A Pair of Aces

11.02.09 - When Max Lark sat down to discuss The Princess and the Frog with the film's co-directors, John Musker and Ron Clements, he quickly discovered what anyone who has ever worked with this dynamic duo quickly finds out: These are two of the funniest, nicest and talented directors working in animation today. The following is part of the interview Max conducted with the two directors in the course of writing the story A Spellbinding Tale for the winter issue of Disney twenty-three. We hope you enjoy it!

From The Little Mermaid to The Princess and the Frog, Ron Clements (left) and John Musker enjoy one of the most successful partnerships in animation.

Q: What are the essential plot points in a Disney fairy tale? It seems there's usually a heroine that works with her hands and there's a transformation, usually at night. How are those constructs presented in The Princess and the Frog? Have they been updated for the movie?
RON CLEMENTS: Well, I mean, obviously, I mean, transformation is a theme that is certainly in a lot of fairy tales. And, it's in a lot of the movies that we've done. I think that there is something that's sort of fascinating and, what we get into in this movie, is the contrast of physical transformation and internal transformation. And I think the underlying message is that the internal transformation is the most important, that physical transformation is more superficial in a way. It may seem like it's important, but it's the inner transformation that's the most important.

I think one thing we really wanted in The Princess and the Frog was a romantic comedy. A love story that takes place where the two, the hero and the heroine, both can physically transform. So, the fact that they fall in love really has nothing to do with their physical impairments. They fall in love with the other person, as they get to know that other person. So, it's not a love-at-first-sight movie. It's a movie actually where the hero and the heroine kind of aren't getting along at all when they first meet each other, and they seem like opposites, and they seem like, it's a little, we've always described it as a little bit It Happened One Night in reverse in the sense that Tiana's more the Clark Gable character, and the prince is a little bit more the Claudette Colbert character, 'cause he's kind of led the privileged life and she's kind of had the work factor.

Q: And the internal transformation is love?
JOHN MUSKER: It wasn't just the love thing. I think they discover that they have qualities in each one that the other one brings out, that the prince has this streak of really wanting to have a dream and to have a passion about something like she does. And he's led this kind of carefree life where he's never had any sort of guiding light in his life, any driving passion. And she on the other hand has kind of lost this element of fun, and whimsy that she had a kid. And he kind of reawakens that in her. So I think they're rounding each other out and they're sort of transforming into something that was buried beneath.
RC: Which ties into Mama Odie's song, where she's singing, "Need to Dig Deeper." It's like to really find, I mean, what's most important in your values, that you do have to dig deep for that. Which is another way of saying, like, "look past the superficial, look inside." 'Cause that's where you'll find what's most important.

Q: Tell us about the major characters. Everybody's talking about Princess Tiana and what makes her so special. And you were talking about the prince, and you've got the voodoo character.
JM: Yeah, Dr. Fecilier, yeah, our bad guy. Yeah, the prince has been fun because princes tend to be pretty straight in these movies. They tend not to have a sense of humor, and I think ours is arguably the funniest prince we've had. I mean, that he can actually crack jokes, and certainly they've enhanced him before. But I think, and he's occasionally been charming, but I think he actually has a sense of humor, and he is a flawed prince. I mean, I think most of the princes are idealized and they're very much just sort of the kind of thin projections. And that all the focus is on the girl. And I think this one, the Prince sort of has an equal leg with the Princess in that he is a major character. He runs through the movie. He undergoes sort of an arc and a transformation both, you know, external and internal.

And then it's carried over into the animation. And I think [animator] Randy Haycock has done a lot with him, in terms of his expressions and his attitudes and having fun with the fact that he is a proud person. Our guy, some people would be horrified at being a frog. This particular prince, there's aspects of being a frog that he kind of finds entertaining and enjoyable, so...
RC: Yes, he goes through the flow. And of course, Tiana's been a really fun character to do. And I think she's certainly different than the other princesses in the sense that she actually has a career goal. I mean, she has a dream and it has nothing to do with romance. I mean, her dream is just really that she's worked really hard, she wants to open this restaurant. She knows she can do it. She has all the talent and ability to be able to run a restaurant, even though she's facing tremendous obstacles in order to get this dream to come true. And yet, she's determined to kind of overcome that.

Q: What makes Dr. Fecilier so attractive in a creepy way?
JM: Dr. Fecilier, he's been fun because he's, a variety of things. I think he's the best dancer among all the villains, so.
RC: Well, Ursula seemed to have the same ability.
JM: On Dancing with the Stars, she would not make it past the first assignment, but…
RC: Jafar I don't think could dance worth anything. But villains are fun.
JM: Yeah. I think [voice actor] Keith David and [animator] Bruce Smith, the animator, and Keith David, brought a lot to it. I mean, Keith David has this wonderful, mellifluous voice, very velvety-tongued. And yet, he is sort of a con man so it's not just a smooth talker, but he's given a line of gab or gaffe a little bit to people, and so you get this kind of a corny showman guy that has been fun I think to play with.

And the whole voodoo aspect of it has been fun. Just, when we went down in New Orleans, we spoke to Ava Kay Jones, who is a sort of a, I don't know if you'd call her a voodoo priestess, but she was an expert on voodoo, and she's studied, and she's, and both the sort of religious aspect of it and…
RC: She dances with a snake.
JM: And she dances with the snake.
JC: She took us through the cemeteries and told us about, certainly talked a lot about [legendary voodoo high priestess] Marie Laveau. And there's a lot of legendary stuff about Marie Laveau and controversy, too. But for the most part, voodoo is, I mean, this very kind of spiritual religion that doesn't embrace that dark part. That's just this kind of offshoot. But it gets all the attention.

John Musker during the making of The Princess and the Frog.

Q: Tell us about [Walt Disney Animation and Pixar Animation Studios Chief Creative Officer] John Lasseter's advice when you were working on The Princess and the Frog.
JM: He really liked our pitch [for the movie] but he said, "Before you guys write a script on it, you got to go to New Orleans." 'Cause he, I told him, his favorite cities in the world, he had a big blow out, 40th birthday party there, he'd been there a number of times. And he knew some people down there. He's like, "You got to experience it." And neither one of us had been to New Orleans at that point.
RC: And we toured the bayou with this sort of eccentric Cajun tour guide, who actually had inspired the character of Ray quite a bit. We had the firefight character in the original thing, but we drew a lot from that.
JM: Yeah, this guy's name was Reggie, and he had a few missing teeth and joked about it.

Q: How did it feel when you knew the movie was going to be made in 2D?
RC: Well, there's the great sort of Sleeping Beauty-esque story that Chris Hibler, who's the grandson of [Disney Legend] Winston Hibler, who worked on a lot of the films, he's the director of Operations here. When we were trying to get the thing going, we were like, well, "We don't even have the desks," and he's like, "Well, I hid some desks." And so he literally salted some desks away, in the warehouse.

Q: As in Enchanted, this movie takes place in a big city. Not like some, you know, fairyland. And it's more like a character in the movie. Is that more fun?
JM: I think it was really fun on this and because New Orleans is such a unique state because it's got this European flavor to it, it's got all the cross-cultural influences from Africa, from the Caribbean, from Spain, from France and America as well. So you've got this polyglot of all this stuff. So just visually, it's got this rich sort of palette to draw from. And setting it in the '20s, the Jazz Age, we felt like it, it in some way made it a little bit more once upon a time.

Ron Clements at Walt Disney Animation Studios.

If it was literally New Orleans as it was today, I think it would be less, obviously just with [hurricane] Katrina and all that. But it really wasn't driven by Katrina. It was just driven by, we thought the jazz age, jazz is such a part of New Orleans, to be there when jazz was just getting going, it made it just that much more magical in a way.
RC: Well, you're going to set a fairytale in an American city, New Orleans seemed like that would be the city to set it in. And also, if you were going to do a musical, New Orleans seemed like a great city to set a musical in. And in terms of the design of the film, we also just wanted it to be a throwback to the dimensionality and a volume that, you know, Lasseter was talking about, he's like, you know, he was saying, you know, if people really want super stylized stuff, you have so much of that on TV now, you know, with the Saturday morning shows, where they've got kind of neat graphic things, but really pushed things, and he's like, I just, and we also, we just love, you know, the volumetric characters, things drawn in the round, and that pliable kind of squashy, stretchy sort of thing. So it was really a throwback, that one.

Q: In the movie, the Fenner Brothers look familiar.
JM: They're unscrupulous real estate agents. There's a tall guy and a short guy. A tall, skinny guy and a shorter rounder guy. And when they get hit by the cake in color, they turn into caricatures of us actually. I'm the skinny guy and he's [pointing to Ron] the short, round guy.

Q: For this movie, you worked with other writers…
RC: Yes, on this movie, we worked with Rob Edwards. Who did a great job, but, and came in a little later. We've always I think written the first script ourselves, the first draft, just to kind of get that taken, and then collaborated it after that, and it's certainly been a good collaboration working with Rob, and he's brought a lot to the material, and then we worked with Rob before on Treasure Planet. We collaborated on that too.

Q: Tell us about Anika Noni Rose.

John (left) and Ron as the unscrupulous Fenner Brothers in The Princess and the Frog.

JM: For the character of Tiana, I think we had many, many, many people. Some bigger names, some smaller names. But I think Anika was the second person we heard. And hearing her, like, she's great. And then, you're like, and then you hear others come and you're like, Anika never left the, you know, our sort of sphere, 'cause she could, she could sing, she brought a lot of vulnerability to it, she brought a lot of smarts do it. She had the elements of vulnerability and appeal.
RC: There's an appeal to her voice. And that voice appeal is kind of what you look for.

Q: So what do you hope happens when the movie comes out?
JM: Well, I hope it's successful.
RC: Well, I hope it's embraced well. I think certainly, I mean, it's a movie for all audiences, I think, which is kind of like a Disney·Pixar film. I mean, it's a movie that we hope is embraced by all audiences.
JM: Well, I hope they embrace both the comedy, the music, and the emotion, I mean, all those elements there, really. And the characters, which it's all built around.
JM: What's interesting about our previews is that nobody in the sort of focus group after and all the notes, even mentioned that it was hand-drawn. Almost like that, that was taken for granted, in a way that it's like, it was all about the story and the characters. And I think that ultimately is what I would want to see happen, is that it doesn't become as much a discussion about the hand-drawn aspect. It was just, it's like, this story, it seems natural and fitting, and it's a non-issue, which opens the way to more hand-drawn movies, that…

Q: Well, that's what John [Lasseter] said about Toy Story. After a month or so no one ever talked about that it was CG.
JM: Yeah, I know. You don't. That's true. You just want the audience to buy the characters and their story. That's what's most important.