‘The Princess and the Frog’ Leads TIME’s Top 10 Movies of 2009
1. The Princess and the Frog – an animated film loosely based on E.D. Baker’s novel The Frog Princess, which was in turn inspired by the Grimm brothers’ fairy tale “The Frog Prince”. It is the 49th animated feature in the Walt Disney Animated Classics.
2. Up – Disney-Pixar’s offering for 2009 about a grumpy old man named Carl Fredricksen and an overeager Wilderness Explorer named Russell who fly to South America in a floating house suspended from helium balloons.
3. Fantastic Mr. Fox – A stop-motion animated film based on the Roald Dahl children’s novel of the same name featuring the voices of George Clooney and Meryl Streep.
4. The Hurt Locker – A critically-acclaimed thriller about a United States Army EOD team during the Iraq War.
5. Up in the Air – A dramedy film about a corporate downsizer in his travels and follows his isolated life and philosophies, along with the people that he meets along the way. George Clooney stars.
6. The White Ribbon – The 2009 Cannes-winning film about children in a village in northern Germany just before World War I. According to Haneke, the film is about “the origin of every type of terrorism, be it of political or religious nature.”
7. A Single Man – This film is based on the Christopher Isherwood novel of the same name and stars Colin Firth as the protagonist George Falconer, a gay British college professor living in Southern California in the 1960s.
8. Of Time and the City – Of Time and the City is a documentary film directed by Terence Davies. The film has Davies recalling his life growing up in Liverpool in the 1950s and 1960s, using newsreel and documentary footage supplemented by his own commentary voiceover and contemporaneous and classical music soundtracks.
9. District 9 – A science fiction film about a South African bureaucrat assigned to relocate a race of extraterrestrial creatures, derogatorily referred to as “prawns”, from a refugee camp in Johannesburg to a new one outside the city.
10. Thirst – A Korean movie that tells the story of a priest—who is in love with his friend’s wife—turning into a vampire through a failed medical experiment.