Disney has spent the last few years seeming not to know what it’s supposed to be doing with the cast of its 2009 animated hit The Princess And The Frog. Sure, the entertainment giant was happy to re-theme the former Splash Mountain with Tiana and her bayou buddies a few years back, neatly replacing the ride’s previous Song Of The South branding with a depiction of Black American characters a bit less likely to get it into public tussles with the NAACP. And Tiana remains in circulation in the company’s general princess branding, kept top-of-mind by a charismatic performance from Anika Noni Rose. But Rose herself expressed very public unhappiness last year, when Disney confirmed it was scrapping plans for an animated series centered on the character that had, after being announced to much fanfare back in 2020, spent years drifting around Disney+’s streaming schedule.
All of which is to note a recent piece from Collider, which confirms that, finally, at least some new Princess And The Frog content is in the works, even as Disney execs sound a little weird when trying to describe it. With the company having previously said that it’s pretty much abandoning making long-form animated content for Disney+ (part of an overall move away from streaming original content that’s seen the service dith out on basically any originals that aren’t Marvel, Star Wars, or Percy Jackson), Walt Disney Animation Studios CCO Jared Bush has now confirmed that a Tiana special of some kind, complete with the film’s original cast on board to star in it, is in actual production.
His descriptions of the series—presumably the one that Disney originally floated back when it let everybody know it was killing Tiana the series, and featuring work from that series’ would-be showrunner, Joyce Sherri—does remain strangely vague, though: “I’m hesitant to give you the specifics,” Bush said. “I’d say it probably will feel more like a special to people. So, it’s not shorts. It’s a full story with a lot of songs as part of it. We have not announced a specific timing of that yet.” But he did assure fans: “That’s actually in active production. That will be out to people soon. New songs. Original cast. It is pretty spectacular.”
All of this is, of course, separate from the rather odd comments Rose’s buddy Colman Domingo made back in July, when he started making noises about writing some sort of live-action project as a spin-off to the original movie. (Princess And The Frog remains, meanwhile, one of the only animated Disney films that the company’s live-action remake machine hasn’t come for yet.)
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