In AppleTV's animated children’s series Pinecone & Pony, characters are designed to subvert and defy expectations.
“You think a wizard has to look like Gandalf the Grey, but we wanted to show that, no, a wizard could look more like this. Or you see the really beefy muscular guy in the first episode wearing a flower suit and dressing like a daisy,” says showrunner Stephanie Kaliner.
Kaliner said the team wanted for any person watching to “just be able to feel like they can be part of this world.” But they also wanted to do it without pointing to it in “overt” or heavy-handed ways. So they never wrote in specific discussions about physical, visual or identity diversity in storylines and dialogue in an effort to avoid inadvertently othering anyone to their young viewers.
So while lessons about obvious physical differences between the show’s human-coded characters are absent, leading and background characters are, among other things, racially diverse, LGBTQ, have disabilities, with some wearing hijab and, in another move rarely seen in animation, having various body types and sizes.
The body diversity that exists among the show’s warrior characters and its larger group of magical semi-medieval community residents — whether more or less muscular, shorter or taller, rounder or thinner — makes it a standout among both animated and live-action kids and family series.
“A reflection of the world is not something I see in animation,” Taneka Stotts, Pinecone & Pony‘s story editor, told The Hollywood Reporter. “We tend to gravitate towards an art style we want to see of leading a happy and healthy lifestyle. But we can lead a healthy lifestyle through many different means and that does not adhere itself to certain body standards.”
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