First rule of movie marketing: With a hard sell, sell the faithful first.
So it was with Walt Disney Co., which on Thursday used a gathering of thousands of loyal Disney fans to unveil "The Princess and the Frog," perhaps the studio's riskiest movie in years.
Disney Chief Executive Bob Iger used the assembly of devoted followers at the Anaheim Convention Center, many of them sporting Mickey T-shirts, to screen a major portion of the film that marks the studio's return to hand-drawn animation.
The film and its subject matter -- a contemporary twist on the fairy tale of a frog prince who desperately wants to be human again -- are reminiscent of classic Disney tales of yore. Indeed, the movie adds another tiara-wearing princess -- the first African American one -- to a lineage of cinematic royalty that dates back all the way to 1937's "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs."
Iger took the stage at the start of Disney's D23 Expo, where attendees posed for photographs near a steel-and-plexiglass replica of Cinderella's pumpkin carriage, sat for tea with the Mad Hatter from Tim Burton's upcoming noir interpretation of "Alice in Wonderland" and played a video-game version of the "Toy Story Midway Mania" theme park attraction. The expo is conceived as sort of an in-house Comic-Con to whip up enthusiasm for Disney's movies, TV shows, video games and theme park attractions.
"Nowhere do we shine more brightly than in classic Disney animation," Iger said to applause as he announced the 30-minute screening, adding, "Promise me you'll go see the rest when it opens."
Extracting such an assurance from hard-core Disney fans might not be difficult. But with the wider public, "Princess and the Frog" presents potential obstacles.
In recent years, ever-more-sophisticated computer-generated animation has become the norm for animated films, supplanting the hand-drawn style associated with scores of Disney classics.
In 2004, after a string of box-office disappointments -- including "Atlantis: The Lost Empire," "Treasure Planet" and "Home on the Range" -- Disney abandoned the painstaking art form it had popularized. Executives felt audiences preferred the new 3-D computer animation.
Pixar Animation's creative guru, John Lasseter, who had been trained by longtime Disney animators, worked to revive the 2-D tradition when he assumed oversight of Disney Animation Studios following the 2006 acquisition of Pixar.
