The Bad:The prince is fairly revolting, in my opinion. He starts out feeling like a lazy, womanizing, cheat who is looking for a ticket to an easy life. He does acquire a few redeeming qualities as the film progresses, but I ended up feeling like our lovely heroine falls in love with a loser. This movie loses a whole star just for him. My second issue with this movie is the voodoo. Some parents might not have an issue with this – and I don't have a problem with most magic depicted in kid's movies, so I'm not sure why this bothers me so much. Maybe because some people actually practice this as a real art rather than a fantasy type of magic? Maybe because it felt like a nightmare-inducing pact with evil? In any case, it came across as far too creepy & dark for my tastes. The Good: The visuals are genuinely lovely. It's a very pretty movie. And it's fantastic to have an African American heroine princess. Yay diversity! I felt that this movie was respectful of a minority group. Our heroine is full of excellent character traits – she's resourceful, hard-working, a good friend, optimistic, and more. The music is a bit jazzy, a bit southern gospel, and not bad at all (although not some of Disney's best).The Mom view:Not one of my favorite Disney films, which was so disappointing since I was excited to see Disney return to traditional fairy-tales – and with a non-white princess, no less! But, between the less than stellar prince, the creepy voodoo, and the forgettable story-line, this isn't going to be one I purchase for my kids. I'll have my kids watch this at some point (probably late elementary age), but only as a rental. Overall, this gets a grade of 'not horrible, but not great'.

I was excited about the movie before I watched it. We have a black princess, its 2D, and this is from the directors of Aladdin and The Little Mermaid! What could go wrong with it? Almost everything. No wonder this didn't get much attention. We have evil spirits, unmemorable songs, and the ONLY black princess being a frog for most of the movie. Plot: Tiana and Naveen were frogs for most of the movie, which really dragged it. The plot was super weird, and it could have done without Voodoo, which was creepy even in cartoon. It had kids screaming in theaters.Characters: I like Tiana (who is a fabulous singer and role model), Naveen at the end, and Dr. Facilier, but no one else. One of the characters died, but I didn't feel any attachment and wasn't sad to see him/her go.Music: I love, love, love the songs, "Almost There" and "Friends on the Other Side," but the rest isn't memorable. Fun, yes. Energetic, yes. Something that gets stuck in your head? Nope. They were actually written by the person who did Toy Story's songs.Animation: The hand-drawn cartoons were just gorgeous! It's in a beautiful style I can't describe. Humor: Spot-on! I was continuously laughing. Really, everything that was supposed to make me laugh made me laugh, except for the firefly Ray being in love with a star, which was just plain weird. Message: The lesson is good, but it's not strong or clear. It's "try harder to find what you really need."Acting and voices: The acting was good but some voices annoying. The old woman, Ray, and Charlotte's voices annoyed me, especially Charlotte's. She was high-pitched and squeaky, constantly bugging me.In the end, Tiana is a fabulous role model, character, and singer. We have gorgeous animation and a great lesson, even though the latter isn't very strong. However, the movie did not deserve to be rated G just because the Voodoo was in cartoon. Tiana isn't human for even half of the movie, but 33% (I actually calculated that). This is not worth watching again. I honestly would've liked it and wouldn't even have minded the songs being done by Randy Newman if Tiana had been a frog for a shorter amount of time and there hadn't been Voodoo.

I am very disappointed in Disney for this film. Here we have Disney's first Black/African American princess and she's poor, almost like a servant to a white blonde haired woman and she spends 96% of the movie as a frog! On top of that the movie is scary and dark, the songs aren't memorable (the music is an important part of Disney, I was just so upset that I couldn't remember one song after leaving the theater) and the characters and their drawls is just unsettling. If I recall correctly some were missing teeth and had the most obnoxious offensive accents that you could give a character in a movie about a black princess. The animation was not breathtaking as many of Disney's movies usually are. The animation was flat and dry.Why couldn't the princess marry a black man? Most of all the Disney princesses have married/fell in love with someone of their race with the exception of Pocahontas which is historically based so it does not count. They could have made a beautiful princess and give her an interesting and intriguing background and setting. I can't stand that they went to New Orleans for this one, just why? Disney should just erase Tiana, pretend like she never existed and start from scratch completely. This princess deserves better than that.

This was one of the Disney films I meant to see during the BFI's all-year Disney-a-week marathon, but managed to miss out on (my enthusiasm had rather flagged by the end of the year). I watched it today under less-than-ideal conditions, on a salvaged second-hand DVD that jammed and skipped, and without actually being able to concentrate on the screen for considerable periods of time, and I liked it a lot: more than "Tangled", more than "Frozen". Loved the Twenties aesthetic (little references like Naveen's ukulele), Tiana's realistic working-class parents, the New Orleans setting, the jazz, the voodoo (the Shadow Man has definite overtones of Baron Samedi). I liked the way that Charlotte, though clearly spoilt rotten, turns out to be a good friend and not an antagonist (and they even manage to make the friendship between the Sugar King's daughter and Tiana the black waitress come across as plausible). The Shadow Man makes an excellent villain. And, although this sounds cruel, I liked the fact that they went so far as to really kill off Ray, instead of pulling off the last-minute magical resurrection that seemed to be on the cards -- though any last words at all were a bit implausible under the circumstances!I have a bit of trouble swallowing the idea of talking animals in New Orleans in the 1920s -- mainly the idea that the alligator can actually talk to ordinary people as well as to enchanted ones -- although that's a weird sticking-point given that I had no trouble with the idea that frogs can talk to alligators and fireflies... My main beef with the film would be that Naveen didn't really work for me as a character and I couldn't see what someone like Tiana would see in him; Flynn Rider as a similar 'reformed rogue' was much more interesting from that point of view. Having watched the DVD extras I now gather that he was supposed to be a complement to Tiana's character in that he can appreciate the things of the moment while she is so focused on the future that she misses out on beauty and reality that she's in the middle of -- and that at least one of the jammed/skipped sections was one that apparently made this point :-( However, when I saw the film he came across as rather flat. (And why the French-sounding accent, when he's the one character in New Orleans with no reason to sound French?)I wasn't especially fond of the songs as tunes -- nothing like as memorable as the numbers from "Beauty and the Beast" or "The Corpse Bride" -- but they work well as spectacle with the accompanying animations. "Friends on the Other Side" reminds me a bit of "Remains of the Day" in that respect, which is perhaps unsurprising! The film scores highly for me in that it repeatedly took completely unpredictable twists: I couldn't see the plot points coming, and yet they generally made perfect sense in retrospect. This is one picture where 'spoilers' are definitely best avoided, and somehow I'd managed to miss hearing any of them in advance :-)High on the visuals (sorry, but I'm really not that sold on 3D animation), high on the plot, very high on the background and setting. Naveen drags it down a bit, I'm afraid, as I couldn't really get invested in the romance, but overall 8/10. It would bear watching again under better circumstances; I'd have been tempted to hang onto the DVD if it hadn't been damaged!