Golden Age Disney features such as Cinderella (1950).[20]
Musker and Clements thought that given so many fairy tales were set in Europe, they could do an American fairy tale.[20] They stated that they chose New Orleans as a tribute to the history of the city, for its "magical" qualities, and because it was Lasseter's favorite city.[9][21] The directors spent ten days in Louisiana before starting to write the film.[20]
The Princess and the Frog was originally announced as The Frog Princess in July 2006,[13] and early concepts and songs were presented to the public at Anchor Bay Entertainment's annual shareholders' meeting in March 2007.[22] These announcements drew criticism from African-American media outlets, due to elements of the Frog Princess story, characters, and settings considered distasteful.[23][24] African-American critics disapproved of the original name for the heroine, "Maddy", due to its similarity to the derogatory word term "mammy".[23] Also protested were Maddy's original career as a chambermaid,[24] the choice to have the Black heroine's love interest be a non-Black prince,[23] and the use of a Black male voodoo witchdoctor as the film's villain.[23] The Frog Princess title was also thought by critics to be a slur on French people.[25] Also questioned was the film's setting of New Orleans, which had been heavily damaged by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, resulting in the expulsion of a large number of mostly Black residents.[26] Critics claimed the choice of New Orleans as the setting for a Disney film with a Black heroine was an affront to the Katrina victims' plight.[23][26]
In response to these early criticisms, the film's title was changed in May 2007 from The Frog Princess to The Princess and the Frog. The name "Maddy" was changed to "Tiana",[25][27] and the character's occupation was altered from chambermaid to waitress.[23] Talk show host Oprah Winfrey was hired as a technical consultant for the film, leading to her taking a voice-acting role in the film as Tiana's mother, Eudora.[9]
The head of story, Don Hall, described the plot as a fairy tale "twisted enough that it seems new and fresh", with a kingdom that is a modern city, a handsome prince that is a "knuckleheaded playboy" and a variation on the fairy godmother with Mama Odie. Co-writer Rob Edwards also said The Princess and the Frog was "a princess movie for people who don't like princess movies". As the writers thought Tiana's character motivation of simply dreaming of having her own restaurant was not appealing enough, they expanded so it was her father's as well, with the extra philosophy of "food bringing people together from all walks of life". Musker and Clements stated that while Tiana already starts as a sympathetic character, the events of the plot make her "understand things in a deeper level" and change people around her. Both protagonists would learn from each other—Naveen to take responsibilities, Tiana to enjoy life—as well as figuring from Ray's passion for Evangeline that the perfect balance is brought by having someone you love to share the experience.[20] Tiana became the first African-American Disney Princess.[28][29]
Tiana was inspired in part by famed restaurateur Leah Chase, whom Clements and Musker met on their research trip to New Orleans.[30] Clements elaborated, "There's a woman in New Orleans named Lee (sic) Chase who was a waitress and ultimately opened a restaurant with her husband … we met with her and we talked with her and she went to kind of into her story, her philosophy about food, which is a big element of the movie."[31]
On its limited day release, the film grossed $263,890 at two theaters and grossed $786,190 its opening weekend.[66][67] On its opening day in wide release, the film grossed $7 million at 3,434 theaters.[68] It went on to gross $24.2 million over the opening weekend averaging $7,050 per theater,[69] ranking at #1 for the weekend, and making it the highest-grossing opening to date for an animated movie in December (a record previously held by Beavis and Butt-Head Do America from 1996).[70] The film went on to gross $104.4 million in the United States and Canada, and $271 million worldwide. It was the fifth-highest-grossing animated film of 2009, which was deemed an underachievement by Disney's standards. Overall, the film was considered a qualified commercial success against greater production and pre-release hopes.[1]
While the film outgrossed Disney's contemporaneous hand-drawn films of the 2000s – including The Emperor's New Groove (2000), Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001), Treasure Planet (2002), Brother Bear (2003), and Home on the Range (2004) – it had a considerably less auspicious time than the animated films from Disney's second heyday of the latter 1980s and 1990s. Disney animator Tom Sito compared the film's performance to that of The Great Mouse Detective (1986), which had been a step up from the theatrical run of the 1985 box office failureThe Black Cauldron (both films presaged upcoming commercial returns to form for Disney, with The Great Mouse Detective, in particular, cited as a self-successful inflection point towards the Renaissance, including by Disney internally).[71] It has been opined that part of the film's modest return could be ascribed to being overshadowed by the release of James Cameron’s Avatar a week after its release.[72] The film's fiscal shortcoming was a major reason for the changing of title of the next year's Tangled from "Rapunzel" in order to dissociate from The Princess and the Frog and the entire vacillating Disney Princess concept (Tangled would almost double its predecessor's box office take).[73]
Review aggregatorRotten Tomatoes reported the film has an 85% approval rating based on 201 reviews, with an average rating of 7.4/10. The site's general consensus is that "The warmth of traditional Disney animation makes this occasionally lightweight fairy-tale update a lively and captivating confection for the holidays."[74] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 73 out of 100 based on 29 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[75] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A" on an A+ to F scale.[76]
Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly gave the film an "A" grade and applauded the film's creative team for "uphold[ing] the great tradition of classic Disney animation".[77] Kirk Honeycutt of The Hollywood Reporter praised Walt Disney Animation for "rediscovering its traditional hand-drawn animation" and for "a thing called story".[78] David Germain of the Associated Press wrote that "The Princess and the Frog is not the second coming of Beauty and the Beast or The Lion King. It's just plain pleasant, an old-fashioned little charmer that's not straining to be the next glib animated compendium of pop-culture flotsam."[79]
Justin Chang of Variety was less receptive, stating "this long-anticipated throwback to a venerable house style never comes within kissing distance of the studio's former glory".[80] Joe Neumaier of the New York Daily News gave the film three stars out of five stars while saying "The Princess and the Frog breaks the color barrier for Disney princesses, but is a throwback to traditional animation and her story is a retread".[81]Village Voice's Scott Foundas found that "the movie as a whole never approaches the wit, cleverness, and storytelling brio of the studio's early-1990s animation renaissance (Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King) or pretty much anything by Pixar".[82] Betsy Sharkey, formerly of the Los Angeles Times, gave the film a positive review claiming: "With The Princess and the Frog they've gotten just about everything right. The dialogue is fresh-prince clever, the themes are ageless, the rhythms are riotous and the return to a primal animation style is beautifully executed."[83]
Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert gave the film three out of four stars and admired Disney's step back to traditional animation, writing, "No 3-D! No glasses! No extra ticket charge! No frantic frenzies of meaningless action! And ... good gravy! A story! Characters! A plot! This is what classic animation once was like!", but stated that the film "inspires memories of Disney's Golden Age it doesn't quite live up to, as I've said, but it's spritely and high-spirited, and will allow kids to enjoy it without visually assaulting them."[84] S. Jhoanna Robledo of Common Sense Media gave the film three out of five stars, writing, "First African-American Disney princess is a good role model".[85] Saint Bryan of KING 5 Seattle praised the film and called it "The Best Disney Movie Since The Lion King".[86]
Upon its release, the film created controversy among some Christians over its use of Louisiana Voodoo as a plot device.[87]Christianity Today's review of the film cited its sexual undertones and use of voodoo, arguing that the scenes with Dr. Facilier and his "friends on the other side" contain many horror elements and that young children might be frightened by the film.[88] The film's negative portrayal of Voodoo also drew criticism from non-Christian factions.[89] The film also received criticism for historical negationism of the Jim Crow era in the Southern USA.[90][91][92]
Tiana made a guest appearance on in the second-season episode "Winter's Gift".[144]
Sofia the First
Alternate versions of Tiana, Prince Naveen, Eudora, and Dr. Facilier appear in the of Once Upon a Time. Maldonia also appears as a realm in New Fairy Tale Land.[145][146][147][148]
seventh season
Tiana is featured in the 2018 film , alongside all of the other Disney Princesses.[149] However, earlier promo images and trailers from the film showed that her appearance was depicted with a lighter skin tone, a narrower nose, and European features.[150][151][152] This led to several backlashes from the viewers on social media as these drew her appearance away from that expected of African-Americans.[152] Disney contacted Anika Noni Rose and the advocacy group Color of Change to redesign Tiana for Ralph Breaks the Internet to make sure that she more closely resembles her actual appearance, which was revealed in the second trailer.[151][152][153]
Ralph Breaks the Internet
In the franchise, Dr. Facilier appears in the novel The Isle of the Lost, being the principal of Dragon Hall, the school for villains' children. Facilier's teen daughter, Freddie, appears as one of the main characters in the animated series Descendants: Wicked World. Dr. Facilier (played by Jamal Sims) appears in Disney Channel's 2019 original film Descendants 3, along with his other teen daughter, Celia.[154]
