Early development Disney had once announced that 2004's
Home on the Range would be their last traditionally animated film. After the company's acquisition of
Pixar in 2006,
Ed Catmull and
John Lasseter, the new president and chief creative officer of Disney Animation Studios, reversed this decision and reinstated hand-drawn animation at the studio. Many animators who had either been laid off or had left the studio when the traditional animation units were dissolved in 2003 were located and re-hired for the project. Lasseter also brought back directors
Ron Clements and
John Musker, whose earlier works include
The Great Mouse Detective (1986),
The Little Mermaid (1989),
Aladdin (1992),
Hercules (1997), and
Treasure Planet (2002). The duo had left the company in 2005, but Lasseter requested their return to Disney to direct and write the film and had let them choose the style of animation (traditional or CGI) they wanted to use.
Jorgen Klubien separately claimed that a story he was developing at Pixar tentatively titled
The Spirit of New Orleans served as inspiration for the film.
The Princess and the Frog returns to the
musical film format used in many of the previously successful Disney animated films, with a style Musker and Clements declared, like with
Aladdin and
The Little Mermaid, had inspiration from
Golden Age Disney features such as
Cinderella (1950). The directors spent ten days in Louisiana before starting to write the film. Also protested were Maddy's original career as a
chambermaid, the choice to have the Black heroine's love interest be a non-Black prince, In response to these early criticisms, the film's title was changed in May 2007 from
The Frog Princess to
The Princess and the Frog. The name "Maddy" was changed to "Tiana", and the character's occupation was altered from chambermaid to waitress. Tiana became the first
African American Disney Princess. Tiana was inspired in part by famed restaurateur
Leah Chase, whom Clements and Musker met on their research trip to New Orleans. Clements elaborated, "There's a woman in New Orleans named Lee (sic) Chase who was a waitress and ultimately opened a restaurant with her husband … we met with her and we talked with her and she went to kind of into her story, her philosophy about food, which is a big element of the movie."
Voice cast voices Tiana. On December 1, 2006, a detailed casting call was announced for the film at the Manhattan Theatre Source forum. The casting call states the film as being an American fairy tale musical set in
New Orleans during the 1926
Jazz Age and provides a detailed list of the film's major characters. It was later reported that
Tyra Banks was being considered for the role. By April 2007, it was confirmed that Rose would be voicing Tiana. Three months later, it was reported that
Keith David was cast as Doctor Facilier, the villain of the film.
Animation and design Clements and Musker had agreed early on that the style they were aiming for was primarily that of
Lady and the Tramp (1955), a film which they and John Lasseter feel represents "the pinnacle of Disney's style". "After that, everything started becoming more stylized, like
Sleeping Beauty,
101 Dalmatians—which are fantastic films as well, but there's a particular style (to
Lady and the Tramp) that's so classically Disney."
Lady and the Tramp also heavily informed the style of the New Orleans scenes, while Disney's
Bambi (1942) served as the template for the bayou scenes. For example, with Louis the alligator, created by
Eric Goldberg, Lasseter said: "It's the believability of this large character being able to move around quite like that." The Harmony software was augmented with a number of plug-ins to provide CAPS-like effects such as shading on cheeks and smoke effects. The reinstated traditional unit's first production, a 2007
Goofy cartoon short entitled
How to Hook Up Your Home Theater, was partly animated without paper by using Harmony and
Wacom Cintiq pressure-sensitive tablets. Animators used traditional, scanned paper-and-pencil drawings to create
The Princess and the Frog. Supervised by Eric Goldberg and designed by
Sue Nichols, the "Almost There" sequence's character animation was done on paper without going through the clean-up animation department, and scanned directly into Photoshop. The artwork was then enhanced to effect the appearance of painted strokes and fills, and combined with backgrounds, using
Adobe After Effects. Marlon West, one of Disney's veteran animation visual effects supervisors, says about the production; "Those guys had this bright idea to bring back hand-drawn animation, but everything had to be started again from the ground up. One of the first things we did was focus on producing shorts, to help us re-introduce the 2D pipeline. I worked as vfx supervisor on the Goofy short,
How to Hook Up Your Home Theater. It was a real plus for the effects department, so we went paperless for
The Princess and the Frog." The backgrounds were painted digitally using
Adobe Photoshop, and many of the architectural elements were based upon 3D models built in
Autodesk Maya.
Music In February 2006,
Alan Menken was initially reported to be composing the soundtrack. However, Lasseter thought that since Menken was scoring the Disney film
Enchanted (2007) at the time, the music might be too repetitive. Lasseter instead hired
Randy Newman, with whom he had previously worked with at Pixar. Musker however said he and Clements had suggested Newman since he was a jazz composer and grew up in New Orleans. During Disney's 2007 shareholder meeting, Newman and the
Dirty Dozen Brass Band performed the film's opening number, "
Down in New Orleans", with famous New Orleans singer
Dr. John singing, while slides of pre-production art from the film played on a screen. Newman composed, arranged, and conducted the music for the film, a mixture of jazz,
zydeco, blues, and gospel styles performed by the voice cast members for the respective characters, while
R&B singer-songwriter
Ne-Yo wrote and performed the
end title song, "
Never Knew I Needed", an R&B love song referring to the romance between the film's two main characters, Tiana and Naveen. Supported by a music video by
Melina, "Never Knew I Needed" was issued to radio outlets as a commercial single from the
Princess and the Frog soundtrack. The film's soundtrack album contains the ten original songs from the film and seven instrumental pieces. The soundtrack was released on November 23, 2009, the day before the limited release of the film in New York and Los Angeles. ==Release==