In October of last year, it was reported that Wyclef Jean signed a deal with Netflix to release an animated musical on his life.
The premise surrounds the rapper and producer’s childhood beginnings in Haiti when he lived in poverty. The script is being written by Justin Marks, the same person who adapted Rudyard Kipling’s “The Jungle Book” for the 2016 live-action film version of the children’s classic. The release will fall under Netflix’s Kids and Family division, and Jean is one of the producers.
On Monday, the 49-year-old spoke about the film with AllHipHop at the MTV Video Music Awards. Jean was just one of the New Jersey artists that closed out the ceremony, along with others from the Garden State like Queen Latifah, Redman, DoitAll from The Lords of the Underground and Fetty Wap.
“Netflix just did a big deal with me. So we’re doing a ‘Prince of Port au Prince,'” Jean explained. “Y’all could look out for that, read about it. It’s on Netflix. It’s going to be animated for kids that are 6 to 12 years old,”
“The premise is how you escape poverty, through the imagination,” he added. “So if you have kids, it’s important that they watch this. I came to America, I seen ‘Aladdin,’ I seen ‘Cinderella,’ and now y’all get to watch ‘Prince of Port au Prince.'”
Jean grew to fame in the mid 1990s as a member of the Fugees with Lauryn Hill and Prakazrel Michel, who’s been recently accused by the feds of accepting millions of dollars of stolen money from a disgraced Malaysian businessman. The group released “Blunted on Reality” in 1994 and “The Score” in 1996.
Jean also released several solo projects, including 1997’s “The Carnival,” “The Ecleftic: 2 Sides II a Book” in 2000, and “Masquerade” in 2002.
