Young Love: How an Oscar-Winning Short Became an Animated Family Sitcom
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
The post Young Love: How an Oscar-Winning Short Became an Animated Family Sitcom appeared first on Consequence.
In 2019, a beautifully drawn story about a young father tackling his daughter’s hair went from Kickstarter to Oscar, when Hair Love won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film. But that wasn’t the end of the project’s journey, as the original short has become the foundation for the new Max animated series Young Love. “We wanted it to feel familiar, like one of those ’90s sitcoms that we all consider classic,” creator Matthew A. Cherry tells Consequence. “Just, you know, the warmth of it. Hopefully, people see the comedy, but they also feel the heart, too.”
Hair Love, the original short, actually ended up being a solid pilot for Young Love — though Cherry didn’t realize how effective it was in setting up the story and characters for the show until they actually started trying to develop the show. “Even the end credits make you want to see what happens next with this family,” Cherry observes.
The series picks up about two months after the events of the short, with the first episode focusing on mom Angela (Issa Rae)’s first day back at work, following the illness that put her in the hospital. But just because she’s back at work doesn’t mean everything’s back to normal for her, her partner Steven (Scott Mescudi), or their young daughter Zuri (Brooke Monroe Conaway).
For Cherry, a major source of excitement was getting to tell a story that feels fresh in the current landscape. “I’ve never really seen an animated series like this, that tackles like a millennial couple in their twenties that have a young kid but also are still trying to figure out their lives, essentially. They don’t necessarily have their own place to live — they’re staying with the grandparents. They haven’t really hit their stride when it comes to their careers. But they’re also trying to be present for their child.”
This meant that “figuring out the tone of the show was like probably one of the hardest things, because it could have been a kid’s show — obviously the book and the short film aimed for that — or we could’ve just lived in Steven’s world or in Angela’s world. But we really wanted it to be a family co-viewing experience, just because I know I just love those type of shows.”
The fact that Angela has just been through a serious illness, but is now on the other side of it, enhances the series’ grounded nature. “In reality, people get sick, and sometimes they pass away, but sometimes they get better and when they do get better, what is life for them afterwards?” Cherry says. “Angela’s whole arc this season is her exploring different things and really just trying to find her purpose and figure out what is that thing beyond work and her family that makes her happy.”
It’s not just Angela’s story, though: While it’s not prominently mentioned in the original short, the character of Steven was a music producer from the beginning, and his job plays a significant role in the show, as he has to contend with his own creative output as well as contending with the wild personalities of artists. Cherry, having had experience working in the world of music videos, notes with a laugh that “that industry is just very wild, wild west. People can pay you whenever they feel like it — sometimes they pay you in cash, sometimes they pay you half a year later. It’s just very unpredictable. You never know what your next adventure is going to be.”
Cherry adds that there were three people on the creative team who were focused on the show’s use of music, including producer Taylor Graves, who was focused specifically on Steven: “He’s really in charge of that sound and we really try to make things very accurate — if he’s hitting this note [in the music], let’s make sure the fingering on the character [in the animation] is doing that same thing.”
In addition, composer Amanda Jones “saw all the heartfelt moments where we wanted score,” while music supervisor Morgan Rhodes didn’t just find great needle drops: “We got even really creative sometimes, where we couldn’t clear the full song — we found the original sample and kind of remixed it. Music is really a big part of the show. We really feel like it gives it the heart and the engine helps them keep the pace up, especially because the storytelling is so grounded and you don’t want it to get boring.”
The show’s setting in Chicago also led to that choice: “Chicago has a really strong musical DNA and we wanted to be kind of accurate to that too.”
In terms of the casting, Cherry said Scott Mescudi (aka Kid Cudi) “just made so much sense” as Steven, who he met while working as an executive at Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions. “We were trying to set up one of his shows and unfortunately, it didn’t work out, but we got really cool. And he loves animation. He’s from the Midwest, from Cleveland, and he’s a young father, and obviously he works in music,” Cherry laughs.
In addition, Cherry brought back Issa Rae (who voiced Angela in the original short): “Her voice is so unique and distinct and I feel like this character really embodies her twenties as well — just the fun and the messiness of trying to figure everything out.”
Young Love (Max)
The cast also includes Loretta Devine and Harry Lennix as Angela’s parents: “[Devine] is just a legend. Everybody always jokes that she plays everybody’s mom or Auntie in every Black TV show, but I see why, because she’s so fun, and she really was excited to go to different places in the vocal booth. And then Harry Lennox had worked on my first feature film, The Last Fall, and he’s from Chicago, so that was even sweeter.”
The voice of Zuri was the hardest role to cast, according to Cherry, with the production debating between casting an actual kid versus an adult. “Ultimately we felt like a kid would be the most organic to the story, because you have to have that energy,” Cherry says, “We did this nationwide search, and we found [Brooke Monroe Conaway] in Baltimore. She was just great — if you see her in real life, she has like the really big hair, the same bubbly personality. She’s the only kid in our cast — everybody else was played by adults, some younger, some older.”
Beyond Young Love, Cherry’s been actively working in the world of live-action TV as a director, and hopes to do a little bit of everything in the future: “I want to do plays, I want to do a musical, I want to do documentaries. I don’t want to be limited — I just want to continue to hopefully perform at a high level.”
That doesn’t exclude more animation, either. Cherry notes that early into the process of making Hair Love, the team debated making the short live-action, but “despite never working in animation before, it just felt like it needed to be animated.”
He then references Hair Love producer Karen Rupert Toliver’s comments from her Oscar acceptance speech, back in 2019. “We have a firm belief that representation matters deeply, especially in cartoons. Because in cartoons that’s when we first see our movies, and it’s how we shape our lives and think about how we see the world,” she said then.
Continues Cherry, “if you watch these shows and you don’t have characters that look like you, it really can do a number on your self-confidence. It kind of makes you start questioning like, all right, why is everybody else being represented and I’m not? And so just I think being impactful in animation is something that’s really important to me, just because it is such an incredible medium — and it’s becoming more and more diverse, too.”
Young Love debuts Thursday, September 21st on Max.
Young Love: How an Oscar-Winning Short Became an Animated Family Sitcom
Liz Shannon Miller
Popular Posts
Guns N' Roses Add New Dates to Fall 2023 North American Tour
John Mulaney Announces New Tour Dates with Pete Davidson & Jon Stewart
The Rolling Stones Confirm Lady Gaga, Paul McCartney Appearances on New Album
10 Non-Metal Anytime Albums Corey Taylor Thinks Every Music Fan Should Own
Jann Wenner Kicked Off Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's Board of Directors
