The Princess & The Frog Premiere
We attended the Disney premiere of The Princess and the Frog this past weekend and had a marvelous time! Disney sent a car for us early Saturday morning. It took us to the airport for our nearly six hour flight to Los Angeles. A driver picked us up at LAX and took us to the hotel in Burbank. There is a three hour time difference between the east coast and the west coast, so although it was four o’clock back home, it was only one o’clock in California and the premiere wasn’t until the next day. We didn’t want to sit around the hotel, so we ended up going to Universal City Walk which is a walkway lined with stores and restaurants near Universal Studio. After eating some of the best Chinese food I’d had in ages, we visited the shops, then went to the theater to see the movie, 2012. After the movie we returned to the hotel for dinner and to collapse.
We spent the next morning getting ready for the premiere, which meant ironing everything that had gotten wrinkled. The driver picked us up around 12:30. He was supposed to pick us up around 1:00, so we arrived at the Disney studio early and had to wait in the car until they were ready to let the early arrivals in. When we finally got out, our escort and a number of Disney characters were waiting for us. Our escort gave us pink passes to wear around our necks. Michael Leon-Wooley was there getting his picture taken. (He did the voice of the alligator in the story.) We had our picture taken with the characters from Up! then walked the red carpet past all the photographers. Our escort led us down the red carpet past jugglers and people walking around on stilts. When I asked about the buildings, he took us into one and showed us the original framed illustrations on the walls. My favorite was the throne room from Sleeping Beauty.
The red carpet ended at a building where people were waiting to greet movie goers, but our escort led us past the red carpet to where froggy footprints marked the route. We followed the footprints to another big building and walked down a corridor to a check point where they took away cameras and cell phones and scanned everyone with a metal detector. They offered to put temporary tattoos on the backs of our hands if we wanted them. I got a froggy tattoo – Prince Naveen in the movie, but he looked like Eadric might have. They gave us bottles of soda or water and a popcorn-filled bucket decorated with characters from the movie. An usher showed us to our seats which were in the middle of the theater. It was a small theater – seating about one hundred twenty-five people. We sat there along with a few other people, but after a while we got up and went back outside. There was a crowd around the entrance to the building where the red carpet ended, so we stood with them for a few minutes and watched the people on stilts. We noticed that the people entering the building had a different colored pass.
The movie was supposed to start at two o’clock, so at ten of two we returned to our theater and went through the security check again. More people had arrived by then. We took our seats and tried to see if we recognized anyone. After a while the front row filled up with teen-aged girls and a few boys. Some of the girls were wearing dresses like you might wear to a party, but a few were wearing short prom dresses. We heard the people around us talking; apparently the girls are in Disney television shows. A woman came in with a little girl and sat at the end of our row. The little girl was wearing a pink outfit with a tutu- like skirt. The woman was also wearing a tutu-like skirt, but her entire top was covered in white beads. I guess they were supposed to look like big pearls. We saw a man we recognized from a TV show and a few other people who looked vaguely familiar, but no one who was in the movie. We decided that they must all be in the big building that we had passed on the way in.
The movie didn’t start until after 2:30. It is the first hand-drawn animation that Disney has done in years and is lovely. Although it is not my story – they say that my story inspired their story – I could see a few things that were in my book. The general basis for the plot is the same. A frog talks a reluctant girl into kissing him and she turns into a frog. They end up in a swamp and seek magical help to turn them back. They learn how to eat like frogs, have trouble with their tongues, and befriend other creatures. If you see the movie, look for the jar of eyeballs. Disney’s jar has two eyeballs, while my jar was full. They also have red, smacking lips. The lips in my story were green and belonged to lizards. Let me know if you see any other similarities.
Although some people got up to leave when the movie was over, quite a few stayed in their seats to watch the credits. (Look for the credit for my book toward the middle.) When we left, our escort was waiting for us in the corridor. He took us back along the froggy path to a big building for the ‘Disney Experience’. We walked into the building to find that all of the Disney princesses were there. Small stages were scattered throughout the room, each one a back drop for a particular princess. The princesses on the stages welcomed people to join them for pictures. We were standing in line waiting to get our pictures taken with the characters from The Princess And The Frog when a man in a white shirt and jeans came up and asked the woman in front of us if another woman and her children could go before her. Afterwards, the woman said to me, “When the president of Disney asks you to let someone go in front of you, you let them.” That was how I learned what the president of Disney looked like.
There were two games at one end of the room, one of which involved tilting a lily pad with a frog on it and letting it go so that the frog smacked into lily pads on the wall. There was a table with cupcakes – lots of icing sprinkled with sugar, and a place where you could choose from three backdrops to get your picture taken.
A man was demonstrating illustration techniques, and they had dresses from previous movies on display. I especially liked Cruella Deville’s elaborate gown. We followed part of the crowd outside to where tables of food were set up. Food plays a big part in this move – the main character wants to open a restaurant and makes gumbo as a child, and later for the other animals in the swamp, so we’d been half expecting that they would have gumbo or other Cajun cooking there. (I heard other people talking about it and they expected it as well.) However, all they had were tiny desserts, only one of which, the beignets, was mentioned in the movie. (Beignets are kind of like small doughnuts sprinkled with sugar.) We sampled a few of the treats and were on our way out when we saw the actor, Terrence Howard, who had done the voice of the main character’s father in the movie. He portrayed a military officer in the movie, Iron Man, which my daughter really liked, so I got up my nerve and asked if he would mind posing for a picture with my daughters.
We left soon after that and returned to the hotel. After changing our clothes, we went downstairs for dinner. We had just taken our seats when Anika Nonni Rose walked in wearing a lovely green dress. She did the voice of the main character, Tiana, in The Princess And The Frog. Tiana looks as if she was drawn with Anika Nonni Rose as the model. Michael Leon Wooley (the voice of the alligator) was already there. I introduced myself to them, and my daughter took a picture of the three of us together. They were both very nice and I was glad I got to meet them.
We went to bed early that night and came home the next morning. All in all, we had a wonderful trip and, to quote a friend, ‘had a great life experience’.
