Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1512296
COURSE CORRECTION FORMER LAWYER MERCEDES VALLE HAS FOUND HER CALLING AS AN ANIMATION WRITER—CASE CLOSED! By her own admission, writer and self-described "recovering lawyer" Mercedes Valle never had a plan B. From a very early age, as she mapped out her future–with the encouragement of her family–she didn't seem to need one. How's this for a super-charged resume: master's degree in Korean Studies, third-degree black belt Taekwondo practitioner, Ivy League education at Princeton, a law degree, and a job as a litigation attorney with a prestigious legal firm in New York City. "My Puerto Rican grandfather was like, 'You're going to be the first African American president of the United States,'" recalls Valle. "'Not the first Puerto Rican president, too? Okay, Grandpa.' The bar was very high for me expectation-wise. I think inside part of me always wanted to be a writer, but I felt I couldn't do that because of what was already set in my life." It didn't take long for Valle to realize that the legal profession was making her miserable. Two years into her law job she left the firm and took a summer intensive at New York University's dramatic writing program. The Family Guy spec script she wrote had her classmates laughing out loud and prompted Valle's sitcom writing professor to proclaim what Valle was starting to realize. "She said, 'You were meant to do this,'" Valle says. "She had worked on Wall Street before she became a writer, so she knew what it was like to go from one kind of grind to another. I took those words to heart." Valle's first big break came via a writing group she joined with alumni of the National Hispanic Media Coalition's TV writers. One of the group members, a Story Editor on the Disney Channel's Elena of Avalor, liked Valle's work and recommended her for the series. Subsequent credits include Action Pack and Polly Pocket. As she considers her professional journey to this point, Valle notes that her master's in Korean Studies has not helped her much in the world of animation. Ditto, her JD. Animated series targeting kids don't make use of a lot of legal terminology. Then again, a case can be made that all life experience is potentially relevant. After all, when reviewing her application, Elena of Avalor Showrunner Craig Gerber noted the transition that Valle was attempting to make and remarked that his wife was an attorney. "Elena of Avalor is about a teenage princess who has magic. She wasn't going to court every episode," Valle says. "But in a way, [my experience] did kind of help. Connections [are] so important in this business. Usually, it doesn't happen as much for the people of color because of who's in power. I was very lucky." She points with pride to another series she has written for: Netflix's Mech Cadets, about a group of teens that bond with giant robots called Robo Mechs to keep the planet safe from alien invasion. The series was being made in 2020 as Hollywood was processing the murder of George Floyd. Valle, who had had several meetings to "fix the mistakes" other writers had made in representations of people of color, was pleased to land on Mech Cadets, a series in which she got to make one of the characters Puerto Rican to reflect part of her heritage and where another character is a congenital amputee voiced by an actor who has the same limb difference. "You don't realize how much of a blessing it is to have a writer in charge who knows exactly what they want," Valle says of Mech Cadets' Executive Producer Aaron Lam. "We were writing up age- wise. That's why my friends who are not children enjoy the show. It has layers, it's complex, and there's a cliffhanger at the end. I'm really proud of the diversity, too." Diversity and inclusion are a significant part of Valle's life both at work and beyond. She is a dual TAG and WGA 16 KEYFRAME T H E C L I M B