Amid the various throwback qualities that come together in The Princess and the Frog is a hope by its creators that it might also be a springboard into the future.

The animated feature hearkens to the most famous of Disney traditions — the hand-drawn animated musical — which has become something of an endangered species in the past decade or so as computer-animated films continue to become more prevalent and more popular, and 3D technology becomes faster and cheaper.

So the release of The Princess and the Frog marks Disney’s first foray into hand-drawn features since Home on the Range five years ago. It also provided a reunion of sorts for many of the animators who were responsible for the memorable characters and images in Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and The Lion King in the early 1990s.

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Princess Tiana, voiced by Anika Noni Rose, holds Prince Naveen, voiced by Bruno Campos, in a scene from the animated film The Princess and the Frog.

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“The big thing I think is the charm that you get with a hand-drawn film. Not that CG films aren’t charming, but it’s just apples and oranges,” said animator Michael Surrey. “It’s just another choice for making a film, and it still grabs an audience and is still interesting to look at.”

Mark Henn, who was the film’s lead animator for main character Tiana, said the difference in appeal between the two animation styles comes down to intangible aesthetics and ultimately to personal preference.

Henn has been the lead animator for several of Disney’s most iconic animated characters from the last 20 years, including Belle (Beauty and the Beast), Jasmine (Aladdin), and the title character in Mulan.

Ultimately, Henn emphasized, the modern marketplace is large enough to support both hand-drawn and more contemporary CG films.

“It’s an artistic choice,” Henn said during a recent promotional stop in Dallas. “You can have your picture taken with a camera or you can sit with a portrait artist. It’s kind of like that. One is going to give you the exact representation in the details and the other maybe captures the spirit of the person.”

The Princess and the Frog is a fairytale filled with some Disney staples such as talking animals; a breezy mix of romance, humor and adventure; and plenty of elaborate musical numbers with songs by Oscar-winning composer Randy Newman.

The story is set in New Orleans, following Tiana (voiced by Anika Noni Rose), an aspiring restaurateur who reluctantly befriends a talking frog (Bruno Campos) who needs a kiss from a princess to turn back into a prince. But soon Tiana herself becomes an amphibian, forcing the two to embark on a wishful adventure together.

It was the computer-generated Toy Story in 1996 that reinvented animated filmmaking forever. And it was that film’s creator, Pixar Animation Studios founder John Lasseter, who was one of the driving forces behind The Princess and the Frog.

Like most of today’s computer animators, Lasseter cut his teeth doing hand-drawn projects. He took over as head of Walt Disney Animation Studios in 2006 and decided to resurrect the company’s commitment to the hand-drawn legacy. Directors John Clements and Ron Musker previously collaborated on The Little Mermaid and Aladdin.

“I think this is going to help bring it back to where it belongs, alongside CG films as an alternative. I think we can both exist,” said Surrey, who was the lead animator for Ray the firefly. “It’s our legacy and it’s what we’ve done for the last 80 years. Why should we stop?”

Hand-drawn animation might be traditional, but it’s hardly old-fashioned, as technology continues to advance the medium.

It still starts with paper and pencil and frame-by-frame character painting. But gone are the illustration boards and animation cells, replaced by a computerized system of inking, along with backgrounds that are painted digitally to help speed the overall process.

“The basic steps are pretty much the same way it was done in Snow White’s day,” Henn said. “Some of the tools have changed.”

The Princess and the Frog will open on Friday at area theaters.

TODD JORGENSON can be reached at 940-566-6871. His e-mail address is tjorgenson@dentonrc.com.