Screenjabber's Ben Mortimer popped along to the London press conference to get the low-down on the new Disney 2D, hand-drawn animated film The Princess & The Frog ...
“The Frog Prince has been in development for about 18 years. Different versions of it, going back to the time of Beauty and the Beast. Eric Goldman developed a version, sort of a Shrek-like version, and Rob Minkoff worked on a version, the director of Lion King.”
John Musker, co-writer/director of The Princess & The Frog, is talking about the genesis of his new film at a press conference to mark the movie’s release.
“Coincidentally enough, Pixar also developed ideas based on The Frog Prince, for a CG-animated film. The first one that was really pitched there was set in gangland Chicago in the 1930s, and I think John Lasseter, when he saw that, saw an opportunity to set the story in New Orleans, rather than in Chicago, because New Orleans is one of his favourite cities in the world … and I think he thought the proximity to the bayou is natural with frogs, so the Pixar version moved to New Orleans.”
Despite having so many different talented people trying to bring the project to the screen, neither Disney nor Pixar could come up with a concept that worked. Fortunately the stars aligned for the project when, in 2006, Disney bought Pixar, and installed Lasseter as Chief Creative Officer.
Lasseter approached Musker and his collaborator, Ron Clements, who had previously had huge successes with The Little Mermaid and Aladdin, and asked them to ‘take a look at [it]’. Musker continues:
“So we read all those Disney versions, we read all the Pixar versions, and we kind of came up with our own variation, … we had the idea of it having an African-American lead, … we liked the idea of telling the story in New Orleans, we liked the idea of it being hand drawn, and being a musical.”
While Clements and Musker were happy with their draft, they still had to convince their new boss, as Clements explains.
“We pitched the idea to John Lasseter, and he really liked all the ideas in terms of it being hand-drawn, with an African-American heroine, set in 1920s New Orleans, and being a musical, he said before you do anything else, you need to go down and visit the city and really get a sense of the city.”
So they did, attending the 2006 New Orleans Jazz festival. While this was undoubtedly a source of inspiration for the pair, they had, according to Clements, already decided on a musical collaborator.
“We had pitched Randy Newman doing the music because he actually spent his boyhoods in New Orleans. …The first song Randy wrote for the movie is a song called ‘Down In New Orleans’, and that is, just all about the city, just bringing you into the world of the movie. We actually thought it would be great for Dr John to sing that song.” This idea led Clements to a unique experience, “One of the big thrills of the movie was that that song was actually recorded in New Orleans, and just being down there in the city with Dr John and Randy Newman together, and a lot of musicians from New Orleans were there doing the music, that was a special day just being a part of that.”
Princess & The Frog is not only the first hand-drawn Disney animation for over half a decade, but also the first film wholly developed under the auspices of Lasseter. For Musker and Clements that lead to a unique, and enjoyable, working environment for the pair, as Musker explains.
“John is a filmmaker, he’s a director, he animates, he draws, we spoke very much the same language. It wasn’t like you had to explain things to him. We could talk in shorthand to John, so creatively it was really thrilling, partly because we were so much in synch, our experiences are so similar.” Musker continues “He has great instincts, particularly in stories … so as we were making the film he found ways to just tell the story more effectively. Not to tell a different story, but to tell that story more powerfully, so that was a very positive thing.”
Clements is even more complimentary, “Working for John is the best of all possible worlds, I would say, because he’s very respectful of filmmakers, he’s respectful of your vision, he’s so supportive, and he has great ideas, and he knows animation inside and out, and it was a really, really terrific working relationship.”