The Princess and the Frog

Seen at: AMC Promenade in Westminster, Colo., at 1:50 p.m. on Dec. 26.

For Christmas this year, I drove down to my sister's place in Westminster, where the whole family got together, including my parents and my sister Anne and her family as well. It was magnificently fun time, to have the family all together.

The last time I'd been down, I promised my sister's daughters that I would see The Princess and the Frog with them. The Christmas visit seemed like the perfect opportunity, so I stayed over an extra night, and the next afternoon we drove to the AMC Promenade, the beautiful giant multiplex in the lifestyle center a couple miles from their house. The place was swarming with post-Christmas movie goers. You really can't doubt that moviegoing is alive and well in America.

I was really looking forward to this movie, because I wanted to see what Disney could still do with hand-drawn animation. I wasn't disappointed at all. This really was a nice piece of old school film making.

The story was well crafted. One could criticize it for following the same Disney type of storyline, in terms of Disney ripping off it's own work. For example, there is a musical number that seems to be nearly the same as Jungle Book's "I Want to Be a Man Cub," and another that one could sing "Hakuna Matata" as alternate lyrics.

If you're looking for something ground-breaking and "completely new" this is not the movie for you. But if you want to see Disney doing the old Disney thing, and having a fresh take on the organic feel of hand-drawn animation, then this is very non-disappointing.

And the four-year-old girls on both sides of me really liked it too. Does it need any more endorsement than that?

Verdict: not mindblowing, but warm and yummy in an old-school kind of way.