No 3D glasses?
No raining meatballs?
No snarky pop-culture gags or celebrity cameos?
What is this -- 1991?
If only.
But it will do.
The Princess and the Frog is, if you hadn't heard, Disney's attempt to resuscitate classical painstakingly crafted animation at a time when every Hollywood outfit has swapped their inkwells for Macs (the Mouse House included).
The gamble is a pricey one -- both in terms of saving face and sheer expenditure -- and you can almost feel the pressure to deliver a masterpiece dripping from every painted cell.
So is it any wonder then that while the film is very good -- and I adore animation -- it also feels less like a breathtaking addition to the medium than a greatest hits mixtape from the renaissance of the early 1990s?
Here we have a plucky young woman (1989's The Little Mermaid) who falls for a cursed prince (1991's Beauty and the Beast) and overcomes the threat of dark magic (1992's Aladdin) with the aid of a motley pair of comical sidekicks (1994's The Lion King).
True, these elements have always been part of Disney DNA, but I still would have preferred an advancement rather than a retrenchment.
Not that the target audience -- families with young and not-so-young children -- will care. What this fable lacks in originality, it makes up with excitement and joy.
The music is rousing, the characters endearing, and the humour innocuous enough to put smiles on the faces of both kids and adults.
We're first introduced to our heroine Tiana in a pre-Katrina New Orleans.
She's the daughter of a seamstress (Oprah Winfrey) and a working-class father (Terrence Howard) who dreams of opening his own restaurant someday.
Those dreams never come true for him, but Tiana carries them a decade later at the height of the city's Jazz Age in the 1920s.
Meanwhile -- and it's almost as byzantine as it sounds -- a scheming voodoo villain Dr. Facilier (Keith David) turns the visiting prince Naveen (Bruno Campos) into a frog in order to ensnare Tiana's wealthy best friend Charlotte (Jennifer Cody).
Desperate to find a princess to kiss him to reverse the spell, Naveen mistakes Tiana for royalty and begs her for a smooch.
When the two lock lips, though, the plan backfires and she's transformed into an amphibian, too. Joined by a plump, jazz-loving alligator named Louis (Michael-Leon Wooley) and a Cajun firefly named Ray (Jim Cummings), Tiana and Naveen journey to the bayou to track down the voodoo godmother Mama Odie (Jenifer Lewis) who can restore them to human form.
Along the way, there are frog-hunting rednecks, narrow escapes, betrayals, romance, lessons in life and plenty of Randy Newman-composed musical numbers (standouts being Friends on the Other Side and Dig a Little Deeper).
All of it will doubtlessly satisfy fans seeking some substance with their style -- this sketches circles around Disney's A Christmas Carol, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and Planet 51, to name three -- as well as prove you can still captivate a crowd with the careful stroke of a brush.
For that, credit Disney boss John Lasseter and veteran directors Ron Clements and John Musker (The Little Mermaid).
They've reinforced themselves against the big bad wolf of CG animation here -- he's huffing and puffing, but this fortified Frog won't blow down.
(This film is rated G)
More Movie Reviews
