New Tangled The Series Coming To Disney Channel + Q&A With Chris Sonnenburg & Ben Balistreri #TangledTheSeries

Tangled fans are in for some more fun with Rapunzel! Instead of making a feature film sequel, Disney has continued Rapunzel’s story with a NEW animated series called Tangled The Series. The season will actually start with its pilot being a Disney Original Channel Movie called Tangled Before Ever After that premieres TONIGHT at 8pm ET/PT.

I had the opportunity to screen this pilot film and thought it was really cute. I have always had long hair and have always been a fan of the Rapunuzel fairy tale story. I remember watching the Tangled movie back in 2010 when it came out with my all three of my daughters and we were all happy when Rapunzel became one of the Disney princesses!

Take a peek at the FIRST 5 minutes of Tangled Before Ever After:

After we screened Tangled Before Ever After we sat down with Executive Producer/Supervising Director Chris Sonnenburg and Supervising Producer Ben Balistreri to ask this creative some time questions that we had about their new series.

We had to know where they get their inspiration from. Being a mom I know that the teen years can be tough, especially when it comes to raising daughters. Chris tells us that he gets his inspiration when he goes home at night and hears the drama coming from his two daughters.

Chris Sonnenburg: You mean when I go home at night at 7 o’clock and I hear the drama that is coming from my two daughters? You know, in any kind of story hopefully, specially, you know, telling stories the way Disney always tells stories, there’s such a wonderful truth to the stories and there’s always magic and excitement and kind of like the fairy tale aspect of our stories. But what really is the driving force between any Disney, hopefully, the best Disney stories is the truth of them, right?

You may notice that Rapunzel is now blonde. We asked why they decided to make the character blonde again.

Chris Sonnenburg: Well, I mean, ultimately her name’s Rapunzel, right, long blonde hair. You know, if you’re going to tell a story about the Hulk you’re not going to tell like about a dog, right. You know, he’s got to be big and green. And I think Rapunzel has to be long blonde hair for it to kind of just read as the character. But really for me the trick about it and what ultimately was the trick for the filmmakers in the original movie was to give the hair a reason for being blonde and for being long and in our case, being uncuttable

When you watch this new series you may notice it looks different from the style that you see in the original movie. We asked what was the inspiration for the design for this new series. Ben tells us that they wanted to stick to the idea of doing it 2D so it really feels like a storybook come to life and that Rapunzel is telling you the story.

Ben Balistreri: So, one of the things that Chris and I both come from old-school traditional, 2-D Disney background. We started, both started a little over 20 years ago, and so just our passion for that, that feeling of like a good Disney traditional animated film really I think drove us early on to be like hey man, we got an opportunity to push the side of it. And then from like a, just from a bigger story point we really sat down and we were like if this is Rapunzel telling her story, by the time this whole series is over, this should really feel like Rapunzel told us her story.

And how would she tell us that story? She’s not going to sit down in, you know, computer programs and be typing zeros and ones in getting mathematical equations down for our rig. She’s going to sit down and put her hand and actually do it herself. So, we really kind of embraced the whole ideological side of doing a 2-D, you know, series and where we put in everything on these little–, there’s little brush strokes like dry brushstrokes in that should feel like she painted it. The lines that surround everything and inside we use a very rough line quality to really give a tactile sense of sketching.

We lay off gradient, like very computer, Photoshoppy gradients as much as possible. They pop up here and there but we kind of stay away in place of feeling like it really feels like a storybook come to life just because we really want to make it feel like she is the person that’s telling you this story.

That was just a few of my favorite questions that were asked that I wanted to share. Want to hear more of the questions that we were able to ask during our time with this two? Be sure to watch the full interview with Producer/Director Chris Sonnenburg and Producer Ben Balistreri below:

It was definitely a pleasure being able to meet Ben who was a story artist for How To Train Your Dragon. Ben also has been a part of Madagascar 3, The Little Mermaid 2, Fosters Home For Imaginary Friends and so many more! I also loved being able to meet Chris Sonnenburg who was a part of some of my family’s favorite Disney films like Kung Fu Panda and Enchanted.