Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1021376
Part of this push for representation and accuracy means not being afraid to ask others for help. Marvel Comics Director of Content & Character Development Sana Amanat says she was excited to work with the animators to transform all the Marvel Rising characters for on-screen adventures. But there's no denying that she was particularly pleased to work on Kamala Khan/Ms. Marvel, the Pakistani-American crime fighter whom she co-created and who only first appeared in the Marvel comics universe in 2013. For this animated version, some things stayed a part of Kamala or got an upgrade. Her trademark gold bangle bracelet, itself a link to her cultural identity, now has a secret compartment for her mobile. She's also traded in her boots for sneakers. "We wanted something that would have a significant female cast, but still [be] an action adventure that was appealing to boys and girls," adds Cort Lane, Marvel Entertainment's Senior Vice President of Animation and Family Entertainment. But, he adds, they didn't want to go about this in a "prescriptive way" of making these inclusive stories just for inclusion's sake and therefore held several conversations with young girls in their target demographic to understand what they would want to see in the stories. "Marvel's philosophy is our stories are characters who are just like you and who live outside your window, and so they should reflect the diversity of the world," Lane says. This was similarly the focus of Harvey Street Kids, the DreamWorks Animation Television series for Netflix that's based on the old Harvey Comics. Little Audrey is now a rambunctious tomboy with three ponytails and a lightning bolt T-shirt. Little Dot is a mature-beyond-her-years African-American science whiz. Little Lotta shares her original incarnation's love of food, but Supervising Producer Aliki Theofilopoulos says they wanted to go beyond that one note and have "her be more passionate with a love for life" while still keeping her body type. This all carries over to Harvey Street Kids' secondary characters, all of whom are designed with thought-out behaviors and style to represent a multi-ethnic neighborhood utopia. Peter Emmerich, Harvey Street Kids' art director, says his design crew didn't set out to check diversity boxes in as much as just create cool kids an audience would want to befriend or emulate. He says the design team had long conversations on how to update the characters—some of whom came to be in the middle of the last century—especially, he says in regards to "changing their clothes and changing their hair." He also called upon his diverse animation team to help with accuracy, such as working with African- American colleagues to ensure that Dot's hair looks realistic. "I think it's important to have shows where kids can see themselves in [it]," adds Victor & Valentino's Molano. "Being multicultural myself, I always looked for characters that I could relate to as a kid, but there were very few. I feel like I am now creating the show that I wished existed when I was growing up." Similarly to Molano's philosophy of delving deeper into a culture to represent it more accurately, the team behind Disney's 2016 Polynesian- F E AT U R E 24 KEYFRAME