Princess and the Frog

At SDCC, we were fortunate enough to sit with Disney Directors Ron Clements and John Musker for The Princess and the Frog. The Princess and the Frog is a return to the traditional 2D hand-drawn animation that Walt Disney fans know and love.

The musical The Princess and the Frog is set in New Orleans and shows us what happens when a beautiful girl named Tiana kisses a frog prince. Randy Newman does the score as well in the musical.

As we were getting ready to set up for the interview both Ron and John talk about how they attended San Diego Comic Con 20 to 30 years ago. They spoke about how the scale has changed and how it used to be about comic books and it was a sub culture. Of course they pointed out how there were no women there (everyone looks at me and we laugh).

Q: How close are you to finishing the film?
A: We’re pretty close. The film is all animated. We just finished animation totally last week. But there are different stages in the film. We are done with story, animation, we’re putting in color and we have 40% left in color over the next three months.

Q: Is the color computerized?
A: Yeah, it’s still sort of hand painted but there hasn’t actually been cells since Little Mermaid and that was the last.

Q: What is your favorite part of the film?
A: I like the music scores, I think Randy has done a good job. There is a number of good ones. A character that is like a voodoo fairy godmother she sings a song called, “Dig a little deeper”. There are things about all the characters that I like.

Q: What are some surprises in the movie?
A: There are twists that I am not going to give away that have to do with the emotional aspects of the movie. But there’s something with the ending of the movie that we’ve done that is very Disney-esque and yet very different than anything that has been done in a Disney film. There are aspects in the story that kindof look at Disney in a new way, re-examine Disney and what Disney is about and what Disney means to people.

Q: Is there a point where you thought 2D animation was dead?
A: There was a point where we thought, absolutely that 2D is dead. Michael Eisner had turned his back on 2D and felt it had no future.

Q: Now that it’s back do you have any nods or homage to older 2D?
A: I would say yeah that there are lots of nods and easter eggs in the movie.

Q: I heard that every 2.5-3 years will be a hand drawn film?
A: 2.5 – 3 years is the plan and there are two different ones on the board and we’re thinking the next film will still be a hand drawn film but after those. I think that actually sounds good, because if you did one every year you might lose the novelty of hand drawn.

Q: Has the break that you have had from feature film making impact your style at all?
A: Some productions techniques that Lasseter brought from Pixar. One of them is animatics of their sequences that is a stage between storyboarding and animation. Take every shot in the movie to plan where the camera went, lighting, and staging.

Q: Have you heard the racial criticism about the character in the movie?
A: All the criticism has been from people who have not seen the movie who don’t know the characters of the movie or the story. From the very beginning when this film was announced there have been issues. But everyone who has been involved with the movie and has seen what it is and that’s including from the very beginning and wanted to be sensitive to what we were doing. So we did alot of consulting. We’ve since previewed the movie, and the reaction we’ve gotten from everyone who has actually seen the movie that knows the story has been very very positive. If people have concerns, see the movie and a lot of the issues will go away. We feel good about the movie and it works for all audiences the way we hoped it would.

Here is the first trailer for the Princess and the Frog:
Here is a recent feature on the villain in the Princess and the Frog: