Hacker Cinema
The Princess and the Frog
2009 · Film · 98 min
Directed by Ron Clements, John Musker
A waitress, desperate to fulfill her dreams as a restaurant owner, is set on a journey to turn a frog prince back into a human being, but she has to face the same problem after she kisses him.
3 positive1 negative11 neutralfrom 15 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
16 comments on Hacker News
What work of Disney is more influential on the modern American Psyche (today, in 2026) than Ironman, X-Men or Spiderman?
Moana? Sleeping Beauty? Mickey Mouse?
The only major "American identit" film I can think of was Princess and the Frog. Maybe Big Hero 6 (at least the San Francisco half).
Staggered how? They have averaged a movie a year for the last 40 years. The Disney live action movies have almost nothing to do with the release schedule of Disney Animation movies, nor have they impacted how many get made. They are completely different studios.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Walt_Disney_Animation_Studios_films
Their 3D movies in order are Chicken Little, Meet the Robinsons, Bolt, Tangled, (Pooh), Wreck it Ralph, Frozen, Big Hero 6, Zootopia, Moana, Ralph Breaks the Internet, Frozen II, Raya, Encanto, Strange Worlds. That’s 15 movies in 17 years, and Princess and the Frog makes 16.
Bolt, Tangled, Ralph, Frozen, Big Hero 6, Zootopia, Moana was an excellent run. (Disney acquired Pixar during production of Meet the Robinsons, and about 60% of the movie was remade, every movie since was produced by Pixar descendants.)
And Tangled is better than Frozen, even if it didn’t have the zeitgeist. (Tangled is the highest rated of any movie I listed on Letterboxd, followed by Big Hero 6, Moana, and Zootopia, so I’m not unique in that opinion. Not sure what the Letterboxd community has against Bolt.) Outside of Chicken Little, there’s really not a bad movie on that list (I haven’t seen Strange World yet.)
If anything, acquiring Pixar doubled their animation output.
I think one reason why Pixars "decline" is more harshly felt is because the Pixar "style" is the only type of flagship animated feature Disney puts out nowadays.
It's not that Pixar has always been good, like any company there's been ups and downs, but because Disney themselves have also gone all in on 3D animated films[0] (and none of those really come close to what Pixar puts out; even the recent flop of Elemental is still a better movie than most 3D Disney movies of the past decade), all those movies get compared to each other in a much more direct manner.
Back in the early 2000s, it was pretty straightforward; Disney did the 2D animation, Pixar the 3D animation. It means that when Pixar or Disney puts out a stinker, its easily covered by the other. A sort of trade if you will.
Disney has kinda now ended up in a bit of a slump for the past decade (likely directly the fault of the Live Action Remakes they keep doing - it feels really uncreative), so the highs and lows of Pixar are that much more apparent.
They'll be doing fine. Elemental sucked, but it doesn't seem like it's a pattern for Pixars movie creation process. Not in the way that Shrek's poop humor ended up dominating DreamWorks for over a decade or how Despicable Mes "marketability" ended up ruining Illumination.
[0]: The last blockbuster 2D animated movie was the Princess and the Frog and according to Disney it didn't make enough money to continue making them.
Not for long:
"In June 2020, it was announced that the U.S. versions of the ride would be receiving a new theme based on Disney's 2009 film The Princess and the Frog.[2][3] The new ride, which will be titled Tiana's Bayou Adventure, is scheduled to open at Disneyland and Magic Kingdom in late 2024"
I dunno. My wife and I used to insta buy/ take our kids to see Disney movies, but now we double check what sorts messages the movie has in it.
For example, Turning Red. It seems to have a message of… never listen to your parents? Rebel against authority? I’m not sure exactly. It’s a weird movie.
Which is interesting because Moana is, as an adult, possibly one of my favorite movies of all time. The messaging of the heroes journey, venerating your ancestors, but being able to look toward the future and find a new way that sometimes faces resistance is a perfect tale. Then there’s also the subtext of Maui and Tefiti being the archetypal divorced couple, with Maui stealing her heart which causes severe emotional trauma until she is healed by Moana, the archetypal child mending the family.
Frozen is a weird one, I could write a book about it.
Princess and the Frog is great.
It’s so weird! I never know if a mainline Disney movie is going to be good or terrible. I don’t really know what’s going on over at Disney right now.
3d movies require a lot more technical r&d, experimentation and tool development.
This was true for 2d in the past, but Princess and the Frog was made in more or less off the shelf 2d animation software.
The biggest challenge to doing 2d though is finding the talent and the justification. Take a look at what most art school are offering as far as animation goes...
I don’t know where you get those numbers from, but obviously animation price for both 2D and 3D are dependent on level of detail.
Naive calculation says that princess and the frog (disneys last 2D) was 100mill for 97 minutes, while Up (released same year) was 175mill for 96 minutes.
I don’t think either movie had particularly bigger stars than the other, so i think the overall budget ratio gives an okay idea of how far your estimate is off for cinema animation.
This is likely because the approaches and techniques are not measurably different with a "2D" animated movie in 2022 or recently, unless they're doing some retro cel animation.
Disney's last was The Princess and The Frog (which is a very good one that predates the story-in-a-box Pixar plots), which of course was still partially made in the same animation software used by others at the time.
If Disney made another traditional animation movie I suspect it would be a lot like spiderverse: mostly an aesthetic change to the existing process.
DreamWorks Animation, as one existing example, is still doing a lot major 2D projects (though certainly not "traditional hand drawn" as technology has shifted a lot post-Flash) as the animation house brand for Netflix these days. (She-Ra and Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts, as two recent examples.) At least in "TV budgets" 2D animation is seen as more than competitive again (though it was a much briefer period where all TV projects seemed to be CG, and 2D never really "died" in TV like it did in features) and it's likely just a matter of time and aesthetic drive before someone (maybe even Disney) tries it again at the feature level. (Supposedly Rastetter was still pushing for it at Disney Feature Animation even after Princess and the Frog and right up to his ouster. Who knows when a successor will champion it as a priority.) It probably won't be DreamWorks Animation today unless Netflix has some reason they want to do an animated feature. (It is an Oscar category they could compete in, if they need the motivation to push. Maybe less controversy in that category for winning as a streaming site than their battles over streaming versus theater in other categories.)
(ETA: Oh and I just remembered that Fox, the crazy Australian company not the parts of Disney formerly known as Fox, and its subsidiary Bento Box do have a full Bob's Burgers feature film release on their schedule. Not that it entirely compares to the prestige of a classic DFA fairy tale based film, but there's at least one attempt at a 2D animated feature film in the near future.)
I can't imagine Katzenberg doing this (I don't think his interests are actually animation or anything "traditional"), but hand drawn animation is just "out of fashion" and the business people don't think the ROI is enough. Look at the budget for Princess and the Frog or other hand drawn projects around that time compared to CG films. Hand drawn cost around $80-100 million while CG is closer to $150 million (a large chunk for both is usually voice talent). Disney had tossed their old animation system CAPS (and I'm pretty sure all their old desks) and they built a brand new pipeline around off the shelf software for the production--subsequent productions would have been cheaper.
If you view most golden age and resurgence Disney it's glaringly clear. By and large the women are shoehorned into submissive, weak characters at the mercy of a white knight.
The thing is, this really wasn't just a Disney thing, it was largely a Hollywood thing in general. Strong(er), three-dimensional women in film narrative didn't hit major motion pictures with significance until the late 60s and into the early 80s.
The late 1980s was an unfortunate time for Disneys resurgence, because somehow there was also a revival of strong man/weak, beautiful woman tropes in Hollywood. So when movies like The Little Mermaid, The Princess and the Frog, Tarzan, Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast came out they very much followed this template.
The plots of these and previous movies hammer home that the young women are meant as prizes for men who come and save them. It's in the stories themselves.
> I don't know what you think a Disney story is, but all of Disney's major works are based on existing folk stories and other works already in the public domain.
False. Here's some of their animated features based on copyrighted works (as best as I can tell):
Dumbo
Bambi
Peter Pan
Lady and the Tramp
One Hundred and One Dalmatians
The Sword in the Stone
The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh
The Rescuers
The Fox and the Hound
The Black Cauldron
The Great Mouse Detective
Treasure Planet (partially based on the 1987 TV miniseries Treasure Island in Outer Space)
Meet the Robinsons
The Princess and the Frog
Big Hero 6
(I'm using the list in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Walt_Disney_Animation_Studios_films, and picking out the “based on” or ”inspired by” credits that look recent enough.)
The science behind the movie was very clever. What has disappointed me is that Disney/Pixar keep on pushing the sexism gambit in their movies. This movie wasn't as bad as some of their others, but they are Consistently failing to address gender in a balanced way. Does anyone male in this movie do/say anything good? What about Frozen? The stupid (Wessleton) and nasty (Hans) are only male. Brave? Same thread. The kings/Princes are all obnoxious and/or stupid. Wreck-it-Ralph : Kowalski strikes Ralph across the face as a show of might and it's meant to be funny (ie. The modern assertive woman who bashes men as "humour") Several of the tinkerbell movies where ratchet & clank are the typical stupid males (and in most of them, they are almost the only males). To be fair. They do portray the southern belle as a dimwitted hick too, which is the stupid southerner prejudice emanating from the U.S. civil war. However, they did a great job with Tangled and Princess and the frog - there's a much better gender balance in those movies. It's a shame. You take your kids to see a supposedly family friendly movie and you cringe at the sexism that is pushed by the writers and directors. Do you just shrug it off, wondering if this prejudice won't rub off on your kids - or do you highlight the sexism to your kids and ask how a large studio could be so consistent in their bias, despite their deep attention to the science. I can't help feel there is more sexism and more conscious sexism than there has ever been. It really makes me sad.
You are stretching on all of you examples.
The Men's Warehouse commercials are as I described before, they talk about looking good for a function - work but life also. This is the pragmatic men's marketing. It's not the 'expensive so it must be good' branding that is on a lot of female products.
When was the last Disney 'prince' movie? Aladdin? Lion King? Meanwhile, Disney has now deemed Mulan and Tinker Bell as a princesses, there is now an African-American princess (Princess and the Frog), they added another pretty, white princess (Rapunzel from Tangled), a Scottish princess (Brave) and Disney is adding a hispanic princess[1] (although light on the hispanic). Girls have been sold the knight in shining armor. Boy could care less about princesses they just want be an action hero.
Diamond advertisements that talk about 'investment' are for men, but there aren't many of those. It's all about 'forever', 'love', etc, which are emotional pleas to women.
And the Superbowl has A TON of women watching[2]. It's sexist to think otherwise. The NFL is openly courting women as a way to increase viewership[3].
[1] http://www.examiner.com/article/disney-s-princess-sofia-the-first-the-first-hispanic-disney-princess
[2] http://jamiedunham.wordpress.com/2013/02/03/marketing-to-women-women-watching-super-bowl-too/
[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/06/sports/football/nfl-hones-message-for-its-female-fans.html?_r=0
Yes. It tells an important story about product creation.
DuckTales had to make it over 65 episodes and under budget. It had simple goals and it accomplished them.
Look at Apple at their brightest hours. You can say that the iPhone was Apple throwing down the gauntlet and rejecting the tyranny of buttons and saved us all, but the reality is simple. Touch was expensive and bad for a long time, so Apple waited until touch was cheap and good, then they solved for X. They didn't care if you didn't buy iWorks for your iMac and your iPad, they just wanted to sell hardware.
That is the secret to success for many products and avoiding it is the road to failure for many others: if affordable{solve for x();} else {do something else();}
MS and Disney have shot themselves in the foot numerous times. MS making sure they didn't hurt other product lines created huge waste and left consumers hesitant. Disney obsessed with the Disney Princess and drove away everyone but the pre-teen girl and parents didn't bother taking their kids to see The Princess and the Frog because Dad would lose his mind and empty his walled if he thought he'd have to spend another second in Hanna Montana-ville. Instead of just solving for X, they lost consumers who assumed they'd get screwed down the road somewhere.
It's just more of an adult / documentary thing IMHO. They spent way too much trying to make some principled point rather than entertain. Same with 'Up'. I think perhaps they were catering to people who nominate Oscars or something.
My kids were bored. Gimmie Princess and the frog, Hercules, Aladdin, Little Mermaid etc etc any day.