The Princess and the Frog Disney+ series Tiana finds its lead writer and director
Tiana will sing once again soon-ish... on the small screen.
Another day, another drop of news about Disney's upcoming projects. More specifically, we've now learned about the current status of one of the most anticipated animated shows coming to Disney+ in the next few years: Tiana, a sequel series to the 2009 animated movie The Princess and the Frog.
Variety has the update, revealing that Disney has enlisted Joyce Sherri as the show's lead writer and director. Sherri's dramatic chops should be strong, given she was part of the writers' room for Mike Flanagan's excellent Midnight Mass. Her other credits include short movies like Beauty, Forever, and The Family Romance.
Tiana will follow the title character as she "sets off for a grand new adventure as the newly crowned Princess of Maldonia", though Disney promises her New Orleans past isn't being left behind. While the original movie wasn't considered a flop, it "only" made $271 million worldwide on a hefty $105 million production budget, so we can see why Disney never moved forward with a theatrical sequel and instead started focusing on 3D animation with projects such as Frozen. Regardless, the "streaming content era" (as well as red financial numbers) have pushed the company to explore underused properties like The Princess and the Frog and Big Hero 6 to sequelize in the form of TV shows.
The mainstream conversation surrounding The Princess and the Frog has always pointed out it was the last of Disney's attempts at making 2D theatrical features, but 2011's Winnie the Pooh was actually the last movie using traditional animation released by Walt Disney Animation Studios. The style has somewhat survived at the House of Mouse through smaller projects developed for TV, and it remains to be seen whether the push for a large amount of wildly different content on Disney+ results in 2D Disney animation making a big comeback. For now, Disney has been toying with Wish's visual style quite a bit, so there's some hope.
Need a refresher on what's coming next to the small screen? There are plenty of streaming and broadcast TV shows to look forward to.
