LOS ANGELES -- Disney has gone back to the drawing board.

Even as the computer-generated Bolt arrives today in dizzying 3-D, over at the studio's animation shingle, work is well underway on next year's hand-rendered cartoon The Princess and the Frog.

Interestingly, John Lasseter -- whose Pixar studios was a pioneering force in computer animation -- is guiding the Mouse House's push back to the inkwell.

"I love technology. In my career, I've been at the forefront of computer animation, of 3-D," Lasseter tells Sun Media. "I did a 3-D movie in 1989, long before there were any theatres that could show it. I took my wedding pictures in 3-D. It's very exciting. But it's not technology that entertains audiences, it's what you do with it. I've always loved hand-drawn animation."

Outside of Lasseter's offices, evidence of The Princess and the Frog adorns the corridors: Designs of characters and sketches of New Orleans, circa the Jazz Era, when the story unfolds. The plot is an agreeable twist on the classic tale: A princess puckers up for a frog in the hopes of turning him into a prince. But the spell backfires and transforms the princess into a toad, too. The pair winds up in the Louisiana swamps, where they're befriended by an alligator who dreams of becoming a jazz musician.

"There's something about hand-drawn animation that computer animation can't quite achieve," says Lasseter, who has presided over Pixar and Disney since the two titans merged in 2006. "To me, if there's a studio that should be doing it, it's this studio."