Released today on DVD: "The Princess and the Frog"

Grade: B

In the era of America's first black president, it makes sense that Disney would introduce its first black princess. On the surface, this feels revolutionary. Her name isn't Ariel or Belle. It's Tiana. And she and all the black characters in The Princess and the Frog have been drawn, by hand, with an appreciable degree of love and care -- wide noses and full lips realistically scaled for each bright, brown face. Even the somewhat stereotypical voodoo man, a light-skinned toothpick with purple pupils and a gap in his teeth you could sail a boat through, looks like friends of mine.

For an additional measure of inspiration, the movie is set in old-time French Quarter New Orleans and hits every box in the city's checkered checklist: gumbo; riverboats; a toothless, turbaned conjure woman (with Jenifer Lewis's voice); chase sequences all over the bayou. Powdered sugar sits like a cloud on the beignets. And Randy Newman's songs swing from big band and gospel to zydeco and, well, Randy Newman.

But the renovations are merely cosmetic. Alas The Princess and the Frog still forces Tiana into the same conundrum that every Disney heroine faces: the marriage fantasy. She puts up a fuss, but it's no use.

Voiced warmly by Anika Nonmi Rose, Tiana was raised by her seamstress mother (Oprah Winfrey) and dreams of being a chef and running a nightclub restaurant in honor of her late father (Terrence Howard). Tiana refuses to believe in fairy tales and princes. She waits tables, saves her tips, and sings about how hard she's working. No fun please, she's a serious black woman.

When Naveen (Bruno Campos), a randy, racially ambiguous jazzbo prince from someplace called Makdonia makes a sour deal with the voodoo man (Keith David) that turns him into a frog, he needs a princess's kiss to break the spell and chooses Tiana, who happens to be wearing a tiara and sky-blue gown. It's a costume. So instead of turning him back into a man, her kiss shrinks this upwardly mobile woman into a proud frog, and a kind of screwball comedy ensues.

The movie isn't short on pleasure. Naveen is a more commanding frog than he is a prince (that neck; those giant, delicious-looking legs!). Tiana's restaurant looks like something from the Harlem Renaissance -- all the expressionist angles and silhouettes; the ochres, mustards and chocolates; the bubbling champagne flutes that rise like girls in a Busby Berkeley musical. These sequences are an Aaron Douglas painting come to life. The whole movie should have been drawn in such an inspired scheme.

The voice actors are also excellent, especially Michael-Leon Wooley as a bouncy trumpet-playing alligator and Jim Cummings as a lovelorn Cajun firefly. When those two arrive, the Claudette Colbert-Clark Gable movie Tiana and Naveen have going on expands into a sort of swamp-faring Wizard of Oz caper, in which they look for a way to become human again.

But there's a rub. Even as Tiana and Naveen hop together through the bayou, she continues to assert her self-reliance. So while she knows she's headed for love, I just never felt her heart was in it. It's not a man she wants. It's professional success. The way she resists the fantasy formula is admirable, but ultimately (and disappointingly) futile.

Early on, it looked like the directors, Ron Clement and John Musker, who also did The Little Mermaid and Aladdin together, were close to turning things completely upside down. Tiana's rich, white, man-hungry counterpart, a creature of comical breathlessness named Lotte (Jennifer Cody), is a lurid joke on old Disney princesses. With her big eyes and tornado gumption, she's like Dorothy Malone the Bratz doll. I do like how the movie doesn't turn her into Tiana's rival. In her selfish way, Lotte is a friend. But her lustiness makes Tiana's falling in love seem more reasonable.

It's not. As charismatic as Neveen is (Campos pumps the character full of enjoyably obnoxious oomph), it's inconceivable that his flirting would make a romantic impression in Tiana. The fairy tale here is ultimately a business transaction. She doesn't love his money, but it is nice to have, no? In that sense, The Princess and the Frog does transcend race. The color that truly matters is green.

Released today on DVD: "Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' By Sapphire"

Grade: A

Claireece Jones, the Harlem teenager at the center of Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire, lives in a world of specific and overwhelming horror. She goes by her middle name, Precious, which seems like a cruel taunt, since nearly everyone around her thinks she’s worthless and lets her know it.

Precious’s mother, Mary, played with operatic fervor by the comedian Mo’Nique, dispenses a daily ration of humiliation and and abuse. The constant verbal and physical violence she directs at her daughter would be shocking even without the monstrous crime that hangs over their dim, dirty apartment like a cloud. Precious, overweight and illiterate — and played by an extraordinary poised first-time actress named Gabourey Sidibe — has a young daughter and is pregnant for a second time. The father in both cases, who is nowhere to be seen, is Precious’ father too.

This information is bluntly presented at the beginning of Sapphire’s 1996 novel, a first-person narrative composed in rough, stylized dialect. In Lee Daniels’s risky, remarkable film adaptation, written by Geoffrey Fletcher, the facts of Precious’s like are also laid out with unsparing force (though not in overly graphic detail). But just as Push achieves an eloquence that makes it far more than a fictional diary of extreme dysfunction, so does Precious avoid the traps of well-meaning, preachy lower-depths realism. It howls and stammers, but it also sings.

Daniels, directing his second feature (after the vivid and eccentric Shadowboxer), is not afraid to mix styles and genres. In his determination to do justice to Claireece’s inner life, as well as to her circumstances, he allows splashes of fantasy, daubs of humor and floods of unabashed melodrama into the drab landscape of her struggle. Ugliness is all around her, but beauty is there too.

There is something almost reckless about this filmmaker’s eclecticism, which extends from the casting — pop stars and television personalities alongside trained and untrained actors — to the visual textures and the soundtrack music. Precious is a hybrid, a mash-up that might have been ungainly, but that manages to be graceful instead. It’s partly a bootstrap drama of resilience and redemption, complete with a hardworking teacher (Paula Patton) wrangling a classroom full of disadvantaged girls. It’s also the nearly Gothic story of a child tormented by the cruelty of adults, as lurid as a Victorian potboiler or a modern-day tell-all memoir.

Above all Precious is unabashedly populist in its potent emotional appeal — not for nothing did Tyler Perry and Oprah Winfrey sign on as executive producers around the time of the film’s debut at the Sundance Film Festival a year ago January — and at the same time determined to challenge its audience’s complacency as only a genuine work of art can.

Mary, brimming with rage, thwarted love and plain meanness, is a character bound to provoke discomfort. Even otherwise misogynistic hip-hop artists will pay tribute to the heroism of African-American mothers, and to see that piety so thoroughly dispensed with its downright shocking.

Other provocations are more subtle but no less pointed. There are virtually no men in this movie. Precious’s father is glimpsed briefly in flashbacks of his assaults on her, and in the fantasy sequences that provide escape from her pain Precious hobnobs with handsome boys, but otherwise the only male character of significance is a hospital worker played by Lenny Kravitz. Otherwise, Precious’s cosmos, for better and for worse, is a universe of women: the social worker (Mariah Carey, scrubbed of any vestige of divahood); the teacher, Ms. Rain; her co-worker in the remedial education program, played by the comedian and talk show host Sherri Shepherd; and Precious’s fellow students.

These characters all can be seen as surrogate mothers, aunts and sisters, who together provide Precious with a more functional family (to say the least) than what she has at home. But their love is also enabled by institutions and government policies. An unstated but self-evident moral of Precious, set during Ronald Reagan’s presidency and based on a book published in the year of Bill Clinton’s welfare reform, is that government can provide not only a safety net, but also, in small and consequential ways, a lifeline.

I will leave it for others to parse the truth or the timeliness of this message. But Precious is, in any case, less the examination of a social problem than the illumination of an individual’s painful and partial self-realization. Inarticulate and emotionally shut down, her massive body at once a prison and a hiding place, Precious is also perceptive and shrewd, possessed of talents visible only to those who bother to look. At its plainest and most persuasive, her story is that of a writer discovering a voice. "These people talked like TV stations I didn’t even watch," she remarks of Ms. Rain and her lover (Kimberly Russell), displaying her awakening literary intelligence even as she marvels at the discovery of her ignorance.

And Sidibe, perhaps the least-known member of this movie’s unusual cast, is also the glue that holds it together. Nimble and self-assured as Daniels’s direction may be, he could not make you believe in Precious unless you were able to believe in Precious herself. You can.