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Princess and the Frog isn’t nearly the heaping pile of shit it looks like it would be. Someone gave me a bootleg and I enjoyed the crap out of it. Disney returns to hand drawn animation, Broadway style musical numbers, actually developing fkking characters within a coherent storyline and flavors it with a spicy blend of humor, drama and – yeay! someone dies! – thumbs up.

Plus they can finally inject some personality into Disneylands New Orleans Square now that they have a movie that takes place there.

FrogPrince does look a lot like Prince Eric but I don’t think there’s much of a template to the Disney dudes outside this comparrison so I let it slide.

The villains had a little more depth to them as well: Lawrence didnt start out with bad intentions but was tempted into villainy which he later had doubts and regrets over and Dr Penis/Phallus/ShaddowMichaelJackson seemed to me to stay within a reasonable character profile.

I liked how there were nice people and cruel people, heart warmers and skeptics, charitable people and greedy people – of both races and it never appeared forced. you never, as you do with Pocahontas, see a jerk with X skin and know its just a matter of minutes till they balance it out with a jerk with Y skin. They even cleared the “work hard and don’t wait for handouts” + “womanizers outta settle down” + “think outside of your current view” + the all the other little anecdotes sprinkled about without sounding preachy and forced. the more i think about this movie, the more im so proud it wasn’t an embarrassing Fail.

If you have an ear for voices though, watching a dude with Goliath from Gargoyles voice doin a soft shoe (Dr F) and hearing Tigger (Ray the fly) with a Cajun accent could get distracting here and there.

Cindarella and Sleeping Beauty’s cottage. Some kind of Ariel castle thing that isn’t really described. Gastons hunting lodge style pub and a “Be Our Guest” restaurant set in the Beasts dining hall. Lots of injections of more activities and character interaction (which i think is a little overdone. you go to the parks to ride rides, meet the characters and move to the next ride, not so much to spend lots of time with the actors in character.

A much needed doubled up Dumbo with a series of circus games for kids to go through instead of waiting in line. John Lassater said at a separate convention Q&A type thing I saw that the “the smallest customers wait in the longest lines for the shortest rides”.

I’ve been loosely following the development of this ever since I heard the news that Disney had hired David Mamet to write a screenplay for a film adaptation of an Anne Frank story. They later rejected it because it was “too dark” (wtf?) and didn’t focus on Anne enough…or at all. wait what? eh-yea… Apparently Mamet was all “mm. ya. Anne Frank. cool chick. – hey, what iiiif… we doooo… *THIS*…instead..ya?” and wrote a screenplay not about the teenage author of the diary he was assigned to write about, buuuut… about “a contemporary Jewish girl who goes to Israel and learns about the traumas of suicide bombing.” okay.. but what? Would it have been released under the title “How the Diary of Anne Frank made me think of this other neat story I think should be told”?

Made me remember some of the comments I saw on the DailyBeast – “What’s next? Giget Goes to Auschwitz?” – “Anne Frank the musical To be followed by The Diary of Anne Frank On Ice!?” Reminds me of the Saturday TV Funhouse SNL sketch of a Disney version of Titanic that included a preview of Anne Frank singing “I’m gonna write a novel some day”.

Is this what we have to look forward to?…

Rotoscoping is an animation technique in which animators trace over live-action film movement, frame by frame, for use in animated films. Originally, pre-recorded live-action film images were projected onto a frosted glass panel and re-drawn by an animator. This projection equipment is called a rotoscope, although this device has been replaced by computers in recent years. In the visual effects industry, the term rotoscoping refers to the technique of manually creating a matte for an element on a live-action plate so it may be composited over another background.

TimesOnline tried to get Disney to comment on this, with no luck.

A Disney spokeswoman refused to confirm that the movie giant used the technique today, telling Times Online that “it’s not something that we comment on”, but the company is thought to have used the tracing technique for decades.

In the recent episode of South Park, titled The Ring, Kenny takes his new girlfriend to a Jonas Brothers’ concert where they each get purity rings. Somehow this turns into harsh criticism of Disney that went completely over my head, which makes me think it was bullshit since not much goes over my head besides hats and maybe a fez on a Sunday afternoon.

I thought the episode was misplaced satire, even though I don’t know very much about the band. The thesis appeared to be that Disney is a big hypocritical fraud by promoting a band whose members don’t have sex, yet are sexually appealing. Huh? Where exactly is the hypocrisy beef? Did I miss something? They don’t prance around without a shirt (like I do) or have suggestive lyrics in their songs and I’ve never seen the brothers hump the air or pump around suggestively like the South Park versions of them did.

So wtf? The South Park guys seem to just really hate the idea of teenagers not having sex whenever they feel like it. I’d get it if the Band appealed primarily to 17-23 year olds cuz then I’d be all duh – screw the purity ring and screw me. But aren’t the Jonas Bros 10 to 14 year old territory primarily? And eh… Isn’t this a group that maybe should probably not be encouraged to banging? Why is role modeling a no-sex policy to kids and young teens such a bad thing to deserve scorn and ridicule? The South Park kids are in 4th grade.

Combined with what I said earlier about the secondary charge against the Disney Corporation who peddles these sexy no-sex boyzes not making any more sense to me than targeting kids who aren’t having sex – wtf was with this episode? If it was all just an excuse to show Mickey Mouse beating the fuck out of someone and cursing then okay, fine, but we’ve come to expect a little more depth and meaning behind the crudeness of South Park gags.

This episode seemed 8 years too late and should have been about Britney Spears. She was much more obviously marketed on a foundation of sex from her outfits to her music videos to her orgasm moans in every other song. But the Jonas Brothers? really? It seemed like South Park was just attacking them simply because young girls like them. Therefore something sinister is going on behind the scenes? Maybe I’m missing something but it didn’t make any sense to me.

I like the emotion in Eve (the chick robot)’s reaction to what she thinks is Wall-E’s death.

A German brass band (including Hirohito on sousaphone and Mussolini on bass drum) marches through a small German town (where everything, including the clouds and trees, is decorated with the Nazi swastika), singing the virtues of the Nazi doctrine. Passing by Donald’s house, they poke him out of bed with a bayonet to get ready for work. Because of wartime rationing, his breakfast consists of stale bread, coffee brewed from a single hoarded coffee bean, and a spray that tastes like bacon and eggs. The band shoves a copy of Mein Kampf in front of him for a moment of reading, then marches into his house and escorts him to a factory.

Upon arriving at the factory (at bayonet-point), Donald starts his 48-hour daily shift screwing caps onto artillery shells in an assembly line. Mixed in with the shells are portraits of the Fuehrer, so he must interrupt his work to do a Hitler salute every time a portrait appears. The pace of the assembly line intensifies (as in the classic comedy Modern Times), and Donald finds it increasingly hard to complete all the tasks. At the same time, he is bombarded with propaganda messages about the superiority of the Aryan race and the glory of working for The Führer.

After a “paid vacation” that consists of making swastika shapes with his body for a few seconds in front of a painted backdrop of the Alps, Donald is ordered to work overtime. He has a nervous breakdown with hallucinations of artillery shells everywhere. When the hallucinations clear, he finds himself in his bed—in the United States—and realizes the whole experience was a nightmare. The short ends with Donald embracing a miniature Statue of Liberty, thankful for his American citizenship.

Disney/pixar’s animation release timeline (after WALL-E) is:

Bolt (2008): A German Shepard version of Buzz Lightyear in that he’s spent his whole life on the set of a tv show in the style of Thunderbolt (the dog-hero show that the 101 Damations puppies watch, which makes me wonder if the name Bolt is an homage/tip off for nerds like me to notice).

His isolated life makes him think his tv powers are real and probably has some self realization story arc similar to Buzz’s after he meets a cat named Mittens and a hamster that never leaves its ball.

The Princess and the Frog (2009): Disney’s first black princess. first return to traditional 2D animation since Emperors new Groove.

Rapunzel (2010): Originally, the film’s plot revolved around two ‘romantically challenged’, real-world teenagers who are transformed into Rapunzel and her Prince by a disgruntled witch who can no longer stand happy fairy-tale endings. However, since production was halted in 2004 for major retooling, Glen Keane has “promised” that the film will revert back to the fairy tale’s “literary origins” and be less of a steaming pile of shit than what was just described.

King of the Elves (2012): Based on Science Fiction writer Phillip K. Dick’s 1953 short story fantasy about a band of elves living in the modern-day Mississippi Delta who name a local guy working at a gas station their king after he helps save them from an evil troll.

Cars 2 (2012): Lightning McQueen and his pal Mater travel the globe in a series of excuses to make more inside references and jokes about or otherwise concerning non-american made automobiles. joy.