5 Best Foreign Shows on Disney Plus Right Now

When Blackpink’s Jisoo starred in her first lead role, it was surprising that she chose a story like Snowdrop. Sure, at the time, stories set in the 1980s were a hit in Korea, with dramas such as Reply 1988 and Youth of May that nostalgically recreated the aesthetics of the time, while also re-examining the loss and the pain under the dictatorship then. Snowdrop does the same, but it adds a more controversial twist– the love story isn’t between innocent bystanders caught in the fire, it’s formed between a South Korean student and a North Korean spy. Writer Yoo Hyun-mi and director Jo Hyun-tak take this interesting premise to chaotic, unpredictable scenes, and it’s a fun ride, at least until the secrets he holds and the politics inevitably brings their childhood to heartwrenching ends. Seolganghwa isn’t a perfect drama, but it’s a story that understands how muddled and confusing the era got, and how much the country should avoid a repeat of state interests acting at the expense of personal freedoms.

When teens are superheroes, it can be tough to balance the regular teen drama along with saving the city (or maybe the world), but it’s a fairly common premise for a teen show. Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug & Cat Noir may take some familiar super teen tropes, like the secret identities, awesome suit-up moments, and cool powers, but unlike most shows, the enemies they fight are teens just like them, trying to deal with regular teen problems… except they’ve been given power and bad influence from Hawk Moth, an overdramatic supervillain that somehow keeps up-to-date to the latest drama in Marinette and Adrien’s Parisian high school. Playing with new powers and switching up the tropes, Miraculous is a fun gem of a kid’s show, one that pays genuine attention to kid’s issues, even if they solve it with the most ludicrous of powers and catchiest of songs.

Based on an arc of the classic Space Age manga, Phoenix: Eden17 reimagines the future of space exploration into a contemplation of human nature. While the show’s pacing speeds through its plot points within four episodes, each reveal feels gut wrenching, as Romi consistently has to deal with changes in Eden, Earth, and what happened to her loved ones. Modern-style animation is used, but inspired the original style of its time, creating a modernized version of the original mangaka Osamu Tezuka’s stunning images. But it’s the series’ ideas that make the show unique. Greed, betrayal, isolation, and human error causes all the disasters in this show’s universe, and even when you know it’s coming, it’s still hard not to feel the devastation the characters feel. Despite being based on a manga created decades ago, Phoenix: Eden17 still feels like an entirely singular work. Given modern animation, the ideas of the father of manga feel like it’s something never seen before.

In the previous centuries, people were born into and died without ever being able to change their status. Nobles remained nobles and peasants remained peasants. But around the Renaissance, the idea of commerce and education allowed some leeway for men to reach a higher station, and for the Florios of Sicily, they’re able to reach higher spaces through the sheer force of will. This is an interesting idea, and The Lions of Sicily by Stefania Auci is able to capture it, but its show counterpart falters in depicting this. The sets and costumes are up to par, but the screenplay is unable to balance between the backstories, with the episode slipping confusedly in and between timelines.

Returning to your hometown can be an eerie thing, mostly because of the way plenty of things would feel familiar, but they’ve either stayed in stasis all these years, or they’ve changed so much. Tierra Incognita takes that eeriness and uses it to craft a mysterious vibe in the small town of Cabo Qwert, a town now best known in the series for its titular abandoned amusement park. It relies a tad bit on jump scares and family melodrama, and the theme park itself seems much more pristine than an abandoned park would look like, but Tierra Incognita would be an okay series for kids to enjoy.