Be Kind, Rewind — “The Princess and the Frog”

The Princess and the Frog
December 12th, 2009
Regal Hunt Valley
Hunt Valley, MD
7:00pm

The Princess and the Frog was Disney’s return to two-dimensional animation. For those who don’t know me in real life, I spent four years working at Walt Disney World while I was in college. Honestly, if you go to school in the Orlando area, I would highly recommend getting a part-time job at one of the theme parks (not SeaWorld). You’ll make a ton of friends. You’ll all be broke college students, but you’ll get to go to theme parks together on the weekends, weeknights, and weekdays when you’re supposed to be in class.

Anyway, I bring that up because I have a little more Disney knowledge than most. When I was a kid, all I wanted to do was work at Disney World and I spent my time learning every thing I could about everything Disney. Now? Now I refuse to pay for a park ticket and I’ve forgotten a lot of my fun facts.

Disney, although it may be built on a kingdom of turkey legs, does continue to make gorgeously animated movies. The Princess and the Frog is no exception. Not only is the two-dimensional animation modern and reminiscent of the movies that started the Empire of the Mouse, but the songs are out of this world.

I listened to a few of the songs to jog my memory and they immediately felt classic. In a good way, the way you know that a thing will never go out of style. It’s a sharp contrast to how I felt about the music of Encanto. I just watched it for the first time last week and would not recognize a single song from that movie.

The Princess and the Frog also made me weep like a baby. While that’s not particularly hard to do (put me in a darkened theatre, make the music swell as something sad happens, and I am sobbing), Disney is so good at manipulating emotions when it comes to charming side characters. It makes me sad that The Princess and the Frog seems to have been forgotten. The focus is more on modern movies like Frozen or classic movies like The Little Mermaid.

What The Princess and the Frog has that no other Disney movie has is the absolute banger that is “Almost There.”

This is part of the Be Kind, Rewind series. A collection of personal essays as told through my movie ticket stub collection. This essay is preceded by Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and followed by The Lovely Bones.

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