How ‘Marvel’s Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur’ and ‘My Dad the Bounty Hunter’ Break Ground for Black Families in Animation
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When The Proud Family: Louder and Prouder debuted last year on Disney+, it called back to the bygone era of Black TV sitcoms in which its 2001 Disney Channel predecessor shined. One where Black families, culture and people were not only celebrated on the small screens in living rooms across the country, but the central focal point of multiple simultaneously airing (though mostly live-action) series.
Its return on Feb. 3, however, pointed to a stunning reality. While the original series aired in the 2000s alongside a few animated kids shows also featuring Black leads, including Filmore!, Static Shock, Tutenstein and Little Bill, there has since been only a handful of animated shows aimed at non-adult audiences that explicitly center Black leads and, more specifically, their families.
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“Ralph [Farquhar] and I always thought there were gonna be people coming up beside us, making shows that will continue to display this potpourri of Blackness in animation,” Bruce W. Smith, Proud Family: Louder and Prouder co-showrunner told Vulture in an interview last year. “That didn’t really happen. So you’re talking about this 15-year gap. Not a lot of really Black shows were around.”
Cartoon Network’s Craig of the Creek and Disney Jr.’s Doc McStuffins, along with Netflix’s Home: Adventures with Tip & Oh, Ada Twist Scientist and Karma’s World are among the few U.S. series that have emerged in the 20 years since The Proud Family first debuted. But with the arrival of its second season earlier this month, the Disney Channel series that gave animation one of its most memorable depictions of Black family life is no longer alone.
In a historic moment for TV animation, two shows, both released this month, bring not just Black kids but their families to the forefront once again while branching into new genre territory and delivering their own unique visual styles. Joining the Disney+ Proud Family reboot is Netflix’s My Dad the Bounty Hunter — from creatives behind the team of the Hair Love — and the Disney animated series Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur, which marks one of the first Marvel titles to feature a Black female lead.
Like their Proud Family predecessor, both shows and their Black characters are also benefiting from creative and technological advancements in the animation space following the success of Oscar-winning projects Hair Love and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.
“For me, the technology caught up to the idea of how I visually saw the show the first time around,” Smith said, speaking to how the look of The Proud Family changed with its return. “The latest version of the technology allows us to do really outstanding 2.5-D animation. Now, we really leaned into the cinematic value. We wanted to allow the personalities and nuances of the writing to shine through the new version of these characters.”
The Hollywood Reporter spoke to the teams behind My Dad the Bounty Hunter and Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur about how they approached expanding TV’s depictions of Black children and their families.
‘My Dad the Bounty Hunter’ Is Charting New Territory for Black Families in Space
In My Dad the Bounty Hunter, siblings Sean (JeCobi Swain) and Lisa (Priah Ferguson) accidentally discover that their father Terry (Laz Alonso) is a dad by day and an intergalactic bounty hunter known as Sabo Brok by night. When his double life comes to light, Sean and Lisa sneak their way onto his ship and crash his latest mission, kicking off their journey navigating the perils and joys of space and familial relationships.
The concept was inspired in part by a desire to see space from a Black perspective and tell an animated story driven in part by Afrofutrism. It was also influenced by co-showrunner Everett Downing Jr.’s (Toy Story 3, The Emoji Movie) own relationship with his daughters, which was complicated by how much time he had spent working. “When we came up with the idea, we realized we haven’t seen this before — these themes of Afrofuturism and a Black family at the center,” Downing Jr. tells THR.
For co-showrunner Patrick Harpin (Clarence, Hotel Transylvania 2), who spent part of his childhood with his sister hanging out at his father’s job, the show occupies a similar space in family storytelling as The Incredibles. It could also be compared to the live-action series Lost in Space, but with one major difference in both cases. “A big thing we talked about and did very consciously was make this a Black family,” he says. “And why not? With The Incredibles, no one asked them that. No one was like, why is this a white family?”
Downing Jr. was perfect for helping bring the show’s Black family to screen, matching the level of detail with the series Black leads — down their baby hairs — that he brought to co-directing the Matthew Cherry-written short Hair Love. “I’ve been in the animation industry for a while and people can kind of go in a certain level, but sometimes they don’t go in very deep. They might have a Black character and it’s like, ‘Oh, the hair’s kind of fuzzy,'” he says. “That’s one of my pet peeves. Maybe you need to spend a little bit more time getting the braids or getting the afro texture right. It’s a very specific texture.”
My Dad the Bounty Hunter features both 2D (for flashbacks) and 3D styles, though operates primarily in the 3D animation realm. “The first season is a little bit more standard fare as far as the art direction, but we are putting our own twist on it,” Downing Jr. tells THR. “We had a very particular art style that we were going for, which is why we were really adamant about getting our two art leads — art director Alex Konstad and production designer Yuhki Demers. We had worked with them several times before and we felt like they could step up into a role that could really help us get what we were going for.”
While 3D may now be growing in use across the medium, it’s still a space that has rarely depicted Black people. 2D animation has also faced historical criticism for its depictions of Blackness as caricature. With the Netflix show’s arrival, and particularly its choice to operate predominantly in 3D, the medium delivers a rare moment in which Black features are not only embraced but celebrated in visual fullness.
“We could have gone maybe with crazier graphic visuals and played with shapes even more, but we felt there hasn’t been something that looks like this, that’s almost a Disney movie that’s not Disney or a Pixar movie that’s not Pixar,” Harpin explains. “We don’t have a lot of humans in our show, so it’s almost like a statement, even though we’re not spelling it out. We need you to be able to empathize with these characters. We need you to feel their emotions, see their eyes. So with the human designs, our emphasis was more on: are you going to relate to them? Are you going to feel what they’re feeling?”
“I was very specific and worked really closely with Yuhki, who has been so good with details. I supplied a lot of different references of what I was looking for. And Yuki got it. He understood and would do draw overs and paintings,” Downing Jr. added of Demers, who had worked with him on previous projects. “Just taking a little bit of extra time gets you so much.”
“He’s coming from Spider-Verse, too, so this is not his first rodeo,” Harpin continued. “I think there was one point where Taye Diggs was his muse. He had a chart of Taye Diggs in all different kinds of lighting to get the lighting on the characters’ skin and the specularity right.”
The team wasn’t just thinking visually about Black culture and families either. While space onscreen has largely been a white frontier, part of bringing a Black family to space in a meaningful way meant things recognizable to Black people would be tucked among the planets and stardust.
“In the first season, they’re going to an intergalactic Wingstop. We’re having fun with that. No, we don’t want to do a cantina. We want to do a Wingstop,” Downing Jr. explains. “What we really wanted to do and were really big on is flipping conventions and reframing things.”
‘Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur’ Celebrates the Brown and Black Communities of New York City
For Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur, executive producer Steve Loter (Kim Possible, Rocket Power) and supervising producer Rodney Clouden (The Wild Thornberrys, Futurama) say they have EPs Laurence Fishburne and Helen Sugland to thank for helping them adapt the story of Lunella Lafayette, a 13-year-old super-genius (voiced by Diamond White), who protects New York City with the help of a ten-ton red T-Rex she accidentally spawned from a time portal. “They’ve been forging a path for a while with shows like Black-ish and Grown-ish,” Loter tells THR.
Unlike My Dad the Bounty Hunter, Moon Girl is an adapted property, whose family narrative was ultimately expanded from its source material through the original concept of Roll With It, the last family-owned roller skating rink in New York City. It was a choice that helped the show “go to places where we needed it to go for a different medium,” according to Loter. “We put our own spin to it, to make it entertaining and educational but also to include a portrayal of Black families that are three dimensional,” Clouden continued.
Similar to the Netflix series and its predecessor The Proud Family, Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur depicts a different family structure than many live-action TV portrayals. In the case of My Dad the Bounty Hunter, Sean and Lisa’s parents are separated but are in a positive co-parenting relationship. In Moon Girl, viewers can see a multi-generational family of parents and grandparents that offer its leading hero Lunella, “different points of view and lessons,” says Clouden.
“We’re wanting to see that family unit and to get rid of the narrative that there’s only always a single-parent situation when it comes to the Black family. That’s not necessarily the case all the time,” the supervising producer adds. “I really gravitated towards Good Times and Family Matters. I loved seeing that on TV.”
Another similarity to the Netflix series? Sony’s Oscar-winning Into the Spider-Verse played into the Disney Channel and Disney+ series visual style, with Loter noting that it wasn’t just a “huge inspiration for us” but “changed the game for all animation moving forward.”
“We wanted to create something that was that visually impactful, but we didn’t want to copy it. So we went in the other direction where we did stuff that looked more hand drawn. And in an effort to keep a sci-fi look, we adapted some things — like the Jack Kirby crackle that you would see in comic books — into a digitized version,” he tells THR. “It was the application of this retro stuff you’re familiar with, but pulling it into something that felt more technologically forward while keeping a comic book sensibility.”
As two creatives who grew up in ’90s New York City around the same time, the duo wanted an art style for its backgrounds and characters that celebrated that era “right before gentrification happened in New York where the city still felt very creative,” according to Loter. While the character design leaned into a modern look for its Black and brown New York Lower East Side residents, the team — like My Dad the Bounty Hunter — were careful to be specific, both in terms of character and environment design.
“The streets that we did are more accurate to what those streets are in the LES. We wanted to portray actual street signs and this as the corner of this place,” Clouden said. “There’s always some scaffolding over buildings. There’s always some kind of construction going on.”
“And coffee cups,” Loter chimes in. “We wanted to make sure that New York was done correctly because it had been misrepresented so much in all visual mediums. Rodney and I were joking that we were watching an animated film once and characters are running a very steep hill. It was like, ‘Where in New York City is that steep hill? I’ve never seen that.’ So it was important for us, not just for the culture, but the architecture of it to be accurate.”
That architecture and background art is partly inspired by their youth in New York: pop art, graffiti, Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol. That’s then coupled with the show’s old-school comic book influences like stipple in the texturing and a pen and ink style for the characters.
Characters were treated with the same level of care and detail as their environment, with both showrunners aware of the racism that has historically existed in the visual styles of animation. “That conversation has been had and not just for Black people, but also the Latinx community. I watch shows and it’s like, ‘This is the brown color,'” Clouden says. “I worked on shows where I had to put some background characters with some color in there. Yeah, the show’s leading characters are white, but the world that is revolving around them is not white.”
That generalization in depiction is why the show is so particular about giving characters different hairstyles and shades, as well as incorporating elements of the culture like Timberlands or Air Force Ones. “We wanted to make sure that we really portray that so that people who are watching can recognize that person,” the supervising producer adds. That specificity is also because diversity is what defines New York City. “Everybody takes the train, no matter what their socioeconomic status is,” Clouden notes.
“There’s a part in one of our episodes, in the montage of where you come from, that was originally animated as a woman sitting on a stoop braiding her daughter’s hair,” he recalls. “It was done in a certain way — kind of robotic — and I’m looking at that going. ‘Yeah, that’s not right. We need to fix that.’ Because I want to make sure this is all portrayed in the most accurate way.”
