Princess and The Frog and Other Disney non-musicals
I can't really figure out why I don't like this movie, so let's try to figure it out.
To get everything sorted out at the beginning, Aladdin is my favorite, followed by Hercules. Those are my favorites because they feature main characters who are actually good people that you would actually want to hang out with, Aladdin is the absolute sexiest man alive, and Meg is waifu-tier. Every other opinion is bad and wrong.
Now that that’s settled, I thought my main problem with the Princess and the Frog was that it’s very strictly not a musical. It’s a movie that some studio execs said had to have songs in it, and so they begrudgingly tried to put some songs in. My first instinct in describing it was to say that “It feels like they go places and then they stop and sing a song, rather than a musical, where the song is going somewhere, or the song is the destination that you're going to.” But that kind of felt like an inaccurate description, or maybe that it was a flimsy justification that could easily be torn through with counterexamples. Like, “If I was a Human” and “Going Down the Bayou” and are both songs that are to give a bit more characterization, while also travelling from place to place. Why do I like “Go the Distance”, but don’t like “If I was a Human”, if they’re basically doing the same thing (I’m this kind of person and want this kind of thing, as I travel to the next scene.)
I can certainly imagine a person saying “well, it’s because you’re racist” and/or “because you like a different style of music”. But I’m not really sold, and all the typical “white fragility” kind of reasons for why I’m just blind to my own racism, etc. I really can’t shake the idea of “we’ve stopped everything and are sitting and singing instead of moving the plot forward”, but I’ve heard the same sentiment coming from my brothers and cousins who don’t like musicals in general, so maybe that’s a thing that you just sort of instinctively latch onto as a reason, even if it’s not a real reason.
I asked my sister-in-law if she liked the movie, because she’s forced my kid to sit through it about 4 times now (though she might claim the reverse, but I’m not sure how the kid could possibly enforce such a rule) and she said she’s more or less ambivalent to it. Low on the tier-list, to say the least. Her favorite is Mulan.
Mulan has always been interesting to me because it’s also a non-musical. Sort of. If you don’t remember, the first half is a perfect musical. They’ve got songs establishing the world and it’s expectations on Mulan, Mulan’s desires, a training montage (a fan-favorite in general, plus heavily meme’d by r/a/dio afficionados like me), and then a travelling song where we go somewhere. The travelling song (A girl worth fighting for) is abruptly ended as they come across a town razed to the ground, and the musical ends entirely. There is no more singing and dancing after that, at all. I wonder who had the absolute giant balls to go up to the execs that forced Princess and the Frog to be a musical, and say “you want a fucking musical, here’s 50% of a musical and you’re gonna like it. Fuck you.” It’s very “malicious compliance”, although it’s done so well that it might’ve also just been a truly visionary choice that someone really fought for and they really pulled it off. I wonder if it’s a known move that’s got a longtime history in the musical/opera scene, and this is just babby’s first? I know a bunch of anime have either episode 1 or episode 3 turns where they like to “haha, you thought this was going to be a fun adventure, now your favorite person’s dead and we’re gonna go grimdark for the rest of it”.
Either way, I don’t think anyone minds that Mulan is not really a musical, but that really doesn’t stop me from latching onto the idea of me not liking Princess and the Frog because it’s not a musical. It’s still the best explanation I have, but I don’t know.
“Almost There”, “Friends on the Other Side”, and “Dig a Little Deeper” are the best songs of the bunch, and I think “Dig a Little Deeper” is basically the only place where they nail the whole “this is actually a musical” thing. We’ve gone a place and are singing a song that actually has a purpose and is not just kind of filler. I also liked that I have a lot of trouble interpreting songs in general, and it greatly amused me that the characters canonically also had trouble interpreting “Friends on the Other Side” and “Dig a Little Deeper”. Purposefully cryptic or indirect fits song pretty well. I wonder if there’s a musical where all songs are “spells people are casting”, or “stuff that’s occuring while high”, or “dreams and fantasies”, or “fights only”. I guess Symphogear and Hero kind of count.
Perhaps the reason I don’t like it is just that I “watched” half of it for the first time with only my ears, while driving cross-country. I later sat down and watched the whole thing from top-to-bottom, but obviously in less-than-ideal viewing conditions, mixed in with some playing with toys or fetching drinks, or whatever. Maybe I should just lean into the level 1 explanation: I didn’t like the movie that much because it’s just not that good. Maybe it’s just the writing, or the acting, or the animation, or some something very generically “not as good as the other ones”. I can almost vividly see a moment where the Genie is trying, yet again, to get Aladdin to come clean and be the good and honest person that he is, because Genie really thinks Aladdin is a good person who would be “enough for a princess” (despite Aladdin’s impressions of needing to “be a prince” and to him Princes are kind of exclusively rich, pompous jerks), and Genie looks to his friend with sadness and sympathy and a touch of paternalistic “I know you can’t see through your feelings of inadequacy right now, but I’m being patient with you”, and when I think of this movie I just don’t feel like I see that kind of depth. It could also be the level 2 explanation: I grew up with the other ones and I saw this for the first time as an adult with a kid. Maybe you just can’t beat nostalgia.
I will say that it’s very sad when Ray gets stomped into oblivion, but my inner 4channer thought it was kind of shocking that (((they))) put black-on-black violence into a children’s movie, especially if it’s a street hustler with dangerous “friends on the other side” who brutally murders the friendly, old, and mostly-harmless guy who’s just trying to keep his friends safe from the hustler’s illegal activities.