I'm Ron Clements, the co-writer/co-director
of The Princess and the Frog.
And I'm John Musker, the other co-writer/director
of The Princess and the Frog.
And I'm Peter Del Vecho,
the producer of The Princess and the Frog,
and we're here today to do the audio commentary on the film.
JOHN: You know, it took us 3 and a half years
to make this film, but I think it only will take us
an hour and a half to do our commentary.
RON: That's what we're hoping.
JOHN: You'll notice a signature of Walt Disney coming up.
Actually, that's Mike Gabriel who used Walt Disney's signature.
Mike Gabriel's one of our co-art directors,
and he had to re-create Walt Disney's signature
to make it work in this new logo, so thank you, Walt and Mike.
RON: So we begin the movie with the sort of iconic Disney image
of the wishing star in the sky, and then suddenly these stars,
we realize they're not stars, they're fireflies,
which actually has a significance in the movie
that I think the audience doesn 't quite realize at this point.
JOHN: You will also notice that this is a hand-drawn movie,
much the same way Snow White was done 70 years ago.
These characters were animated on pieces of paper
by our wonderful animation staff,
and those backgrounds are painted by hand,
and it was great to be back to hand-drawn animation again.
"'...only a kiss from you can break this terrible...'"
RON: You're hearing the voice of Oprah Winfrey,
who's doing the voice of Tiana's mom, Eudora.
We pitched this movie a lot, early on, to many different people,
just people who worked around the studio.
JOHN: And when we say we pitched it, literally,
we had a few storyboards of just individual drawings,
and in about 20 minutes, we would tell the story of the movie.
RON: The most stressful pitch, I think, on this was,
we pitched the movie to Oprah Winfrey at Disneyland
where she was shooting some footage for her show,
and we just pitched it to her mainly just to get her reaction
to what we were doing and what the story was.
Fortunately, she was very, very excited by the pitch
and really loved the story very much, and it was actually her idea
that she wanted to be a part of the movie,
and that's how she became Eudora in the movie.
I would ever, ever, ever... I mean, never...
RON: And these 2 little girls, little Tiana, little Charlotte,
the actresses who provided their voices,
we found those when we did auditions in New Orleans.
JOHN: Right, Elizabeth Dampier, who's doing Tiana,
is from Madison, Mississippi,
and Breanna Brooks is from Louisiana.
And so we auditioned them down there,
and then we flew them out to California to record their voices.
RON: They actually very much fit the characters, I think.
Little Elizabeth, she 's a straight-A student,
very focused, she knew all her lines
and did everything that we asked her to do.
And little Breanna was just like Charlotte.
She was a little diva. She had a lot of fun doing the part,
and she was very similar to the character.
JOHN: And she even yanked on Ron's mustache.
He was trying to help her with the lines.
Just like in the movie here.
RON: Not really.
Eudora, you suppose you could whip something...
PETER: And we cast John Goodman to play the role of Big Daddy.
He actually has a home down in New Orleans.
JOHN: The Garden District in New Orleans
is full of many, many beautiful mansions,
and this house that we drew is a synthesis
of several elements we saw down there.
CHARLOTTE: I do! I do! He's so cute!
(TRAM BELL DINGING)
RON: Here we're hearing some beautiful underscore
by Randy Newman,
who did the score and all the songs in the movie,
and Randy Newman is sort of Mr. Americana.
This type of music, he's really known for.
He did the scores of Ragtime and The Natural and...
JOHN: And he wrote this piece as a brass quintet.
It really sort of separates from the rest of the score,
and it has a really wistful, old-world quality,
old Americana quality that we loved.
PETER: And Terrence Howard plays James, Tiana 's father.
RON: The idea for this movie,
of course, it's based on the Grimm fairy tale The Frog Prince,
and Disney's actually been exploring,
trying to do something with that fairy tale for years and years,
going all the way back to the time of Beauty and the Beast.
A weird coincidence is that Pixar, with John Lasseter,
also had explored doing versions of The Frog Prince,
and the Pixar version actually started in Chicago,
but then quickly moved to New Orleans
because that was John Lasseter's favorite city in the world.
It was also Walt Disney's favorite city in the world,
and that's why they have New Orleans Square in Disneyland.
When John Lasseter came to Disney
and was put in charge of Disney animation,
he asked John and I to take a look at that property,
and we looked at the Disney versions that had been done
and the Pixar versions,
and then we sort of developed our own version
and pitched that to John in March of 2006.
JOHN: Right, and we pitched it as set in New Orleans
and it was based on The Frog Prince story, but it was...
We pitched it as an African-American heroine.
We pitched it that it would be set in the 1920s,
and we pitched it as a musical,
and we pitched it as a musical being done by Randy Newman,
and we thought it should be a hand-drawn movie.
So all those things we suggested to John,
that's the way we envisioned the movie.
And I did a series of drawings of all the different characters,
and we cooked up a basic storyline,
and we literally did our sort of 20-minute pitch of the story to him
back in March of 2006 and he loved the pitch,
but he said, "You've got to go to the city of New Orleans
"before you write a word. " So we did.
We went down to New Orleans, the 2 of us, plus Maggie Malone,
and the development executive, and Dobie Baltazar,
who is the visual development artist, and we really got to know the city.
RON: We toured the French Quarter and the Garden District.
A voodoo priestess took us around the cemeteries in New Orleans,
we had a Cajun tour guide who took us around the bayou
and we got to meet some alligators.
JOHN: And we used all that material that we experienced.
RON: We also went to Jazz Fest for 2 days
and heard all the different styles of music
that really influenced the film.
JOHN: And we certainly saw firsthand
2 of the obsessions that New Orleans has.
One is food and the other is music,
and we really tried to incorporate those into our script
and into our visual storytelling.
And, in fact, then we returned a number of times after that,
and we got to ride a float in Mardi Gras,
we did things, we brought our whole staff, really.
We brought our head of story and our art director, Ian Gooding,
and Rasoul Azadani, our sort of cinematographer,
and Jeff Draheim, our editor.
We really wanted everybody to sort of feel what it was like
to be there in the city.
We really wanted the movie to be sort of a valentine
to the city of New Orleans, and we really thought
of the city of New Orleans as sort of a character in the movie.
So we wanted to really celebrate what was so magical about New Orleans.
The idea of setting a fairy tale here, we loved,
just because it had so many different influences.
European influences, the French, the Spanish,
the Haitian influence through the Caribbean and the American,
it seemed like a city where magic lurked right around the corner
and you could believe that something like this could really happen.
It was a very mysterious city that way.
I insisted that one of the streetcars, that we put the number A 113 on it.
If you look, you'll see A 113.
That's the room at CalArts
where I studied animation with John Lasseter.
I was in the same class with John Lasseter and Brad Bird.
And John and Brad and Andrew Stanton
and all those Pixar guys have worked A 113 in their movies,
and I was like, "Darn it, I'm gonna work it into one of my movies. "
They really wanted to have a "once upon a time " song
to open the movie up
that would set up the city of New Orleans as a character,
'cause we really think of it as a character in the movie.
RON: The song Down In New Orleans,
I think, Randy did the original demo on that,
and I think Randy planned,
probably originally, to sing that song in the movie.
It was our idea maybe to have Dr. John sing the song
rather than Randy Newman, partly because we wanted
to differentiate the movie from a Pixar film,
that we're so used to hearing Randy's voice in the Pixar films,
and Dr. John is such an iconic New Orleans presence.
JOHN: Yeah, I've always been a big fan of Dr. John,
and I always thought he would be a great voice for animation,
and I think someone should use him as a voice
for a character because he's got such a rich growl
that seems made for animation,
so putting Dr. John at the top of the movie really said,
"We're in this specific place and time, "
and as Ron said, it separated it from being a Pixar movie,
and we wanted it to have its own identity that way.
RON: Yeah, I'm not sure Randy was totally happy,
although Dr. John is a very, very close friend of his.
JOHN: It was really just sort of a throwback to see these 2 guys,
who are really very much musical peers
and 2 bigger-than-life guys.
RON: Yeah, being in New Orleans, seeing Dr. John and Randy Newman
working together, recording this wonderful song,
it doesn 't get any better than that.
JOHN: You'll note all these girls in these scenes,
this retinue around Prince Naveen, those are all caricatures of women
that work here at the studio on the staff.
(SINGING) Stately homes and mansions
JOHN: We shot dance reference live-action footage
as a guide for the animators,
much the way they did on some past films
where they had Marge Champion or Elaine Stanley doing dance moves.
In this case, our choreographer was Betsy Baytos,
a woman I've known for over 30 years.
We were both trainees together at Disney back in the '70s,
and she was an eccentric dancer herself
and a student of eccentric dance.
RON: One of the requests of Anika Noni Rose
was that Tiana be left-handed.
Anika was left-handed, and she just felt Tiana should be, too,
because that just makes her a little different.
Actually, I'm left-handed, as well, so I can sympathize with that,
but we went along with that, and, as you can see,
whenever she 's doing things, like writing or other things,
that she is left-handed.
JOHN: Also, I think Mark got the dimples that she has from Anika,
and we thought that was a good idea, to make her a unique Disney princess.
Are you talking about that dang restaurant again?
Buford, your eggs are burning.
JOHN: This is Michael Colyar doing the voice of Duke here.
He did a very funny reading.
He was very bright, very quick and really funny.
Adam Dykstra was the animator who brought this to life,
and he 's got a great gift for comic action.
RON: When we were down in New Orleans,
and we spent a lot of time in New Orleans
doing an incredible amount of research for this film,
we didn't see this exact restaurant,
but I think we were in some kind of breakfast joint,
so to speak, that had a very similar feeling to this restaurant.
JOHN: And, of course, we did go to Café Du Monde,
which is a New Orleans landmark to have the beignets there,
so we had to have beignets in this movie.
It's such a New Orleans staple.
Those are those pastries with powdered sugar.
If you have not had a beignet,
please, go down to New Orleans and have one.
PETER: Bursting through the door was Charlotte,
played by Jen Cody, sort of a powerhouse actress.
JOHN: Done work on the New York stage.
We fell in love with her voice. She's got this great voice.
It's a combination of sort of Jean Arthur
and Betty Boop, I think, Mae Questel.
It's sort of somewhere in between those,
and we encouraged her to be fairly big with the part,
and she went to town with it.
And then Nik Ranieri and his animation likewise.
RON: Nik has done characters like...
For us, he did Hades in Hercules,
he's done some really kind of broad, very fun characters.
He's never done a female character like this before,
so Nik had to reach deep down and find his, kind of, inner diva.
JOHN: Nik has about 4 or 5 daughters, I think,
and a very lovely wife, so he's surrounded by women,
so I think he channeled some of them for this part.
This should cover it just fine, Lottie.
This is it! I'm getting my restaurant!
(WHOOPS)
T onight my prince is finally coming.
And I sure as heck ain't letting him go!
PETER: The idea of Facilier's shadow moving independently
-actually came about really early on... -JOHN: And, actually,
it was Sue Nichols, who's one of our first vis-dev persons.
We called him the Shadow Man,
and she took that literally, and she said,
"Well, why doesn't he have a shadow that can move independently
"and express his thoughts and even do a duet dance with him. "
So she did those drawings as we were writing the script,
and we said, "Yeah, we've got to work that in.
"That's such a great visual touch. "
And that's the way animation can work.
Visual artists can spark ideas that we then work into the story.
Likewise, even this idea of his gumbo pot,
I think, actually came from John Lasseter a little bit,
that he felt there was a way to warm this scene up,
to really make the gumbo pot a recollection and a remembrance
of Tiana 's father, and it warmed up Eudora,
the fact that she would bring it as almost like a housewarming thing.
Tiana has this crazy dream
to make this tumbled down sugar mill into a restaurant.
It's a way of her kind of getting on board
while still being a little wary just 'cause it's such a big task for her.
RON: It was exciting and it was a challenge
to kind of work on a princess movie again.
We've had a little experience with princesses,
with Ariel in The Little Mermaid and Jasmine in Aladdin,
but whenever you're dealing with a Disney fairy tale,
you're more conscious of the Disney legacy.
JOHN: It was fun for us to try and create a princess
that sort of broke the mold,
not just because she was African-American,
but because she actually had a dream that wasn't finding a prince,
that actually involved, you know, getting this restaurant,
and it was sort of, you know, the first princess that really had a job
and a career path, and that, I think, makes her a modern princess
and one unlike any of the others,
and it was fun to write and for Anika to bring to life.
She brought such great conviction to the part
in terms of her drive and her dedication,
but also this vulnerability and this sort of softness
that's kind of masked underneath that.
She got both of those qualities in what she did.
We're segueing into this song now,
Almost There, that Randy Newman wrote.
This flyer is based on the artwork of Aaron Douglas,
who's a noted Harlem Renaissance artist,
that Sue Nichols brought to our attention,
and it gave us an opportunity as she was visualizing her restaurant
to do it in the style of that flyer, that Aaron Douglas thing.
So you'll see as the song picks up, we go into this fantasy universe.
And this song was really supervised by Eric Goldberg,
the great Eric Goldberg, an animator who's done the Genie in Aladdin,
and directed Pocahontas,
and he worked with the team of animators
to work in this kind of stylized limited animation style,
to bring it to life.
It was wonderful that Anika was such a great singer as well as an actress,
so she did both the singing and the speaking for Tiana
and really brought great warmth and likeability to her.
RON: That's actually true of all the singing in the movie,
that all of the voice actors also did their own singing in this movie,
which doesn't always happen.
JOHN: This is one of the numbers that we actually choreographed
with Betsy Baytos, our choreographer.
So we shot reference, and Eric Daniels helped on this sequence, as well,
in terms of trying to realize this in this technique,
to make it really look like these illustrations.
This sequence was done through a whole different production pipeline.
It was actually one of the last things animated on the film,
and we had to do it kind of quickly to get the movie done in time,
but they did a great job.
RON: For animation buffs, this sequence actually
was not cleaned up by clean-up animators.
The animators who animated on this sequence
worked very tight, and it went right from animation to color.
JOHN: Yeah, you'll notice there are not lines around the characters.
They're all sort of shapes.
That's because of Aaron Douglas' drawing style,
and those sort of slanted, slitty eyes, those come from Aaron's style
of rendering characters in his illustrations.
RON: As well as the circles inside circles and the beams of light.
JOHN: Right, those are all signature elements of Aaron Douglas' style.
I always think of this last shot as sort of our That's Entertainment!
Gene Kelly close-up here.
We dolly back, and the great thing is, with our computers and everything,
we can do a very smooth pull back. Unlike those dollies in the MGM films
where they kind of shook on the way back,
we have a very fluid dolly shot there.
Now we 're in the French Quarter,
and it's a signature part of New Orleans,
the Vieux Carré, as they call it, or the old part of the town,
and it's got this great wrought iron.
If you've been down there, it's a very distinctive part
of the architecture down there.
We really wanted to capture street scenes and music.
We were just down in New Orleans again last week
for a museum opening, and we saw musicians performing in the street,
not unlike this singing and dancing, even today.
This is part of the New Orleans tradition, this sort of street music,
and music is really everywhere in that city,
and it's a part of its heritage.
RON: The prince's valet, Lawrence,
is voiced by a great New York actor, Peter Bartlett,
a great comic actor who brought a lot to the part of Lawrence.
And Lawrence was animated,
the supervising animator on Lawrence was Tony DeRosa
and the style of Lawrence is very,
I would almost say, kind of John Lounsbery-esque.
JOHN: John Lounsbery was one of the Nine Old Men,
a veteran animator who did Tony and Joe in Lady and the Tramp,
the 2 Italian restaurateurs.
Cartoony, but very solidly drawn.
There's a little bit of Mr. Smee in him, too,
I think, that Ollie Johnston animated.
RON: And the great animator Eric Goldberg was actually caricatured there
scooping up the poop.
I think that Eric can be very proud that we put him in the movie,
-scooping up poop. -JOHN: Yes.
PETER: This scene really helped set up the prince, too.
He's sort of fun-loving, and you really get a good sense of his personality
right early on in the movie.
JOHN: Princes, traditionally, have been the most thankless job
on any animated feature.
It really is a challenge to make a masculine commanding prince,
and generally they've been sort of... It's like, "Cue the prince!"
They've been props, in some cases, for the princesses to play off of.
In our movie, we didn't want the prince to be that,
and Randy had to come up with a prince that was handsome,
he was charming, but he could also be funny.
Bruce Smith, who did Dr. Facilier, we sort of courted him
to come back to Disney and do this part.
He's one of the best draftsmen here, and he's a wonderful animator,
and he brought a real slink
and coolness and vibe.
When people look at these drawings of Facilier,
they go, "Wow, that's a bad villain. "
Bad in a good way.
That really owes to Keith David, who did the voice,
but then Bruce Smith, who brought that ultra-coolness to the animation.
He's got this range of expressions, I think,
that no other villain has and just very specific bits of acting
and choices that he made from a performance point of view
that bring him to life.
RON: We thought of Keith immediately for this character because of his voice.
He just seemed like he would be right.
What we didn't know was whether he could sing or not,
and it turned out he's a fantastic singer.
JOHN: That's called effects animation, where those fires flame up,
and that's done under the supervision of Marlon West and his effects team.
All those little leaves, the shadows here,
the door opening, and we had a fabulous effects team
that really brought all this sort of atmosphere and bayou stuff to life.
RON: And while we're talking about this,
also Rasoul Azadani, our head of layout,
was really responsible for the staging.
In an animated movie, the head of layout
is kind of like the cinematographer,
and he brought so much throughout the whole movie,
but particularly in a song like this, that's so spectacular.
We did a new thing on this movie
that we've never done before with our layout department,
where we actually kind of did layout animatics,
where we put the scenes together without animation,
but still with all the staging and lighting
so that we could really watch the movie, in effect,
before we animated it.
This sequence was one of the first layout animatics
that was done on the movie and, I think, right away
convinced us that even though this was a new innovation,
it was an innovation that John Lasseter suggested
because that's how they do it at Pixar,
and it was a great asset, in terms of the staging of the film.
JOHN: I wanted to give a shout-out to Paul Briggs,
who's our storyboard artist.
All these sequences you see here are the finished thing,
but really they begin as storyboards,
as sort of comic book panels,
and Paul Briggs storyboarded this song,
and he created the idea of all this card play here.
I mean, Randy wrote it in the song,
but Paul brought it to life with a lot of interesting ideas,
how he was gonna shuffle the cards and display the cards.
Then Bruce Smith took it even further.
He looked on YouTube and found these amazing videos
of these sleight of hand magicians,
some famous, some not as famous, who did amazing things with cards,
and then Bruce took it even further and did things that I think
no magician can actually do,
but that's the wonder of animation, really,
that you can make the impossible plausible,
and that's what he did with this animation.
RON: And Sue Nichols, who we talked about before,
actually designed the images on these tarot cards,
and these are her actual drawings and coloring that we're seeing here.
That was used in the movie exactly the way she designed them.
(SINGING) You been pushed round all your life
JOHN: T. Dan Hofstedt did this funny animation here on these cards
as we're flipping them, and it was just a very funny idea
and the lyric that Randy Newman came up with about your mother
and your brother and all that, and Paul found a way to visualize it.
That was Paul Briggs' idea in the cards.
These aren't based on actual tarot cards,
but they're Sue's reinterpretation of the way tarot cards work.
We weren't literal to the...
There 's a big change in the song here where the spell starts,
and we always saw this as being kind of a bit psychedelic
that the room sort of fills with smoke
and things get kind of wilder and crazier.
A little bit like Pink Elephants on Parade in Dumbo.
It's just sort of a magical set piece.
So the effects artist, Noe Garcia, did all these sort of flying symbols,
and Doug Walker, our great layout man and idea person,
came up with the idea of some of these visuals,
including this scene we have of Facilier
with this sort of voodoo coloring on him. We borrowed that
from Doug 's great visual development artwork that he did on the film.
We really wanted to exploit the visual quality of this,
that it was a voodoo extravaganza.
And this is sort of a bit of a parody
of the penguins and Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins.
I mean, it's sort of him and his evil penguins,
now they're voodoo dolls.
We really wanted to get a rich production value on this movie,
and we knew films like Fantasia and that,
where the effects played such a big part,
we wanted to live up to those films.
You'll note on this pan as we go into this ballroom,
there are some people that we know dancing by in the foreground here.
You're going to see a caricature of Peter Del Vecho,
our producer, and his wife, Jane.
PETER: I think that's me, right there.
JOHN: And that guy with the octopus head there
is actually a caricature of Joe Grant,
which we sort of turned it into during the course of production.
RON: And Stella here, we named the dog Stella.
Even though she's a hound dog,
she has attributes of my 3 basset hounds
because I'm a basset hound person.
She drools like Slugo,
and she gets up on the table to try and get food just like Jimmy does,
and she's kind of overweight like our basset hound, Molly.
There are plenty of young fillies dying for you to waltz them into a stupor.
JOHN: It was fun to write for Charlotte
because she was sort of so over the top,
and we were really trying to channel our inner Tennessee Williams,
southern, Blanche DuBois diva,
and then Jen Cody took it a step further,
and Nik, even further in the animation,
and Kevin Gollaher, who storyboarded this,
really came up with some of this business
and these ideas of the Tammy Faye mascara
and her over-the-topness she displays
when she finally sees the prince is coming,
throws the sparkles in the air, those are all Kevin's bits of business.
He did a great job on storyboarding this whole set piece here.
You'll notice Charlotte, of course, even as an adult is dressed in pink.
We wanted her to be sort of so princess obsessed
so that her room was pink, all her dresses were pink.
It's her signature color throughout the movie,
in contrast to Tiana,
even when she dresses as a princess later.
That's why we had her in blue, just to contrast Charlotte.
RON: Yeah, we thought of Charlotte as someone who hasn't changed a lot
since she was 4 years old.
She hasn't quite grown up that much, in contrast to Tiana,
who maybe has grown up a little bit more so than she should have.
She's lost a little of that childhood magic,
and part of the movie is seeing her get that back.
JOHN: When we were doing our temporary score,
which we put into the movie before it's really completely animated,
sometimes, just to give a flavor,
our temporary song here was Randy's beautiful waltz from Ragtime
and that's what we sort of saw, a waltz in that vein,
and then Randy wrote a new waltz for them to dance to here.
We love this new waltz that he wrote for this moment in the movie.
The Fenner Brothers, some people think it's a caricature of me,
and I resent that because I feel like as I'm getting older,
I'm looking more like that. Of course, my hair is grayer,
but my chin is somehow turning into that chin,
I'm sorry to say. I don't know what happened. I'm disappointed.
RON: Yeah, actually, the Fenner Brothers
started out looking more like the 2 of us...
JOHN: Originally, they looked like Rock Hudson and Tony Curtis,
and I don't know what happened. Just something changed, I don't know.
Actually, yes, people were trying to guess, they said...
Actually, my wife thought, "Is that you and John Lasseter?"
I'm like, "That's not John Lasseter!"
There was a plot contrivance here a bit,
but we needed to get Tiana dressed to appear to be a princess,
so in this later scene, when Naveen shows up as a frog,
I'm presuming you've seen the movie already,
that she would appear to be a princess.
So we had to find a way to get her out of this dress
and into a princess dress. So we messed it up, basically.
RON: It was harder than people might think.
We struggled for a while in terms of how to get her
into that princess dress, but this seemed to be successful.
JOHN: Danny Galieote was one of the animators
who also worked on Charlotte, and he did that scene
where she wiggles from behind. It's a great scene.
Nik did this one, and the first time he did it,
Ali Norman on our staff pointed out that she was brushing
her mascara the wrong way, that no woman does it that way.
So he went back and...
It was late on a Friday, and he had to change it
so she brushed the mascara correctly,
the way every woman in America and around the world does.
Nik, somehow he hadn't boned up on that, I don't know.
RON: We had several women animators on this movie,
which shouldn't seem that surprising,
but in the past, there haven't been that many.
There have been a few, but...
JOHN: Yeah, women, for whatever reason,
have tended to work on other parts of the production,
whether or not they be background painters
or in some cases layout artists and clean-up artists,
but relatively few are animators.
This reprise wasn't originally in the movie,
but we felt that once we had the song Almost There,
we thought it would be a great song to reprise in a wistful way,
and this moment seemed ideal for it.
So, it really only required a few words,
but we talked to Randy about sort of bringing it back again
just to make it a different statement.
I think it helps the structure of a musical comedy
to have some reprises where you restate the same song
in a different sort of key or mood or whatever,
and this seemed like an ideal moment.
You'll notice the gestures that Tiana does here when she's sad,
where she rubs her arms,
and she does these later when she's a frog,
these identical gestures,
and Mark Henn really was careful when he was animating Tiana
to track gestures that worked both as a human and as a frog.
Watch for that later when she's disappointed as a frog,
you'll see that same move happen.
RON: It was kind of fortunate the way it worked out
that this movie was animated
somewhat in the sense that the opening stuff in New Orleans
was some of the first stuff we animated,
so there was a fair amount of animation of Tiana
and Naveen done before they got turned into their frog characters.
JOHN: Wasn't this sequence actually the first thing
that Mark Henn animated? Am I remembering that right?
-PETER: Yes, yes. -I feel like this was first in production.
JOHN: Randy Cartwright storyboarded this, great job,
and then Mark, these scenes, like, literally,
I think that scene of her throwing stuff was one of the first scenes that he did,
and Randy Haycock, as well, on Frog Naveen here.
So we usually pick a pilot sequence to try and establish the characters,
and this was the one that really set the characters up,
I mean, the frog and the princess,
or the prince, at least, as a frog, so it really helped create a template
for the rest of the animators working on the character.
Randy Haycock did an early scene of experimental animation
where he took a track, it was a voice track,
a very sort of sexy voice track, actually, from Don Juan DeMarco,
of an actor saying something like,
"I like to give women pleasure, " or whatever.
And he did that as a human,
a very handsome human, and it looked great.
Then his challenge was to take that same scene
and do it as a frog, so literally, he took that same handsome guy
and tried to capture all those mannerisms with him having,
in effect, a green face and legs and arms.
The prince is Maldonian. We made that country up.
We wanted him to be from an exotic place,
but not one that was identifiable with any literal country,
so it's somewhere east of the sun and west of the moon.
RON: And we don't have a lot of Maldonian in the movie,
but there are a few words.
There's, of course, achidanza, which I think we felt meant "cool. "
JOHN: And aminaza, which means "goodbye" and...
RON: And of course, faldy faldonsa...
JOHN: The famous faldy faldonsa which means...
And we can't say that in mixed company.
PETER: This sequence, Bruno Campos, who plays frog Naveen,
his comic style and timing really came out well.
RON: Yeah.
JOHN: He did this little throwaway here
where he says, "You know, I'm a handsome prince, okay?"
Look, besides being unbelievably handsome, okay...
JOHN: And he threw a little "okay" in there,
that then Russ Edmonds, when he animated it,
really did a fun thing in the animation
that really made it very specific and funny.
RON: We had a tough time finding the voice for the prince,
and he was one of the last voices cast on the movie,
and we've told the story before,
but we were down to just 3 finalists for the voice of Naveen,
and we couldn't decide which voice to go with.
So John Lasseter suggested playing the 3 voices
for a group of ladies who worked on the movie,
because it was important that the voice have a certain romantic appeal,
I would say, and so we did.
We played these 3 voices, we didn't tell them who was who.
Bruno won hands down.
PETER: Bruno was actually the 3rd one played,
and all the women swooned the second they heard his voice.
JOHN: So the swoon meter was in full force.
PETER: Randy also talked about when he was in college, he had,
I think, a roommate who tended to get a lot of attention from the women.
RON: Sort of a ladies' man.
PETER: Randy noticed that he always leaned on something
whenever he talked to these women,
so he incorporated Prince Naveen leaning on things as he was...
RON: So Naveen is a leaner as a human and as a frog.
-No! No, no, no, that is not slime. -What?
You are secreting mucus.
JOHN: This line actually goes back
to the first version of the script
about secreting mucus, I think.
It made it through. A lot of things don't,
but I think that was in our original script.
We restructured this whole area of the movie at one point
and it used to be that this chase all took place after the ball was over,
and it was sort of through the household
when it was asleep at night.
I think the story department felt very strongly
that it ought to take place while the party was still going on.
It would be more funny to sort of destroy the ball
while it was in progress.
Hey, Stella!
Get them frogs!
-Run! -I can't run. I'm a frog!
Then hop!
(BARKING)
JOHN: We rearranged the story
so that we could still have all the people present,
and it kind of collapsed time,
and it made the movie work better, move faster.
The mermaid costume here
is based on our own Little Mermaid that we directed.
We did use the color scheme. We borrowed it from that.
Tom Ellery, a very funny storyboard artist,
boarded the original version of this chase
and did stuff in this version, as well.
Did a ton of cartoony stuff on the movie.
PETER: We also have another little cameo coming up right here.
JOHN: Yes, that is me and Ron.
When the Fenner Brothers get covered by the cake,
Jean-Christophe Poulain, the layout artist, said,
(IN FRENCH A CCENT) "Let us make it a caricature of you guys.
"I think it would be very funny. "
RON: And it is very funny, but I think it looks very,
very much like John. I don't think it looks like me.
They couldn't quite capture me in the cake.
JOHN: Yeah, well, that's hard to duplicate that face.
This was a fun animation challenge.
Bill Waldman did the animation here of the prince.
But, of course, it's not really the prince.
It's Lawrence in the guise of the prince.
So he really looks like the prince, but he moves more like Lawrence,
and it was a fun acting thing that both he and Tony had to deal with there.
RON: This is Tony DeRosa 's scene,
a very fun scene with the transformation.
But, yeah, it's fun for the animators,
just as it would be for a live-action actor
when they get to sort of play the same part
in different bodies and different forms,
and that kind of demonstrates the skill of the animator as an actor
in that they sort of retain the personality of that character,
even though their appearance is completely different.
JOHN: An animator named Jamie Lopez
worked with Bruce Smith on Facilier.
He did some real fun scenes, and this one
where he just gestured to himself, did that fun fact about voodoo
and kind of did that pause.
That's Jamie Lopez's idea and his animation,
a very quirky, funny scene, one of the best scenes, I think, on him.
PETER: And Lawrence as the prince is played by Peter Bartlett,
another New York stage actor.
JOHN: And you've worked with Peter at the Guthrie.
PETER: I did, yeah. About 15 years ago, maybe more, in Candide.
JOHN: On Facilier's hat, the skull and crossbones,
Eric Daniels in the hub, would add that to the hat.
It wouldn't be roughed in necessarily by Bruce Smith,
and they would add it as a final thing, and sometimes we forgot to put it in,
so there are a few scenes that were in color for a while,
we were like, "We forgot the skull on his hat!"
And we had to put it back in.
RON: Sometimes we'd forget it, and it would be a long time
before anyone would ever notice that it wasn't there.
JOHN: All this rain, these were done
by Marlon West's effects team and a great job.
And there's different layers. There's some behind the characters,
there 's some in front of the characters, it's dripping off them.
It's very involved. And then there 's lightning flashes in the background.
It really is a bit of an effects tour de force,
and when his arm moves, you'll see those trails of drips.
All that, you know, was tailored to the hand animation and done...
Actually, the effects work on this movie,
they were done on the Cintiq, which is a pressure sensitive tablet.
After the animator's drawings of the characters
were scanned in on paper,
the effects animators would do their work on this pressure-sensitive tablet
and draw it by hand, but be recorded directly into the computer.
It was a new thing on this movie.
There 's a bit of this movie that's kind of a manhunt,
and there are people chasing our heroes,
and they needed clues to find along the way,
so you'll notice there are bits of the balloon here
that are remaining on the water's surface.
Those are going to reappear later
because we wanted a telltale sign that says, "They went thataway. "
We needed something visual,
so it was a very simple sort of visual marker to help create tension
during the middle of the movie.
This is Rob Edwards' leech joke that he wrote and was very funny
and then well-animated by Russ Edmonds, I think.
It was not a lie. I fully...
(SHOUTS)
Run!
JOHN: Paul Briggs storyboarded this sequence,
a wonderful sort of bit of action trying to carry exposition.
You're always trying to disguise exposition,
which is sort of plot information,
to make it more interesting and yet understandable.
So we were trying to find a way to kill 2 birds
or 2 frogs with 1 stone, here.
PETER: Ian Gooding, the background artist,
I think, did a really nice job
of creating different moods in the bayou.
Some dangerous here, and then, as we progress,
-some are romantic settings. -JOHN: Yeah,
we wanted the bayou to be less appetizing
and more kind of a place you'd want to get out of.
RON: This is what we would call the cold, miserable bayou.
As things progress, we'll see other bayous,
but we wanted to begin with the bayou at its coldest and most miserable.
JOHN: These images of the alligators coming in the water with the V's,
we saw them when we were down in New Orleans.
On our first research trip down there, we went on a boat on the bayou,
and the Cajun tour guide, Reggie, summoned some alligators
over to the side of the boat by waving some marshmallows,
and we just saw the V's in the water, and it looked exactly like that.
Kind of sinister, coming right at you.
RON: We tried to make it look exactly.
That's what we saw. What's in the movie is what we saw,
and it's a little scary.
JOHN: You'll note this alligator here who's going to come up,
and he has a very distinctive voice if you happen to listen closely.
You're going to taste so good basted...
JOHN: It is none other than Emeril Lagasse,
the famous New Orleans restaurateur,
originally from Providence, Rhode Island,
I think, but that "bam, " his signature "bam, "
we had to work in there somewhere. So that's Emeril doing that gator.
The gator's name is Marlon, but the voice is Emeril.
PETER: We actually had the pleasure of eating
in a couple of his restaurants down in New Orleans.
-Some of the best meals I've ever had. -Great meals.
JOHN: We couldn't fit through that hole in that tree after we ate.
It was shocking.
RON: Odin Benitez, our sound designer,
when he went down to New Orleans, he also went to the bayou
and recorded the actual sounds of the bayou,
so in these scenes in the bayou,
the background sounds that you're hearing
are the actual authentic background sounds
you would hear in a Louisiana bayou.
JOHN: Yeah, so please, with your home theater system,
switch it so you just hear the surrounds for a while,
and you can sort of really appreciate every little frog...
I will play a little louder.
RON: It was kind of a fun aspect of this movie that...
Because so many fairy tales, and ones that we have done before,
like Mermaid and Aladdin, kind of deal with love at first sight,
you see that person and you know instantly
that's the person for you.
This movie wasn't love at first sight.
They really don't particularly care for each other
when they first see each other,
but as frogs, they kind of become more sensitive
to qualities in each of them.
The alligator, Louis, was animated by the great Eric Goldberg.
Why, the bayou's the best jazz school in the world.
JOHN: In earlier versions of the story, Louis was actually a human being
who couldn't play any music at all and he really wanted to,
and he went to Dr. Facilier and struck a deal with him,
and he got the ability to play a great trumpet,
but he was turned into an alligator in the process,
and when they found him here, he was wandering there,
trying to find some way to get turned back.
It was that way for quite a while in the story,
but it got kind of cumbersome.
The story was too long. It was too complicated.
We still loved a jazz-playing alligator,
but we said, "What if we didn't have him be human
"and he just was an alligator that loved jazz. "
So we sort of simplified the story.
PETER: I think this character really came to life,
not only through Eric's animation,
but Michael-Leon Wooley, when we cast him,
really helped add a lot of humor to the character.
JOHN: He did. Yeah. Wonderful actor. RON: And Louis evolved a little bit.
I mean, he's still similar to what he started out as,
but I would say he was more kind of phobic and nervous and jittery,
and he became more just basically Michael-Leon Wooley
as we went along.
JOHN: Right, and Michael looks a little bit like the gator.
When he smiles, he's got a great big smile,
and he's about 6'6" or 6'5" and big powerful guy and so...
RON: But a teddy bear.
JOHN: But a teddy bear, so it's a lot like Michael.
Also, Eric worked with a great team of animators,
Bert Klein and Hyun Min.
Hyun Min Lee is a very new animator out of CalArts,
did wonderful animation,
and Bert Klein did some of the funniest stuff on Louis here.
This bit where he slumps against the tree and various things,
where he jumped on board that riverboat and looked around,
"Hey, did you like that?"
That was Bert Klein's animation.
Really hilarious animation that Bert did.
We also, earlier on in the production,
we had a reverse order of these sequences.
Originally, Tiana met Ray before she met Louis,
and we had a hard time making Louis not seem like a detour.
So it was John Lasseter's idea.
He really thought, let's reverse the order.
Let's meet Louis first and then meet Ray.
So we had already started to animate the sequence with Ray,
so we had to sort of add Louis to that sequence
because now it came at a different spot in the movie.
The shot of Louis on his back as he's going along the water
was storyboarded by Tom Ellery, originally, I think, by Bruce Morris.
I don't know if they were thinking that,
I honestly didn't think of that when they were going through,
but it certainly has its analogies to Jungle Book
with Baloo and Mowgli as they travel down the river
and the kind of bonding they were doing.
PETER: These have to be some of my favorite backgrounds in the movie.
-Just gorgeous. -JOHN: Yeah. That down shot
was Ian Gooding's thumbnail on that, that brilliant bright coloring.
There isn't a ton of daylight scenes in the bayou in the movie,
but we really wanted to take advantage of this one,
so it really has a rich, day-lit feel.
RON: So we've left the cold, miserable bayou,
and now we're in the bright, warm, inviting bayou.
JOHN: Of course, you know, Jungle Book had the great Dixieland jazz
and the songs that the Sherman Brothers wrote,
and, I mean, this is sort of a left-handed homage to that,
and this was really our big Dixieland swing number
and very trumpet-centric.
So, it was designed to be a very up-tempo number
that would contrast the different philosophies of all 3 characters.
You've got the playboy aspect to the prince,
you've got the "I work hard and that's all I do " with Tiana
and then you've got Louis,
who wants nothing but to play music in front of an audience.
We wanted them to kind of cross against each other.
RON: Also, in terms of Randy Newman's original version of this song,
the turtle actually had some lines.
The turtle actually sang a few lines in the song,
and Randy Newman did the voice of the turtle.
JOHN: And the turtle was a sardonic skeptic like Randy can be,
and his line kept coming back,
"You sure about that? You sure about that?"
when they talked about how great it was gonna be,
but it seemed to slow down the song a little bit.
I think John Lasseter felt strongly, "I don't think we should
"have a counterpoint. We want it to all be up-tempo. "
PETER: Yeah, it sort of gave it the wrong tone at that time.
JOHN: Yeah, so we took out those parts,
-but the turtle survived. -It seems like we tried to get Randy,
2 or 3 different times, into the movie and...
RON: We tried and failed a few times.
-JOHN: He 's in the movie, though. -RON: He is in the movie.
He is in the movie and we'll point him out when he comes,
but he was going to be an otter at one point,
and we recorded a little bit of Randy Newman as the otter
and that character didn't stay in the movie.
JOHN: We were psyching Randy out 'cause we kept cutting him out
and he thought it was his acting,
but it really was 'cause the story kept changing,
although his acting... How would you describe his acting?
PETER: Well, he pretty much was Randy.
JOHN: Yeah, he was Randy.
This was Eric Goldberg's fun staging of this as the gator goes away.
This is a great layout by Rasoul Azadani's team.
It's a multiplane shot. You'll see the different overlapping layers
of trees and vegetation moving at different speeds.
Even though it's a hand-drawn movie, it gives the illusion of depth,
and it's a technique that goes back to The Old Mill
and to Snow White and Pinocchio.
RON: There's some great Sandro Cleuzo animation here.
JOHN: Yeah, Sandro is an animator from Brazil,
but he relocated for this movie. Terrific, brilliant draftsman and actor.
And he did a lot of the scenes here,
as well as Tony DeRosa, who did hilarious stuff.
And Danny Galieote did Charlotte in most of this sequence
and great expressions and fun timing on what she's doing here,
as well as, of course, the voice work of these guys.
It really was just a little comic set piece.
RON: Actually, the idea of the talisman kind of running out of fuel, so to speak,
and Lawrence reverting came out of a...
When we had our first screening of the movie,
we took it up to Pixar and ran it for some of the artists up there
and directors who do the Pixar films,
and this was an idea that came out of that brain trust.
JOHN: Nik had fun designing these different dresses for Charlotte
and Lorelay Bove, a great designer,
and Ian Gooding were all involved in sort of costuming our characters.
Oddly enough, this movie has more costume changes
on the main characters than any movie we've ever done.
I don't know why, but it does. Let me point out a little thing.
Because Facilier shows up, the fizz goes out of the champagne,
so Marlon's effects team took the bubbles out.
He can kill a glass of champagne like nobody else, our villain, so...
What do we do now?
RON: Marlon West was our head of special effects,
and he's a fantastic animator and head of the department.
2 of the big Disney influences on this movie
that we looked at a lot were the films Lady and the T ramp and Bambi.
Lady and the T ramp particularly for the scenes
that took place in the city of New Orleans,
with all the architecture,
and Bambi for the bayou scenes
and the beautiful backgrounds of Bambi
and the way they were able to, with lighting and color,
suggest a lot more than was really there.
A lot of the Bambi backgrounds are somewhat impressionistic,
and that's kind of what we were going for in this, as well.
JOHN: Ruben Aquino did some of this animation of the frogs,
when they get tied up and the stuff where he's hunting for food.
Very funny animation that Ruben did.
And I love the line that Rob Edwards wrote here.
There is no way I am kissing a frog and eating a bug on the same day.
(SHOUTS)
JOHN: That was Rob's line, and it gives a heroine a funny line,
and a lot of our heroines haven't had a lot of funny lines.
It was great to be able to play comedy
with the so-called straighter characters in the movie.
PETER: And the whole idea of the tongue being involuntary,
I thought, was a...
JOHN: Yeah. It was a way of trying to accommodate things.
We thought they were going to look for food,
but the idea of it being an involuntary action
was a way of getting them literally tied together.
RON: And most of this sequence was storyboarded by Wilbert...
JOHN: The crazy Dutchman Wilbert Plijnaar, and the idea,
the visual of them tangled up in a knot really came from Wilbert.
The idea of the light Ray is shooting out
and him writing his name in the sky and breaking it up,
all those were very funny Wilbert storyboard ideas.
He really brought this sequence to life. He did some very key scenes with Ray
during the course of the movie that were really inspirational
to both us and to the animators.
RON: And now we introduce Ray, our firefly character,
a very key character in the movie, brilliantly animated by Mike Surrey,
who did Timon in Lion King, among others,
and voiced by Jim Cummings.
JOHN: Jim Cummings spent years down in New Orleans.
Actually, he worked down there with Cajun guys,
and so he really picked up the sort of Cajun accent.
I ain't no firecracker!
I just got my big butt glowing! That's right!
The women like a man with a big back porch!
RON: Yeah, we really wanted the accent to be authentic and...
JOHN: And we did hear this accent when we were down at Jazz Fest there.
We heard the jazz, the Cajun guys with the whole, "Yeah, you right. "
And in fact, we watched the documentary called Y eah You Rite!,
which talks about the different New Orleans dialects,
and we looked on the Internet
and we found Cajun dictionaries and slang,
so we wrote the script with the hayacalls and the couillon,
and we tried to get all the Cajun turns of phrase
in here to really exploit the fact that he was part of this culture.
We admire the Cajuns.
They're wonderful people, and we think they have a rich heritage,
and we just thought Ray was an important character in the film.
And him being Cajun felt like it really grounded it in Louisiana.
PETER: I think as great as the script was, too,
Jim Cummings really added a lot of flavor,
a lot of comic timing and ad libs.
JOHN: And he could improvise in character, which was great.
So this whole thing,
"A woman likes a man with a big back porch, "
that came from Jim Cummings.
...by a voodoo witch doctor.
Well, there you go.
And we were on our way to Mama Odie's.
RON: And the song that Ray sang
when he was down in between the 2 frogs trying to untie them
was actually part of Jim Cummings' audition.
JOHN: Right, it's a Leon Russell tune written in the '70s, Cajun Love Song,
and he did it as his audition piece,
and Jeff Draheim, our great editor, thought it was really fun
and cut it in as just a while-you-work, idling along song.
And then we had to sort of buy the rights to it
'cause we liked it so much, we wanted to keep it in the movie.
So, we thank Leon Russell for that song.
(WHlSTLES)
Why, me and my relationals will help show y'all the way.
(EXCLAlMS)
JOHN: Hey, who's that sitting there? PETER: That's Randy Newman.
JOHN: That is my caricature of Randy Newman, vaguely.
I think Randy thinks I put a little more weight on him than he deserved,
but I was just trying to get a little Randy.
It's hard. Randy wears glasses,
and you can't give a firefly glasses, at least most of the time.
(SINGING) We're gonna take you there We're gonna take you there
JOHN: Brian Ferguson did this fun scene
of Ray zooming away from the camera
and his dance stuff. Mike Surrey did wonderful animation on Ray,
and he had a great team of animators doing it,
and Bob Bennett, the effects animator, did a lot of these particle fireflies,
this sort of trail of fireflies. And we needed them to dance,
so Bob had to make these fireflies dance along
with the hand-drawn ones,
and it was really a tour de force of particle animation.
RON: And this was one of the last sequences
finished in the movie, actually.
PETER: There was actually a point
where we questioned whether we could do
a 7th song or not. This was...
JOHN: Yeah, I know. Some people were arguing with us and saying,
"Hey, the movie's too long. Let's leave this out. "
And John Lasseter's like, "You're gonna cut out the zydeco number?
"That's the signature New Orleans scene. You can't do that. "
So we found other ways to shorten the movie.
RON: He was absolutely right.
(SINGING) Goin' down the bayou
JOHN: Yeah, this was a fun sequence to visualize,
and it's short, but I think it really is so visually packed
with fun, entertaining visuals and the music is so bright and cheery,
I'm glad that it carried to the end of the film.
Craig Elliott did some wonderful development art
that we based some of this trek of fireflies through the bayou on.
We really tried to capture some of what he got in his great paintings.
PETER: Here it was clear that with our villain,
he had to have a power greater than himself...
JOHN: Right, this came as the story evolved,
and there were a lot of changes.
This sequence kept going through a lot of changes.
Bruce Morris storyboarded,
it was always staged great, but it was the question of exposition.
Where did Facilier get his power from?
Did he have to answer to anybody else?
What were the stakes if he lost?
And so we came up with this idea that he really had to double down here
and kind of go to his sort of higher...
It was sort of a mafia analogy, that he had to go and ask for more money
and had to make a promise, like, I'm gonna do something for you,
you do something for me,
and, yeah, things go wrong. There was an implied threat here.
So, we were trying to help set up
Facilier's ultimate demise here with this.
RON: And from fairly early on, we had the idea
that Facilier would have this kind of platoon of shadows
that would do his bidding, though for a long time,
the shadows were actually duplicates of his own shadow.
They all looked like his silhouette with a top hat.
JOHN: Alex Kupershmidt is the animator who did these shadows,
and he designed and animated all these shadows.
It really became his part of the movie,
and he came up with how they would move
and their designs, and it was really a wonderful way to make them work.
And again, technically they didn't go through what we call clean-up.
His roughs were just tightened up a bit and then inbetweened,
'cause, again, they don't have lines around them,
so the line quality didn't matter, it was the shape quality.
But Alex really made these macabre.
And the idea of these kind of shadows...
This storyboard, again, Bruce Morris designed
this whole sort of dramatic exit of the shadows,
this chase sequence and a lot of the stuff
between Facilier and the shadows, Bruce created the rules
that we operated, where a shadow has to interact with another shadow.
There 's a million rules on these shadows that Bruce came up with.
-That's your girl? -Oh, no, no.
My girl? Ho, ho, ho. That's Evangeline.
Evangeline?
JOHN: Ray's girlfriend, Evangeline,
the name Evangeline came from the poem by Longfellow.
There's, sort of, an Acadian myth of Evangeline, who actually...
It's sort of the reverse of what we have in the movie,
in that she spent her whole life looking for her lost love.
It was a guy that was lost.
And she was a tragic figure who wandered and, I think, never...
It was a tale of unrequited love
and when I read this poem by Longfellow,
I just felt like that would make a great name for the Evening Star.
It just seemed to fit the period,
and it was an homage, sort of, to Longfellow
and this sort of Acadian myth.
So, Evangeline became the name of Ray's lost love.
The darkness is closing in! I'm so cold.
RON: And now we introduce our version of The Three Stooges.
JOHN: Yes, the frog hunters here.
This sequence storyboarded and these characters initially designed
by Tom Ellery, a very funny story artist.
And they were brought to life by Dale Baer, who's a real veteran.
He was in the first Disney training program, trained at Chouinard's,
the old art institute that eventually became CalArts,
and he just did a wonderful job.
We might mention the voices of these guys.
2 of them are people who happen to work here.
Darnell, the man in the middle, is Don Hall,
and I think he 's channeling a bit of Stan Freberg here.
And on the right, Two Fingers...
RON: Don Hall, our head of story.
JOHN: Yes. And he doesn't look anything like that.
You know, waitress...
JOHN: And Paul Briggs, story man, who's from Texas originally,
did Two Fingers, the guy on the right.
And our lead guy, Reggie, was voiced by Ritchie Montgomery,
who we found down in New Orleans, and I believe he's from Mississippi,
but we flew him out here, we recorded him down there, as well,
but he brought some local authenticity to the part of Reggie.
Most of the character designs on this movie
grew out of drawings that the supervisors did.
We, in fact, had a character design retreat in Ojai.
We took all the character designers, we went to Ojai, and we...
PETER: Along with the supervising animators.
JOHN: The supervising animators,
really they all got to work on each other's characters, as well,
and we had storyboards pinned up,
and people would do drawings over the drawings,
and we had the drawings that the story artists had done.
-RON: I mean... -JOHN: Very collaborative.
John Lasseter was very big on...
He felt sometimes past Disney films,
the designs of certain characters didn't fit with the others,
so one of the purposes of this retreat was to get a unity
so that they didn 't separate so much, so one design related to the other.
That's why we had this kind of cross-pollination.
RON: Tom Ellery boarded the frog hunters,
and he did just some of the funniest boards we'd ever seen.
JOHN: I remember crying when I saw these first boards.
And, again, I'm a lowbrow guy, what can I say?
But I literally was crying, laughing, and it's my taste in humor.
I grew up on The Three Stooges. My mother told me, "Turn off that TV. "
I refused. This is what happened.
This is what could happen, and this is what did happen.
RON: Although when Tom Ellery first boarded it,
it was about 20 times longer
than the sequence as it ended up being filmed.
-It was Frog Hunters, the feature, yeah. -PETER: A lot of ideas.
JOHN: Yeah, Tom isn't big on editing, but he's great on ideas.
PETER: I think in addition to being a good comic set piece,
it really helps establish Naveen and Tiana working together
to kind of overcome the obstacle.
JOHN: When we did this movie,
Disney had sort of abandoned hand-drawn animation,
and we had to re-establish a whole sort of what we call a pipeline,
which is a production process for doing the film. And, in fact,
we didn't even know we had enough of the animators desks,
those sort of beautiful old wooden desks
with the light boards in them for the staff to do it, and then fortunately...
PETER: They had actually been told to sell all the desks.
JOHN: They had been told, "Sell all those desks. "
RON: To get rid of all the desks, all the paper, all the pencils.
JOHN: And then Chris Hibler, who's in charge of operations here
and in fact the grandson of Winston Hibler,
whose name you can find on many a Disney film,
who worked with Walt Disney, he said,
"I kind of secretly hid away some desks. "
In fact, he had enough desks hidden away to do one of these films.
-It was like opening... -RON: He didn't tell anybody.
PETER: He knew that, at some point, they were gonna regret that decision,
-so he put them in a warehouse. -JOHN: Right.
He was foresighted enough to do that.
So it really was like this miracle, kind of.
You opened the doors and the dust and the moths emerged
and there was a heavenly light, and there were these animation desks.
RON: Ed Catmull and John Lasseter came to Disney,
and it was like, "What are we gonna do?
"We don't have any animation desks. "
And Chris Hibler was like,
(CHUCKLING) "Well, take a look at this. "
JOHN: Randy Cartwright did this scene of Tiana, "We talk, too, "
which was very well-animated, I thought.
And we talk, too.
RON: And this is our tribute or homage to Miyazaki.
JOHN: Yes, that water was designed to look like Miyazaki's movies,
the great Japanese director, and so that's our homage to Miyazaki.
You all right there, little bug?
JOHN: This was Jim's ad-lib about,
"Your breath nearly killed me to death. "
That was Jim's idea, totally.
I think Don Hall pushed the pricker idea.
We needed a reason why they had to slow down for things to happen,
so these prickers were invented to get them to pause on the journey,
and yet not pause too long.
It's tricky because we didn 't want to stop
the forward momentum of the story.
So it was a challenge to keep the story feeling like we 're moving.
The shadow intercuts were designed to build tension through this area
so it didn 't get too static.
And I might add, Josie Trinidad storyboarded the part coming up,
what we called the campfire sequence
where the characters really begin to warm to each other,
and she did a phenomenal job of really creating fun moments.
This whole idea of the mincing being such a struggle
that it actually created a sweat
and he had to slave over it and said, "One, "
that all came from Josie's storyboards,
and she really made the romance start to work here.
We had a hard time getting the romance to work,
and she really solved some things in her storyboards.
RON: Yeah, the animators really cued off her boards
'cause there's beautiful animation,
particularly by Mark Henn and Randy Haycock,
who did Tiana and Naveen here,
but they were really inspired heavily by Josie's storyboards,
which really conveyed a lot of the warmth and entertainment.
JOHN: Yeah, I mean, one of the essential things
that the Nine Old Men taught us, the veteran animators,
was really to make characters...
You have to see their thought processes.
And both Mark and Randy were masters
at really getting into some subtle acting.
I mean, these are frogs, they look kind of cartoony,
but you'll note in this scene and others their expressions,
and you really understand what they're thinking at all times,
and that's not an easy task to accomplish.
And Mark and Randy are experts at this.
RON: Yes, this is really brilliant
animation acting that you're seeing right here.
JOHN: And the effects, as well.
Joey Mildenberger did this crazy mincing.
Although as I was watching the scene,
it alarms me that it looks like he's gonna cut off his finger.
If we could do it over again,
-I wish we had pulled his finger back. -PETER: There's no handle.
JOHN: I know. Well, when she sets the second one down,
right here, it's like, "No, don't cut your finger!"
I wish we had just pulled that index finger back a little bit.
There was no blood there, but there could have been.
RON: It's over, it's done. JOHN: Yeah.
PETER: I love what Randy did in this scene, too.
JOHN: Yeah, this is one of Randy's best scenes.
And really, the way Bruno acted it, wonderful,
and Rob 's writing on this and all those things combined, I think,
and Josie's boards, we tried to get a vulnerable side.
The prince has been so carefree up to this point,
and this was meant to be our sort of entrance into his head,
that despite his fun nature, he's missing something in his life.
He lacks purpose,
and he wishes that he had more of a passion to commit himself to
and not be so flighty, basically.
RON: And Alex Kupershmidt,
we transition to Alex Kupershmidt's shadows on the hunt.
PETER: It was great the way the hub was able to put those shadows
against the trees in the background.
JOHN: Yeah, this is the shortest sequence in the movie.
There it was, 2 shots.
RON: Yes, yes, that put us ahead of schedule for one week.
(ALL LAUGHING)
Yeah, working out the love story, there's some really key things
that are going on here that we were struggling with.
And it ended up a very simple idea,
the idea that she teaches him how to cook,
and then as we'll see from this, he teaches her how to dance,
and that very simple idea just kind of symbolized
the relationship between the 2 of them
and how they complement each other.
JOHN: When we were developing this movie,
there had been some material developed on the idea
of doing a version of The Frog Prince before this,
and one of the treatments that had been written some years ago
was by 2 of the great story people, Chris Ure and Dean Wellins,
and in their treatment, they had the idea of a firefly
who fell in love with the Evening Star.
RON: It didn 't take place in New Orleans.
It was more of a traditional fairy tale.
JOHN: But as we read all the material that had been done on this idea
before we even got onto it, both here and at Pixar,
that idea really jumped out at us. Like, that's just a great idea.
So when we wrote our script,
we said we've got to have a firefly that falls in love with a star.
It's just romantic, it's part of the period
and it became a huge thematic idea in the course of the movie.
It started out as a very small idea,
but it became central, just the possibilities of romance
and love overcoming any obstacle.
And Randy's set piece song here, we wanted him to write a Cajun ballad
that would be sort of the thing that they would fall in love during.
It's kind of a convention of musical comedy.
You see these in the Gene Kelly movies and Fred Astaire,
where it's really a dance and a song
that kind of telescopes the whole relationship into a musical sequence,
and this was ours here. We did look at...
Again here, we saw Esther Williams swimming underwater.
We looked at Fantasia, actually. This shot was influenced,
and Dan Lund did a great job with the animation
of all these ripples and pollen and all that stuff.
And then Min-Kyu Lee, again, a young animator out of CalArts,
did this underwater ballet here that they're dancing.
Wonderful animation.
RON: Yeah, we had some great animation
from some brand new animators who just started on this movie.
I was also going to mention that, for a while,
it was tricky to determine what is the exact moment
where each of them fall in love with each other.
But that is the exact moment where Naveen falls in love with Tiana
and realizes that she is the one for him.
She doesn't realize it yet,
so he's a little bit ahead of her, in terms of their relationship,
and it's going to be a little while
before she finally realizes that he's the one for her.
JOHN: Mark Henn did a great job with that scene
where she sort of rebuffs him,
and, actually, we generally didn't shoot live-action reference
for when they were frogs,
but we did happen to shoot that 'cause it was part of the dance,
and Danielle Truitt did some wonderful things in her live-action performance
that Mark took some cues from,
but he really did wonders with that scene.
We didn 't used to have this sequence so much in the film,
but we wanted at least a little flurry of some action.
So we built up this moment
just to get some contrast with the scenes around it
to get a little bit more dramatic tension.
And we struggled over this introduction.
Mama Odie's intro got re-worked several times,
and we always wanted to do a misdirect
that you'd think she's big and imposing.
It was sort of like What's Opera, Doc?
The big shadow and it turns out to be Elmer Fudd.
We were sort of trying to do something like that here.
Now which one of you naughty children been messing with the Shadow Man?
RON: This is the voice of the fantastic Jenifer Lewis,
who did the voice of Mama Odie.
Mama Odie is 200 years old.
Jenifer Lewis is much, much, much younger than that,
but she was sort of creating a voice, I think.
JOHN: She was channeling Moms Mabley a little bit,
the great African-American comedienne,
and in fact, when we first thought of the part,
we thought she was a combination of kind of a Moms Mabley and Yoda,
an all-wise, all-saying but kind of quirky,
funny, older African-American lady and Andreas Deja, the great animator,
did both Juju, the snake here, and Mama Odie.
He designed and animated them.
RON: And Andreas is known for villains.
He did Scar in Lion King and Jafar in Aladdin
and Gaston in Beauty and the Beast.
So it was fun for him, I think, to do the other side with Mama Odie.
JOHN: Sue Nichols, who did our early visual development on Mama,
did some great drawings of her,
and we really tried to get that into the course of the film.
Daniel Chung, who was a visual development artist,
had the idea of making her blind.
He did a drawing of her with glasses. We liked that,
and so we asked Sue to do some new drawings of her with glasses,
and Sue also did some very funny drawings.
Her husband works in home health care
or I think some kind of assisted living for seniors,
and she did drawings of Mama Odie with all this candy around her,
and she said, "You know, older people, they really like candy. "
So we said, "We gotta work candy into this. "
So we had the whole thing, "Y'all want some candy?"
That came from Sue and her husband
and the senior citizens of Northampton, Massachusetts.
RON: Mama Odie has a lot of influences from New Orleans,
including 2 women, I think.
Coleen Salley, who is a storyteller who we met at Jazz Fest
and who took us around New Orleans, who passed away just recently,
but a great, great New Orleans character.
JOHN: She's originally from Baton Rouge,
but she taught at the University of New Orleans,
and she did these storytelling conferences years ago.
Tom Schumacher, I think, who is an executive here,
sat next to her on a plane and discovered her.
She was so salty and such a bigger-than-life character.
He introduced her to John Lasseter, John Lasseter introduced her to us.
She became our ambassador down there.
She drove us around the Quarter, drove us around the whole city,
told us stories of restaurants,
and she's white, she's not African-American,
but this whole "You ain't got the sense you was born with, "
that came from Coleen Salley, a great, great lady.
RON: And we did spend a day with a voodoo priestess
when we were in New Orleans, Ava Kay Jones.
JOHN: Right, when Pixar was exploring the idea of doing this film,
they had gone down there a few years before we got down there.
They met with Ava Kay and she toured them
around the cemeteries and the voodoo emporiums there,
and she did that with us, as well, when we came down.
We discussed how voodoo worked and the spiritual aspects of it
and the sort of touristy aspects of it and how those differed
and what the serious underpinnings were.
We wanted here to have our version of a fairy godmother
that fit sort of the Louisiana setting,
so we liked this wise woman of the bayou here.
RON: All these spoonbills, the chorus of spoonbills,
were animated by Adam Dykstra.
In most cases, in terms of simplification of the movie,
this was a case where things look much more elaborate than they are,
'cause in most of these scenes,
Adam just had to do 1 or 2 spoonbills at most,
and we just kind of multiplied them to create this whole chorus.
JOHN: And the movement of the spoonbills
was based on choreographic reference
that Betsy Baytos created using...
Jermaine Johnson and Josette Wiggan danced,
and they were sort of a couple that performed these spoonbills
with baseball caps on.
If you check out the live-action and choreographic reference here,
you'll see that, as well.
PETER: Jenifer Lewis, not only a great actress,
she's obviously a really great singer.
We even tried, at one point, having her sing the song in her natural voice.
JOHN: She sang in her natural voice. She's a good singer,
but it seemed like maybe a little bit too much of a disconnect
when you heard her speaking voice and then her singing voice
when she turned into the real Jenifer Lewis,
so we had to move it back into her spoken voice,
which is a tricky one to sing in, but I think she pulled it off.
It was a real challenge for her.
RON: Armand Baltazar,
who was an early visual development artist on this movie
and did some very key art that had a big influence,
it was his idea that Mama Odie have a big bathtub where she made gumbo.
JOHN: And he did that painting
that was the basis for her boat stuck up in that big cypress tree.
That was Dobie's painting,
and all through production, we were sort of haunted by it.
We said we've got to get that in the movie.
It took a while, but we really tried to capture the feeling
that Dobie had in his original image.
PETER: In terms of these background singers, too,
we went down to New Orleans
and actually recorded with a gospel choir
down in New Orleans to get that feel.
JOHN: And we wanted this to be such a colorful climax to this song.
It was Ian Gooding's idea. He said,
"What if we hung bottles in the trees so that we can have prisms of light
"coming through the bottles to make it a really radiant thing. "
And he designed this to kind of look like stained glass.
The triptych that's up there, that came from Ian 's design
and his shape of that whole climax.
Also Paul Felix, who is the art director on Bolt,
he helped Ian out and did some wonderful color keys on that sequence.
I might also mention Mike Gabriel, who assisted Ian Gooding
in the color model department,
in terms of picking colors for characters
and integrating characters and backgrounds.
Mike Gabriel, who directed Pocahontas and a fabulous artist himself,
really brought a lot to the color on this movie.
RON: And this is a great Randy Newman song.
Right from the beginning, we wanted to have a gospel song
'cause that seemed...
When we went to the Jazz Fest before we even began this movie,
we heard all these different styles of music,
from zydeco to gospel to Dixieland and jazz,
and we really wanted all the songs to kind of have a different style
to reflect all the different kinds of music that are in the city.
JOHN: Big Daddy, the character, was animated
by Duncan Marjoribanks, who is himself about 6'5",
but he's much skinnier than Big Daddy, but he brought a good gravitas to him
and weight and bulk and scale to this sort of patriarch character.
Hop-along, you only got till then to get that princess to kiss you.
JOHN: We wanted to really communicate
visually what the stakes were.
This really establishes our ticking clock for the 3rd act.
We wanted to have a point of reference, of deadline, basically,
so that it would increase the stakes of, would they get there in time?
Could they right the wrongs by that time?
And if they didn't, there would be dire consequences.
So this really set the ticking clock for the rest of the movie.
Midnight, Mardi Gras is over.
RON: It's fortunate that we had this idea
that now the characters all kind of take a riverboat
to go to Mardi Gras for New Orleans,
because we do have this ticking clock established now.
Time is running out.
JOHN: Ron Clements, the master of light,
"We don't want too much at night. We want it during the day. "
He drove us nuts with all this. Right?
RON: Somewhat. But what I was gonna say
is that we have some very delicate relationship scenes
coming up here on the riverboat,
and the question, how can you have scenes
where they just kind of stop and get to know each other
when that clock is ticking?
But because they're riding on a riverboat
and they can't really do much until they arrive in New Orleans,
it allows us to do that.
JOHN: We did used to have a scene where there was a couple
onboard the boat dressed as chickens,
and they got to know Louis, and the woman took a liking to him
and tried to pull his costume off and was looking for the zipper,
and it was a very funny scene, and the movie just got long,
so it didn't make it into the movie, but I miss that one.
PETER: We even saw Louis up on stage at one point.
JOHN: Yeah, this went through a lot of revisions.
Yeah, we had Louis playing, we had Ray trapped in a champagne bottle.
RON: And we should mention the voice of Louis' trumpet in the movie,
when Louis plays the trumpet,
is the great Terence Blanchard, a great, great jazz trumpeter
who also put together the gospel chorus in the Mama Odie song,
and he was also the voice of one of the band members
who sees Louis there and thinks it's an alligator costume.
JOHN: Also, the great Cajun musician, Terrance Simien, did the accordion,
the Button Box accordion, for Ray in Gonna T ake You There, so...
In fact, we just saw him perform down in New Orleans
at the New Orleans Museum of Art,
and he's a wonderful musician and a great ambassador of zydeco,
and it's such a get-up-and-dance kind of music. It's wonderful.
James Finch did the original drawing
that prompted that scene of the riverboat with the moon.
He did this establishing shot.
James Finch designed a lot of the backgrounds and Big Daddy's house.
He did some original work on that, that then Ian took over,
but he went down to the bayou with Rasoul Azadani.
They took 5, 000 pictures and every cypress tree you can imagine.
And a lot of what James did set the tempo
for the way the bayou would look
and the way the riverboat was going to work.
RON: And this was a beautiful scene here.
Actually, the animator, Russ Edmonds, did Naveen in this scene.
Mark Henn did Tiana. It's a great scene.
JOHN: It's one of the best sort of back and forth scenes
where they really feel like they're playing off each other.
Many of the scenes of the actors,
just by the nature of the way we work, are recorded individually.
The actor's in a sound booth
and there 's a person feeding them lines, but they work by themselves.
And it's a challenge for a lot of actors,
because they're used to playing off each other.
But there were some scenes in this movie, however,
where we really wanted to get the interplay of the characters,
the romantic comedy aspects between Tiana and Naveen.
So Anika and Bruno recorded several key scenes together,
including this riverboat scene
where they're sitting there at their kind of intimate, romantic, candlelit dinner,
and they were able to improvise, to throw things in,
Bruno 's whole thing, "That was loud!"
And, you know, his sort of gentle laugh and all that,
and how they went back and forth. "You got to keep it loose. "
All that came from them being able to play off each other
the way they would on stage.
They really played off each other really well.
And you would never know it, but we had a nightmare,
in terms of these panning backgrounds.
We wanted to give the illusion that the boat was moving,
so we had to get those clouds and stars moving
at just the right speed, and in the real world,
if they're that far away, they might seem to move slower,
and yet, it seemed like the boat wasn't moving,
so we went back and forth trying to find just the right speed for those stars.
So I hope you like it. It was a struggle.
RON: Some great acting, I think some of the best acting in the movie.
JOHN: Yeah, there's some crucial stuff, particularly on Naveen here.
On both of them, but particularly Naveen,
where he's come into the scene so excited
about trying to confess, you know, to propose,
and then he's got to change his mind.
So we have to understand what's going on in his head.
It was always a question on both of these characters.
John Lasseter kept badgering us on this, particularly with Tiana.
What is she thinking? What's her attitude on all this?
And really make it clear.
So there was various story work, including that opening scene
where even the idea of him proposing wasn't originally in here, I think.
And all of this was definitely moved
to sharpen up what's in his mind, what's in her mind.
We had him really fall in love before she fell in love.
RON: Right, right. And the visual of the ring
really helped us communicate what's going on here.
JOHN: Yeah, we didn't used to have that.
We felt like by putting that in the scene,
it really created a visual way of communicating the story.
RON: As far as the moment where she realizes how she feels about him,
this is kind of that moment now
where she's wanted this restaurant her whole life.
She's worked so hard for it and, for the first time,
she's thinking that, "Is it possible that maybe there's something
"that's even more important than the restaurant?"
What do I do?
Please tell me.
(MUFFLED GRUNTING)
JOHN: This scene where we see Charlotte outside this building,
this little outbuilding on the estate is called the bachelor quarters.
Some of these big houses had separate buildings
where the bachelors would stay
so as not to be in the same house with the young women.
So, we drew on that from some of the places we saw down in Louisiana.
And Tony DeRosa did this great scene of Lawrence.
These scenes of him by the door here, very funny.
And Bruce Smith did both the shadow
and Facilier in this, as did Frans Vischer.
Frans Vischer was also on the team.
Get your filthy hands off me! Lawrence!
(CHUCKLING) Oh, now hold still, Your Eminence.
(BOAT HOOTING)
ALL: (CHANTING) Mardi Gras! Mardi Gras!
JOHN: Odin Benitez was our sound designer. He did a wonderful job
on picking all these little flitting sounds on the thing,
and the atmosphere of the bayou,
-and he had to create all sorts of stuff. -RON: Right.
He actually went out to New Orleans and recorded a lot of the sounds,
the authentic sounds from New Orleans.
-He recorded the streetcars. -JOHN: Recorded the streetcars.
And you might say, "How did a guy get a name like Odin Benitez?"
That's right. He is Hispanic, but his father loved Norse mythology.
So believe it or not, our sound designer, Odin Benitez,
has a brother named Thor. I kid you not.
RON: We've had little cameos in movies.
We're these 2 guys on the float throwing beads.
These Mardi Gras floats, for the very, very astute,
just kind of for fun, we based them on movies that we 've directed.
So, there 's kind of a mermaid float, an Arabian Nights float,
there 's a little bit, there 's a Greek mythology float
and even a pirate float.
JOHN: The background painting on this film, it was such a rich environment
full of different textures. You can see the sort of...
Ian really wanted to capture the way in the French Quarter
you see sort of crumbling paint on some things
or you see brick beneath plaster
and the change of textures and surfaces
-and the color... -PETER: He actually used
the Mardi Gras colors, too, as sort of a basis
for his organizing of the film.
The reds for more the Facilier characters, the evil characters.
The green to sort of represent the middle and the frogs,
and then the gold to represent goodness and Mama Odie
and the wedding and...
JOHN: The lavenders and the purples came from the Mardi Gras thing
that worked in Facilier's area and his lair and in the climax, as well,
the Mardi Gras colors, purple, green and gold.
Notice, this is the gesture I was alluding to before,
where Tiana sort of comforts herself and rubs her arms.
Mark animated both those scenes,
and I thought it was great the way he carried over a gesture
she did as a human to what she did as a frog.
It's subliminal, but I think it ties the characters together.
PETER: This idea, story wise, of Tiana basically telling Ray
that Evangeline's nothing but a star,
I think was a big turning point in our story.
JOHN: Right, it wasn't there originally, and it really was a great,
I think, story beat to have her so distraught,
and to see the teary-eyed Ray. I think the whole audience, "Poor Ray, "
and yet they feel like he 's nuts, but we feel bad for him.
At this point, I think everyone thinks he 's still kind of nuts,
but it really estranged them in a way
that hooked them into the story.
-It gave her a low. -RON: Pulled the 3rd act together.
At one point we had a plague of frogs,
which I think we're just as glad we didn't do that.
JOHN: Yeah, we had a whole sequence where Tiana...
There was an idea of Facilier rounding up the frogs
by creating this fake frog hunt,
that they rounded up every frog in the bayou
and then eventually, Tiana, who 's put in with them,
released them and they storm this float,
she and 100, 000 frogs.
RON: Peter, I think, is very sorry that we didn 't...
JOHN: Yeah. Peter had a cow along with the million frogs.
So, the million frogs went away and I think it's better.
Ron resisted it as long as he possibly could, but he finally gave in.
PETER: I mean, it turned into something really emotional.
JOHN: It did. That was the trade-off.
PETER: Which serves the story better.
JOHN: Much better. Much, much better. Yeah.
REVEREND: And so, by the power vested in me by the state of Louisiana...
JOHN: The Reverend here, who's doing the wedding vows,
is actually Joe Whyte, who is a modeler here in the CG world,
but he's a great actor. He does a lot of voice work.
We did a filmmaking technique there called mechanical cutting,
-where each shot... -RON: Mathematical.
JOHN: Mathematical cutting, where each shot
gets progressively just a few frames shorter.
It's a way of building tension in a scene,
so every cut is getting progressively just a bit shorter
on its way to the big climax when the frog jumps out of the box, there.
Tony DeRosa did some hilarious animation on Lawrence here
as he transforms and both as he runs out later.
It got me, too.
Let go of that!
JOHN: It was fun to have Mardi Gras as sort of a backdrop.
We actually got to ride a float in Mardi Gras
when we went down to New Orleans.
PETER: We sort of experienced it from both sides on Mardi Gras, too.
We experienced it from the audience standpoint,
but also actually on the Bacchus float.
JOHN: But, again, this is almost sort of a Hitchcockian thing
to have sort of a big event like this,
but there's sort of an action-adventure counter-story
that's against this big visual backdrop,
and it was fun to do something like this.
And the great thing about the cemetery is,
we wanted to get the aboveground cemeteries in New Orleans,
and we have a set piece coming up that's set in them,
and we did a lot of photographs and research,
St. Louis Number 1 and the Metairie Cemetery,
where various notables are buried there in New Orleans.
It's a signature part of the city. And it's like a city of dead,
I think some of the books call it.
But it really feels like skyscrapers, but it's all crypts,
and it's really a dramatic landscape.
If you're in New Orleans, you've got to go see them.
Of course, one way to make your bad guy bad
is to have him do something bad to one of your heroes,
and this is our most sympathetic character,
and it was both a way of making Facilier that much worse
and raising the stakes of the emotional story, here.
Ray?
JOHN: We have a boo moment here.
(GASPS)
It's nice in some of these to have a boo, and I think it kind of works.
It was well-animated by, if I remember, Frans Vischer, I think, animated that.
PETER: The ending of this movie went through many iterations,
-this part of the movie. -RON: Yes.
JOHN: Yeah, this idea, Don Hall in charge of story, was very big
on trying to keep a thread alive in the 3rd act that Facilier's plan
not go away even when his plan on the float got disrupted.
That there could still be a chance of pulling the pieces together.
He was insistent that that was important, to keep going.
So, we rewrote the story here, so this talisman
became kind of a Macguffin in that it was sort of the key to him
completing his plan so that his plan wouldn't be completely over
until this thing was either destroyed or he got it back.
RON: Also, we always kind of had a climactic scene
between Facilier and Tiana in the cemetery,
but there wasn't this fantasy where he recreated her restaurant
and made her appear to be human again.
JOHN: Yeah, she was just a frog
and I think this really made the stakes much higher and made it...
She was really giving something up,
as well as being able to see her as a human being
for longer in the movie and to see her in this great dress.
And to see her fantasy sort of come to life,
the thing we saw earlier in a very stylized way,
to have it be so real and so lush and so vivid
and her look so beautiful and to make this future all the more tempting.
Is it possible she might actually want to take this deal,
deliver what her father had missed all those years?
This is the opportunity of her lifetime.
We really wanted to make the choice as hard as we possibly could for her.
RON: Yeah, from the start we really felt we wanted Facilier
to have a strong argument here,
that it was important that even for a second that you would think,
"Well, he's got kind of a point. Maybe he's right. "
JOHN: The name Dr. Facilier actually comes from the French word,
it's a word we made up, but facile means easy,
and we thought of him as the guy who tries to tell you
that everything's going to be easy and make it easy,
so that's why we called him Dr. Facilier.
He's the guy who makes things easy.
PETER: He actually conjures up the image of the father
thinking that, you know,
his dream never came true as a way of enticing her.
-But ultimately, it backfires on him. -JOHN: Right, it's his undoing.
RON: But it backfires partly because of stuff her father said,
stuff her mother said, stuff Mama Odie said
and her whole experience of Naveen and how he's changed her.
So, the climax of the movie really comes down to a choice
that she has to make.
JOHN: And Randy is using musical themes
to help clarify her thought process,
so this is triumphant fanfare that comes in as she resists here
that really is Tiana 's theme,
but now as Facilier gains the upper hand,
it moves into darkness, and ultimately,
we're gonna head toward a reprise of Friends on the Other Side
as things really backfire on Facilier and he has to answer to those friends.
I've got news for you, Shadow Man. It's not slime. It's mucus!
(GASPS)
PETER: "It's not slime. It's mucus, "
which, I think, John, that was your line.
JOHN: I kept insisting.
-I know. It's a weird jokey line. -RON: There was a question,
-and it was controversial. -Everybody hated it, except me.
PETER: No, I think, ultimately, it was a good idea.
It really harkens back to her relationship with Naveen.
JOHN: Yeah, that's why I really wanted to do it.
I thought it was a way of saying basically, "Naveen changed me
"during the course of the movie, " so that's why I wanted to do that line.
... minor setback in a major operation.
JOHN: These voodoo dolls were animated by T. Dan Hofstedt.
He did a wonderful job with them,
and the masks and the voodoo dolls were all T. Dan.
RON: Again, this was some of the very last stuff in the movie,
some of the last scenes that we finished right at the end.
JOHN: This was an effects extravaganza, once again.
We had to time all these masks going in, and the drums and the smoke
and the light, and there's so much going on there.
And this, actually, I think it was Alex Kupershmidt's idea,
I feel like, to put his name on the gravestone.
Originally, he was just gonna get sucked into a grave,
and I think Alex suggested, "Put his name on it. "
RON: Right at the end of the movie, there was a big panic moment
when we realized that the clock in Jackson Square,
that instead of having the Roman numeral 4
which was like a I and a V,
that it was like just 4 lines.
And we were, "Quickly, what are we going to do?
"We have to change this. " And then we realized, doing more research,
that that is the way it is in Jackson Square.
-It was correct. -JOHN: What you said was clear.
RON: It may not have been clear, but it was meaningful.
JOHN: We had drawn the clock with 4 lines thinking that was correct
and someone pointed out, "No, no, Roman numeral is an I and a V. "
And then we went to change it,
and someone researched the actual clock down there
and discovered, in fact, it does have 4 lines.
So we left it that way, like you see there.
I love these little scenes Joe Oh animated.
These looks up at the clock and look back.
They're so simple, but they communicate so strongly.
And this, I think, this was Jared Stern's idea.
-RON: It was Jared Stern, yeah. - The writer, who really had the idea
that her being his Evangeline,
that's a way of shorthanding, saying basically,
"I'm in love with this girl. " Jared, who wrote on the movie early,
also his line, "Gumbo, gumbo in the pot,
"we need a princess, what you got?"
Jared had some great ideas about wants and needs,
the thematic ideas of the film that we worked in
that were done early on and hung around.
This is one that hung around.
And this went through a lot of things, too.
Just trying to find exactly the right wording of what she said.
We really wanted her not to say,
"I'm going to give up everything I ever wanted for you, "
but to say, "I want to include you in what my dream was. "
My dream wouldn't be complete
without you in it.
JOHN: So, there was just a slight change in wording,
but it made a big difference, I think.
And also, I think it was John Lasseter's idea here,
that we always liked the idea
that Charlotte would have a change of heart here.
That she had been so self-absorbed, really sort of want to do it,
but he added a line that made it more explicit.
Basically, that she wanted to help her friend out,
and that I think their relationship, between Charlotte and Tiana,
is one of friendship
despite Charlotte being so self-absorbed,
and I think this is a great moment.
I'll kiss him. For you, honey.
JOHN: She sort of is willing, because of friendship,
to sacrifice what she wanted.
That she becomes a little more dimensional here than she has been.
RON: Well, she grows up a little bit. Not completely.
That was a question, how completely should she grow up?
JOHN: You'll notice here, this is the most
aggravating thing in the movie for me,
when he's got all this lipstick on,
and we didn't put any lipstick on the scene.
We should have had him wiping off the lipstick as he got set down.
We could have done it. This was Ron's sequence.
Why did we not have lipstick wiped off here?
RON: You just got to leave it alone. JOHN: The lipstick.
PETER: Well, I don't think we really noticed it. Maybe you did.
-I didn't notice it until later on. -JOHN: It was in reverse order.
Unfortunately, we did the second scene first,
and by the time we did the other one, it was too late.
So there were debates about this scene with Ray.
Some people felt that we should kind of shorten this,
and there are some people that felt like Ray should not die...
And this was an idea that Ron actually had
early on as we were developing the story.
Originally, Ray didn't die. We wanted to work in the idea
of a New Orleans funeral, which is a very signature part of New Orleans,
and he suggested, he came to me and said,
"What if we had Ray die, and then when we go up and we look in the sky,
"there are 2 stars in the sky. "
And I'm like, "We gotta do that. We gotta do that!"
The trick was, I thought, will John Lasseter let us do that?
-PETER: Yeah. -And fortunately he did.
We pitched this story many times before it was animated...
RON: We always got a very strong reaction to that,
and there's something, I think, that's kind of spiritual
and intangible about it, but that it seems very meaningful...
JOHN: I just think it gives our whole movie
so much more weight that we did it,
and it would have been so much lighter without this,
so I'm glad that John went along with the idea,
and that it really is a part of this story. It is an essential, almost thematic part
that the story doesn't work nearly as well without, I think.
So I'm glad we did it.
Again, this sequence now, this funeral sequence,
Wilbert Plijnaar, who did this happy-go-lucky intro of Ray earlier,
he storyboarded that, he also storyboarded this
and did a wonderfully understated job of just the eloquence of this leaf boat.
He designed the idea of this funeral cortège
and the gentle setting of the leaf down in the water.
And then, Jeff Draheim, our editor, actually did an early blueprint
using After Effects where he did ripples in the water.
Mauro Maressa, a great effects animator,
did these real ripples and fireflies and this very elegiac moment here
that Terence Blanchard played on.
RON: And Terence Blanchard came in, flew all the way out here
on our last day of recording the score for the movie
because we wanted him to be consistent and play the trumpet
for Louis throughout the movie, so he played that little lick of trumpet.
JOHN: When we originally storyboarded this,
it had been the New Orleans funeral,
which actually involved a certain dirge-like statement of a song
on the way to the cemetery.
And we tried that in our rough reel, and it just seemed almost comic,
even though it's the real thing for New Orleans.
When we did the real score, Randy also tried it with the cue
and it's on the CD and it's a wonderful cue,
but for people who don't know the New Orleans tradition,
they didn 't understand it.
So we went back to a more traditionally funereal,
very sad, somber piece and I think it works better
even though it isn 't strictly New Orleans.
PETER: You had to go to the sad in order to have that feeling
-of seeing the 2 stars. Euphoric. -JOHN: The reveal of these stars
just didn't work with the other piece of music,
and so Randy did an adjustment on this
and then we headed for this big ecstatic ending.
Ian Gooding created this color palette here,
wonderful golden light where everything is based...
And in fact, it's even sort of soft focus, romantic lighting here.
And the pollen in the air, it's all meant to be
this celebratory festive bayou, natural environment.
BUTTERFLY: Congratulations.
JOHN: And that is Peter Del Vecho's voice, our producer,
-who just said, "Congratulations. " -PETER: Very quickly. The butterfly.
JOHN: He is sped up, but that is Peter.
RON: This idea that by kissing each other that turns...
Because Tiana is a princess once they're married,
that when the prince kisses her,
in effect, he's kissing a princess, so they turn back.
That was actually in earlier treatment
written by Greg Erb and Jason Oremland,
who worked on this movie or a version of this movie
when it took place in fairy tale land called The Frog Princess,
before we were involved with the film.
JOHN: And we thought that was a great idea and a way to sort of surprise us.
You think they're going to stay frogs and then, no, it changes around.
So we used Greg and Jason's idea for that.
You just kissed yourself a princess.
JOHN: This is great, fun animation
by both Mark and Randy here in this kiss.
Yoshi Tamura, who also worked on that twirl,
did wonderful animation of Tiana.
He was Mark's second-in-command on these shots of Tiana.
He did this scene, as well, and this.
Ian Gooding, at the very last minute, said, "I want birds in this shot.
"We need to add some birds in here to get some production value. "
RON: Although that's not his accent. JOHN: No, it isn't. I'm sorry.
-It's actually Jamaican, not German. -JOHN: "We want elephants!"
Yeah, he's Jamaican.
But those birds, we had to import at the last second from Lion King.
If you go back and look at Lion King, those birds are from Lion King and...
Kyle Odermatt found them and he imported them
and doubled them and made it work. It was unbelievable.
RON: And we were just in New Orleans again last week,
and we saw the birds fluttering around.
JOHN: We did see real birds. It was like the movie all over again, yeah.
It really was. That cathedral is the St. Louis Cathedral in Jackson Square.
It is an icon of New Orleans,
and we were delighted to have gone to mass there.
RON: I wanted to mention, a tribute to the Firehouse Five,
the Disney group of animators who formed a jazz band.
JOHN: Yeah, it was Ward Kimball and Frank Thomas
and people that worked here in the '50s and '60s.
We wanted to pay homage to them, so that band, the Firefly Five Plus Lou,
is devoted to them,
and that guy playing the piano on the right is a caricature
of Frank Thomas, one of the Nine Old Men
and, really, Ron 's mentor in animation, taught him how to do animation.
PETER: How to end this movie also went through many variations
and I think it was John Lasseter...
JOHN: We weren't sure exactly what song to reprise
and who was gonna sing it, and John was insistent.
He's like, "No, you got to do Down In New Orleans,
"and you've got to have her sing it. "
We did have a temp song in here that was very up-tempo with no singing,
just a placeholder that Jeff Draheim had found,
and it gave the movie a real lift at the end,
but we were considering, "Well, maybe we should restate Evangeline
"or Louis' song or something. "
And John's like, "No, no, no, you gotta do Down In New Orleans."
And it was a great idea.
It really gave the movie the lift it needed at the end.
And it rounded out... Ron was insistent
that the last shot track back up to the stars
so it would bookend the movie exactly as we started.
This is another idea that came late.
PETER: And just the idea of Anika singing at the end of the movie
-was also important... -JOHN: To make it her movie.
I mean, it felt like we really wanted to put her center stage at the end.
PETER: We were pretty much at the end of production,
just trying to get the movie out and 2 people came to us,
Joe Pitt and Lorelay Bove,
and pitched the idea of doing end credits.
JOHN: Yeah, Ian was very strong on doing the idea,
but he was pitching Lorelay to do it, and she's a wonderful designer
and Joe Pitt really kind of directed this whole title end set piece.
RON: 2 youngsters. JOHN: 2 young'uns.
And the song by Ne- Yo came very late, too.
Tom MacDougall and Chris Montan, the music mavens.
We had heard a variety of artists who might do a song over the end credits
who were, you know, contemporary, could get radio play and had appeal.
We met with Ne- Yo. He seemed like a great guy.
We showed him sequences from the film,
we explained the idea of the romance to him,
and he came up with a song and a lyric
that we felt really remarkably captured
the relationship of our hero and heroine.
We had talked to him about wants versus needs,
and I think it's a great lyric hook on this song and...
But we loved the sort of stylization of the visuals that Lorelay...
She's a master designer. Got great taste in color,
so these are all sort of her drawings brought to life.
And then, actually, this is kind of like a CalArts film,
but Erik Fountain and Mario Furmanczyk, young animators
who are fresh out of CalArts, practically,
did the animation on this sequence, and Joe directed it.
RON: We were going to call this the guerrilla school of animation,
where it's kind of down and dirty and people just chip in
and they really got this done quickly.
JOHN: Yeah, it was the very, very last thing done on the movie.
It's the last thing in the movie and the last thing animated on the movie.
RON: And they did a beautiful job.
JOHN: Again, we were trying to capture icons of New Orleans
and from the movie so you can kind of reprise the moments
and kind of restate the story of the movie in a stylized way.
This movie is a labor of love not just for us, obviously,
but for literally hundreds of artists and 3 and a half years of labor
and artists around the world, really,
and it was a great privilege to work with all of them.
RON: Yeah, I think probably the most dedicated crew of artists
we've ever worked with and probably, in many ways, the most talented.
It was a wonderful experience
just working with all the people on this movie.
JOHN: And you'll note that the fireworks here that explode,
they're very muted versions of the Mardi Gras colors
of purple, gold and green.
Very understated, but they sort of form our transition
into our longer list of credits, which features so many people.
I do want to, again, restate a key player on this movie,
Jeff Draheim, our editor.
We had questions on this movie all the way through.
Was it going to be too long? Was it too short?
And he became, really, a partner with us
in terms of trying to get this story told
and did a great job with pacing the sequences
and finding ways of interlacing different ideas
and solving story problems or even saying,
"I don't think the story quite works here, "
and so it wasn't just, like, "Snip this shorter, " or "Make it longer, "
but "How is this telling the story?" And so we were very fortunate.
We had never worked with Jeff before,
but he 's really a brilliant editor and a storyteller.
PETER: And so easy to get along with in the editing room, too.
JOHN: Yeah. And worked so hard, but it was very... He's from Nebraska.
You know, people there are low-key.
Yeah, Mary Hogg did these end titles and she was...
She helped pick the typeface, the color and the pace and all this stuff,
and she's really a wonderful designer
and very easy to work with and very experienced.
She 's done a lot of movies,
but she was a great pleasure to work with on these.
PETER: We 've talked about effects and backgrounds
and animation on the movie. I also wanted to say,
Vera Pacheco and her clean-up crew did an amazing job.
JOHN: They did. I mean, the beautiful drawing in this movie...
Vera, we've worked with her before as head of clean-up,
and the clean-up leads, many of them are people
we've worked with on other films.
It fell to them to really maintain a standard of draftsmanship
that could be compared to, you know, the great Disney films of the past
and they really put their all into it.
And clean-up is an art form that was in danger of going away
because that exact job doesn't quite exist in the computer animation world.
There's still animation in that world,
and there are still sets to create and lighting to effect,
but there isn 't the cleaner drawing of the character,
there isn 't quite that part of the production process,
so many of them were left by the wayside
as computer animation took over.
And it was great to bring so many of them back to the studio
and to get to see the incredible skills
they had developed over a period of years,
and to get them to apply that sort of trade again
and just be dazzled by how beautifully they can draw.
I mean, really, you are looking at a lot of beautiful drawings
that Vera and her team, Rachel Bibb
and Dan Tanaka, Juliet Stroud and Marianne Tucker, Kathy Bailey,
all of them, Tracy Lee, phenomenal job all of them did.
RON: When hand-drawn animation went away from Disney, I think,
no one really expected it possibly to come back
or ever come back, I think,
and it really is thanks to John Lasseter, when he came to Disney,
became in charge of Disney animation in early 2006, that it did come back.
He loves hand-drawn animation
even though he's had so much success with the Pixar films,
and he was kind of insistent on bringing it back
and certainly wasn't afraid to bring it back,
and we really have to thank him.
Certainly, we love hand-drawn animation,
as did all the artists who worked on this movie,
and we're really appreciative to John for what he did.
JOHN: One of the people who really had a strong impact on the movie,
who is not an artist here, although she's an artist in her own right,
her name is Leah Chase. She's a restaurateur down in New Orleans,
and she runs a restaurant with her husband, Dooky Chase,
called Dooky Chase, and it's a New Orleans landmark.
It's African-American owned and operated,
and it's really great food there and a great part of the city,
and she had a story not unlike Tiana 's, and it influenced our writing.
RON: Yeah, she started as a waitress
and then opened this fabulous restaurant.
JOHN: And we went down there, we met with her,
and she talked about her philosophy of how food brings people together,
and, really, that became part of what James tells Tiana.
So we wanted to dedicate the film to her
because she was so inspiring to us.
So, to both Leah Chase and to Coleen Salley,
who is the salty raconteur and storyteller
and great dame of New Orleans, as well.
We did a mutual dedication to both of them
for all the great inspiration they gave us on this film.
We'd like to thank you for really
spending this time watching this movie.
I hope you get a chance, maybe even to look at it a second time.
We really tried to make it a rich movie that would bear repeated viewings,
so, take another look at it.
RON: In fact, we could look at it again right now
and redo this entire commentary and do a completely new commentary
that would be unlike the commentary that we just finished.
So, thanks for listening to this, and goodbye, everybody.
JOHN: Yeah, thank you, and go watch some animation.
PETER: Thanks. And thank you to all the people
that helped us make this film.
Subtitles: Arigon