Guess Who (or What) is Back? You Guessed It: Traditional Animation

Disney recently released “The Princess and the Frog” to DVD and it's exciting on many different levels. Despite this being Disney’s first adventure with a black princess, it’s also its first whirl with a majority traditional animation in a while. With the advent of computer technology and such, we’ve begun to see much more computer-generated work being released. There is nothing particularly “wrong” with this, but for the generations accustomed to Disney’s classic side, this is a breath of fresh air.

Much work and preparation goes into creating a hand drawn feature length movie, and with the market for CG (computer generated) movies on the rise in the late 90s, Disney made the switch. Much of this had financial implications of course (Dreamworks and Pixar were blowing Disney out of the water once upon a time, and with no pun intended), but now that they are out of the water it must have felt like the a good time to release a traditionally animated film. That, and many people may not go for a princess classic in CG. You never truly know, really.

Anyway, technically speaking “The Princess and the Frog” is an awesome movie visually.  It had the characteristic colorful musical numbers present in nearly all musical numbers, but being set in New Orleans the directors likely knew they would have to put a lot of focus on Cajun and New Orleans culture. If you’ve ever been to New Orleans, you would see how good a job the illustrators on this project did to artistically preserve it the movie. You can even see this by checking out the movie's website.

Now, will traditional animation stay awhile? Probably not, but that's okay. It's great to see good films in traditional animation can still do fairly well against its late 21st century counterparts.