‘Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur’ Team on New York-Inspired Animation Style, Diversity in Marvel Series
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur’s leading voice cast and producer team opened up about creating the world for one of Marvel’s first onscreen leading Black superheroines ahead of the show’s season two renewal announcement at New York Comic Con.
The news followed a nearly hour-long panel that featured voice stars Diamond White (Lunella/Moon Girl), Fred Tatasciore (Devil Dinosaur) and Gary Anthony Williams (Pops), as well as executive producer Steve Loter, supervising producer Rodney Clouden and producer Pilar Flynn. Later in the panel, and following footage of the show’s main title sequence, Grammy-winning musician Raphael Saadiq took the stage to discuss serving as the show’s executive music supervisor and composer.
More from The Hollywood Reporter
“This group gives me a huge challenge,” Saadiq told the panel, noting that the show has been his “funnest” to score in his 10 years of composing. “You look at all the animation and you know you can’t drop the ball.”
During the chat, the Moon GIrl and Devil Dinosaur cast and creative team teased what the upcoming Disney Channel series has in store for fans when it debuts in February 2023. The story follows Lunella, a young girl and inhuman who is “obsessed with all things science” and “loves music” as much as the dinosaur she pulled out of a portal, according to White.
While discussing how the show came together, panelists touched on how producer Laurence Fishburne helped get the show from the comics page to screen, the decisions behind the show’s animation style, its music — both soundtrack and score — and how the producers worked to ensure diversity and inclusion offscreen.
“It starts with Laurence Fishburne in a comic book store,” Loter shared of the animated series’ journey to the small screen. “He did his weekly run to pick up new comics every Wednesday and was drawn to Brandon Montclare and Amy Ramy Reeder’s run of Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur.”
The EP, who was a producer-director on Kim Possible and said he was brought on because of his experience with “strong female protagonists,” noted that Fishburne “fell in love” with the series and reached out to his producing partner Helen Sugland at Cinema Gypsy before calling Marvel and Disney.
“They made Black-ish, Grown-ish, Mixed-ish and said, ‘We gotta make a show out of this,'” Loter added before voice actor Williams interjected (to audience laughs), “But without the name ‘ish’ on it.”
While Fishburne’s love of the comic might have brought it to screen, Loter and Clouden noted that it was their and the team’s love for New York that helped give it its vibrant, sketchy style. Creating a look that was just as much of a character as the show’s actual characters (without detracting from them), meant pulling in influences from graffiti, street art, screenprinting and the work of artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol, according to the supervising producer.
“We started thinking about what New York is,” he told the panel audience. “New York in a lot of animated shows has been misrepresented. New York is not slick. It’s not shiny. It’s grit. It’s got edge.”
“The characters themselves are done in a very pen and ink, hand-drawn style because we want it to feel like an illustrated moving comic,” Loter added, with Clouden confirming real graffiti artists also worked on the show.
While what fans see on the screen is important, especially for such a historic Marvel series, producer Flynn noted that the team created an entire process for ensuring who was making the show as reflective of the diverse New York viewers would see onscreen. The end result for their writer’s room was a team that is “100 percent” women and a directing team that is currently made up entirely of women as well.
“We not only wanted to tell the story of this little Black girl as a superhero, in a beautiful and high-quality way, but we also wanted to tell it authentically and as inclusively as possible,” she said. “Because so much of us in leadership are diverse ourselves — I myself am a Latina — it was our mission from the beginning that we were going to cast authentically both on screen as well as behind the scenes.”
While breaking down its approach to hiring, Pilar said she was “proud” to say “most of our crew is actually made up of women, people of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community” and that Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur‘s creative leadership worked to create a “really collaborative” environment where production crew members felt they could speak up and “give us ideas [or] tell us if something didn’t feel right.”
Along with their team behind the scenes, she and Coulden said, they also leaned into Disney production coordinator Allen March, who helped them identify potential onscreen representational opportunities, from main to background characters, and down to their footwear, with Clouden teasing viewers can expect to see Timberlands and Air Force 1’s.
“He did a lot of research, too, in terms of tracking percentages of how much of a certain group is represented in episodes,” Clouden explained. “It was really scientific.”
“Even though we’re a majority diverse crew, we even have so much subconscious bias ourselves. So we took a page from Geena Davis,” she added. “It was amazing when we laid out the data what was missing. So anything that was missing, we tried to fill as much as possible.”
It’s a show with a leading character Diamond said she is excited to portray onscreen.
“We made history with this and I’m so honored to be a part of this,” White told the panel audience while speaking about her leading character Lunella. “I love this character so much. I relate to her being the one weird kid with their head in our own world of science.”
Best of The Hollywood Reporter
