Thursday, December 10, 2009

The Princess and the Frog Featurette: Magic of the Bayou

One more featurette before the big release day tomorrow. This one revives my enthusiasm for seeing the movie (the opening scene with the young Tiana greatly dampened it for a while there).This featurette is called Magic of the Bayou and gives us glimpses of scenes we haven't seen before. I particularly like the way the good magic of Mama Odie (in the movie it's voodoo) balances the bad of Dr. Facilier (also voodoo).Nice use of color palettes for good vs evil, yes? You may notice there's also a strong set of shapes for each set: long, lean and stretched for the baddies, round, earthy and comfortably plump for the good. I've yet to see all the magic effects but the clips I've seen and pics like these show curly, sinuously moving creeping magic for Dr. Facilier while Mama Odie's is strong and ray-like.

Here's the featurette - enjoy!


I sincerely hope the movie does well and revives people's enthusiasm for fairy tales. It's been a while since they've been in popular culture and, despite the Disneyfication of the tales (and this story, while taking inspiration from The Frog Prince and some ideas from the book "The Frog Princess" by E.D. Baker, is really more of a Disney original story than a retelling) there's no doubt we owe Disney a great deal of thanks for keeping fairy tales in the popular consciousness.

1 comment:

  1. the opening scene with the young Tiana greatly dampened it for a while there
    Huh, so I was not the only one not won over by Tiana. The spoiled blonde girl was honestly more amusing than the sweet heroine. The blonde girl reminded me of Darla Dimple from Cats Don't Dance; she was an absolutely hilarious villain. While sweet girls are more pleasant to deal with in person, the bossy and demanding ones are more fun to watch on the big screen.

    Of course, I already know that, if (fine, when) I watch this, it shall be for the villain. Disney often does great villains and samples of this one have suggested that he continues the tradition quite well.

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