Ugh, I hate people like that, too. Guys in my French class didn’t want to watch Hercules (which is one of Disney’s weaker efforts, but still) instead of some boring, uninteresting French film because “Its like a movie for five year olds!”
Luckily, most people around here are good with that. My English teacher is obsessed with it (she still has the poster hanging in her room from a few days before opening night, as well as her mother giving her a “Tiana’s cookbook.” She lent it to my best guy friend to get some recipes from and it was actually really cool, with real New Orleans recipes (though there was one or two that were standard “normal food makes animal shape,” but plenty that weren’t), and a lot of my friends are, too. XD
Congratulations to Randy Newman for earning a couple of Oscar nominations! I really hope that “Almost There” wins, if only to emphasize the fact that Disney still has some “spunk” left in them…
I’d be pleased with either nominated song, but I’m leaning toward “Down in New Orleans” - it really has a great intro/vamp and melody, makes you want to get up and dance down the street. (“Friends on the Other Side” is still my favorite, though: “Are you ready?”)
Most of the kids in my elementary school back in the 80’s thought they were too cool for Disney. There was only one kid besides me who would admit to watching DuckTales.
Anyhow, more recently, I’m a film critic for a local newspaper, and one day at my retail day job I was talking about the last two films I reviewed, Princess and the Frog and Fantastic Mr. Fox. One of my co-workers said, in a matter-of-fact not even mean way, “Oh, so they don’t make you review, like, grown-up movies?” I thought that was amusing because, while PATF is a family film (for the whole family, not just kids), Fantastic Mr. Fox was more of a quirky animated film for grown-ups.
My choice for best song of the year is “Evangeline” (not nominated), but “Down in New Orleans” and “Almost There” were great, too.
Yeah, what’s with that yellow border? Whatever. That’s the one I gotta buy anyway, since Disney doesn’t appear to be doing DVD versions anymore. It kinda stinks that I’ll be paying for something I can’t use. Unless there is one with just a DVD, and I just haven’t heard about it
The reviews are too mixed…I’ll have to rent it first. According to some critics, It’s just an excuse to make a feel-good movie, like the other Disney Princess films, but not as good. It looks too much like a more “politically correct” Beauty and the Beast (awesome movie).
I have to agree with you guys and say that the yellow border is just hideous.
I felt it portrayed the era in a respectable and realistic tone. There’s a particularly poignant scene in the beginning where [spoil]a young Tiana returns from her rich friend Charlotte’s mansion with her seamstress mother to a simple home in a row of tenement houses. The majority of the residents were blacks and in lower-income poverty, even sharing Tiana’s mum’s gumbo stew.
And then there was that infamous line of “…people of your background” from the accountants that had hints of racial undertone beneath them.[/spoil]
Of course, the chances of [spoil]a black low-wage earner being friends with a white social debutante are very slim in those days[/spoil], but it was not impossible. So I felt that Disney at least had the courage to depict the era, not 100% truthfully (since that would be hard to do, even in live-action), but in a stylistic manner that had a couple of honest verities in them.
As for its ‘quality’, it’s not quite as good as the classic princess stories (due to some unnecessary slapstick sequences and characters), but the tagline on the cover’s pretty much right; it is Disney’s best since The Lion King (close to Tarzan and Mulan).
Since I’m pretty sure we all know that 
