Disney Junior's 'Mira, Royal Detective' is India-inspired

The newest cartoon on Disney Junior has all the hallmarks one would expect from a children's show a smart, resourceful lead character, entertaining sidekicks, and a bright, colourful animated environment, filled with song and dance.

But those aren't the main reasons Sonal Singh can't wait for the debut of Mira, Royal Detective." She's excited because her 3-year-old daughter will be seeing something that Singh would have loved to have seen herself a generation ago as a child growing up in America an Indian girl at the heart of it all.

Seeing someone like yourself on TV, especially on a cartoon that you love or that you watch, gives you some sense of connection to your identity and your self-worth," said Singh, 35, of Mountain View, California. I think it's incredible."
"I would say this is a pretty good start" to a career, Ladnier said. The show has been a reminder of how beautiful our culture is and I'm really excited to share that with the public."
We wanted it to feel authentic," he told The Associated Press. The biggest piece of that in terms of authenticity was making sure we included as many South Asian voices in the process as possible."
"This is going to be a generation of kids for whom this is going to be normal," he said. "They don't carry the emotional baggage or institutional memory of what it was like for us growing up with a lack of content on TV, they just don't have that."
If anything, he said, my excitement coming into it I have to temper because I don't want him to think there's something abnormal."