The story begins with a king and queen who have three noble sons, all of whom possess the finest characteristics, but the youngest, Prince Ivan, is the best of them. Folktales balanced this perceived injustice by frequently featuring the youngest of the family as the hero or heroine. The youngest son would usually receive no inheritance, and the youngest daughter was married last and so might have the poorest dowry. The Frog Princess also has the main character show kindness to the creature but later betray its trust and also uses the device of the youngest of three as this was a popular motif in folktales.

In this same way, The Frog Princess relies on the suspension of disbelief at a talking frog who is able to perform transformational magic. For the tale to be effective, an audience must accept the world of the tale in which foxes can speak, reason, and rationalize. In the tale of The Fox and the Grapes, for example, the fox behaves like a petulant child when he cannot reach the overhanging grapes and finally walks away saying they were probably sour anyway (inspiring the phrase 'sour grapes' referring to someone who rationalizes a failure to get what they want). The hearer is required to suspend belief and see the animal speaking, thinking, and acting like a human being. However, the area of contact between the didactic, moralizing fable and folklore is slight, for the animal tale proper is meant essentially to entertain.

The line between the literary and folk fable is not easy to determine, since tales from collections like that attributed to Aesop have had wide popular circulation and have been taken from and gone back into oral traditions of large groups of people.

The frog princess book series