Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of The Princess and the Frog
2009 · Ron Clements · The Princess and the Frog on Sightlines
There is a shadow in New Orleans that does not keep time with its owner. Dr. Facilier stands on a street corner, all sales pitch and smile, and his silhouette peels off the wall to run errands of its own. It laughs half a beat late, like a sideman who has decided to take the solo. If you watch The Princess and the Frog for nothing else, watch that shadow. It is a drawing doing something only drawings can do, and it carries the whole argument of the film.
Start with the line itself. In 2004 Disney decided that hand-drawn features were finished. It closed its Florida studio and scattered its animators. Two years later the Pixar acquisition put John Lasseter in charge of the studio, and Ron Clements and John Musker were brought back to make a hand-drawn musical. That meant calling people back and rebuilding a pencil-and-paper workflow that had been taken apart on purpose. The filmmakers called it a craft argument. The pencil line, with its changing pressure and the smudge of an animator's hand, was the thing they wanted back.
Gilles Deleuze, the French philosopher who wrote two books on cinema, has a passage that explains why that argument matters. He says the cartoon belongs fully to cinema because its drawing is not a pose or a finished figure. It is a figure always in the middle of forming and dissolving. He calls this the any-instant-whatever: the ordinary, unposed moment inside a continuous flow, as opposed to the frozen climactic tableau of older arts. A drawn character never holds still the way a painted one does. Facilier's shadow takes the idea literally. It has come loose from the body and keeps moving, a line with a life of its own.
That shadow has ancestors. Peter Pan (1953) animated a detached shadow on its own layer, assigned separately from the boy it belonged to. Clements and Musker took that technical problem and promoted it from a gag to a henchman with its own performance arc. The number where Facilier makes his pitch, "Friends on the Other Side," is built on an older Black showman: Cab Calloway in the Fleischer cartoon Minnie the Moocher (1932), whose scat and call-and-response carry a phantom underworld of morphing shapes. Add "Pink Elephants on Parade" from Dumbo (1941), the Disney number cut loose from story and timed to the song, and you have the recipe. Tarot cards, masks, shadows acting on their own, a stage where things that should be inert are suddenly alive.
Deleuze has a name for that kind of life too. Writing about German Expressionism, he described the "non-organic life of things": light and shadow charged with appetite, objects that seem to want something. Facilier's sequence, with its acid violets, sulfur greens and inky silhouettes, belongs to that tradition. It's a cartoon, and it's some of the darkest drawing Disney ever put on screen.
Now go back across town to Tiana. Her half of the film runs on what Deleuze calls the action-image, the engine of classical storytelling: a character reads a situation and acts to change it. Tiana's situation is unusually concrete for a princess. Her "I want" song is about a lease, a down payment, double shifts, and a run-down sugar mill she plans to buy. She is a waitress who means to become a restaurateur, and every French Quarter scene is a step toward that. In early development she was a chambermaid named Maddy, and the studio reworked her after criticism. That revision tells you how deliberately Disney wanted this woman to be an agent rather than a servant.
The fairy tale comes with its own action-image built in. Snow White (1937) set the template the film inherits: a naturalistic heroine set against rubber-limbed comic sidekicks, and a kiss that fixes everything. Clements and Musker stage that kiss faithfully and then let it fail. Tiana kisses the frog prince Naveen and turns into a frog herself. The one act the genre promises will solve the problem makes it worse, and the film has to go off through the bayou looking for some other way to act.
Then there is "Almost There." Tiana sings about her restaurant, and the film drops its rendered depth completely. We get flat Art Deco planes, hard silhouettes and a restricted gold-and-black palette, a Jazz Age poster brought to life that recalls Harlem Renaissance painting. The studio precedent is Eyvind Earle's flattened, color-keyed design for Sleeping Beauty (1959), pointed here at a very different decade. What happens in this number is something Deleuze picked out in the Hollywood musical. He called it world-movement: the character's motion passes into the world, so the setting itself starts to move and dance with her. Her wanting stops being a private feeling and becomes the shape of the space around her. For a few minutes the dream isn't something Tiana will reach someday. It is the world, and it's here.
So the film runs on two motors. The plot is all action, sharp and purposeful, cut tight across 97 minutes. Between the plot beats, the numbers suspend it and let the world swing.
This is also where the film's hardest questions sit, and it doesn't settle them. Critics pointed out that the studio's first Black heroine spends much of her own film as an amphibian, that Naveen comes from an invented country, and that the film's 1920s Louisiana treats segregation as background weather. The film also takes its Deep South animated idiom, the trickster staging and folk-tale bayou of Ray the firefly and Mama Odie, from Song of the South (1946), while dropping the plantation framing that made that film unreleasable. You can keep all of that in mind and still see what the numbers do. The world that answers Tiana's wanting in "Almost There" is a world the film can draw but can't quite place in history. Is the musical dream a way of stepping around that history, or a way of imagining past it? The film leaves the question with you.
Part of the film's significance is a story of loss. It earned three Oscar nominations and made money, but not enough. Disney blamed the word "princess," renamed its next fairy tale from Rapunzel to Tangled, and within two years the hand-drawn unit was gone again. That makes this film something like the last full sentence of a long chapter: Fleischer, Snow White, Dumbo, Peter Pan and Sleeping Beauty, gathered up and spoken once more in pencil.
When you watch it, watch the edges of things. Watch a shadow move when its owner doesn't. Watch a street flatten into a poster when a woman starts singing about a lease. That is the any-instant-whatever at work, a line that never stops becoming something, and it's the reason drawn film was worth bringing back.
Concepts in play
- any-instant-whatever — The revived pencil line, valued for its variable pressure and the smudge of the hand, and Facilier's shadow animated as an independent figure that keeps moving apart from its body
- expressionism (non-organic life of things) — 'Friends on the Other Side': independently acting shadows, tarot cards and masks in acid violets, sulfurous greens and inky silhouettes; Facilier's shadow running errands and laughing on its own beat
- action-image — Tiana's concrete goal-driven arc (the lease, the down payment, double shifts, buying the sugar mill) and the true-love's-kiss resolution inherited from Snow White, which is staged and then fails, so she has to find another way to act
- movement of world — 'Almost There' drops rendered depth for a flat Art Deco poster world, and the numbers in general are staged so the surrounding world reorganizes itself into choreography around the singer