Pinecone, alongside her best friend Pony, defy expectations and break the molds.
Regular readers of this column are familiar with the ever-burgeoning number of stories to appear here that cover the confluence of technology, disability, and Hollywood. One recent example ran at the end of January, diving deep into DreamWorks Animation’s Madagascar: A Little Wild. The children’s series, which begun airing early this year, is a spinoff of the popular film franchise. It follows the formative years of characters Alex the Lion, Marty the Zebra, and others as they live in a rescue habitat in New York City’s Central Park. Notable from a representational perspective is one of the characters, a chimpanzee named Dave, is deaf. Executive producer and showrunner Johanna Stein told me in an interview the creative team brought in deaf actress Shaylee Mansfield to perform “signovers”—conceptually akin to voiceovers, but using ASL instead of vocal narration. A clip from the studio, called “Signing with Shaylee,” illustrates Mansfield’s role on the show.
Where Madagascar: A Little Wild is on Hulu and Peacock, DreamWorks has brought another animated children’s series, Pinecone & Pony, to Apple’s TV+ streaming video service. The show, which premiered in April consisting of eight, 25-minute episodes, follows the adventures of Pinecone, a girl warrior-in-training straddling the line to be equal parts Xena and princess-worthy, who comes of age with her flatulent pony of a best friend. The series is based on children’s author Kate Beaton’s 2016 Children’s Book Award-winning title, The Princess and the Pony.
The official teaser trailer for the series is available to watch on YouTube.
“Pinecone & Pony is about a young girl growing up and making her way through the world, but that world is a warrior kingdom! [It’s] not just any warrior kingdom though—one we worked hard to make as playful, joyful, and diverse as a regular playground of children can be in real life,” Beaton, who’s credited as one of a few executive producers on the show, said to me in an interview conducted earlier this month. “Princess Pinecone goes on adventures and learns that there is more than one way to be a warrior, with the help of her best friend, Pony. It’s a very funny show, that’s the number one thing. You gotta make kids laugh.”
Princess Pinecone doesn’t depict disability in the same sense Dave does on A Little Wild or as Cece does in Apple’s El Deafo. In both cases, their disabilities are readily apparent to audiences; Dave has the aforementioned “signovers,” while Cece wears hearing aids. Instead, Pinecone & Pony elicits a broader message applicable to everyone, but especially those from underrepresented communities. The message is simple yet profound: You matter, which hopefully instills stronger senses of belongingness and self-worth. Pinecone has every right to be accepted as a warrior regardless if being one isn’t seen as cute or effeminate, just as Cece has every right to seek acceptance as an individual regardless of her disability. As showrunner Stephanie Kaliner told me in a concurrent interview, Pinecone & Pony exists as a duality. It obviously should entertain as television. More pointedly, it aims to “[subvert] expectations and stereotypes and [push viewers to] live proudly as who you are.”
Another nod to the disability community is the cultural dimensionality to which Pinecone & Pony tries to pay homage. Disabled people don’t belong only to the disability community; they’re also part of the Black community or the LGBTQ community or the AAPI community too—oftentimes in multitudes thereof. Recognizing this intersectionality is crucial. Beaton said one of the creative team’s goals was to make the town of Sturdystone incredibly diverse. “[Our] generation grew up with fantasy that was very Eurocentric and with kids programming that had very narrow representations of bodies,” she said. “Everyone deserves to see themselves on screen without the confines of a cliché attached. We are moving away from that, generally [in society], and in our show, it’s everywhere we could put it, from the designs of the characters to the architecture—and having representation behind the scenes as well.”
Beaton continued: “The message is, you belong here. And I think that is very important. You would think, in a world of warriors, that there would be a bar for some people who were ‘not good enough’ or ‘not strong enough’ because that is what we think of when we are thinking of warriors out-toughing each other. But in our town, whatever way you are a warrior is the warrior you are meant to be, and everyone else is all about it. They celebrate each other, it is who they are. It’s why we chose a warrior society, to turn it on its head—[and] it’s a great place for comedy. Kids are naturally drawn to rumbling and tumbling, it’s fun! Our show tells them: ‘You’re welcome in the fun, just as you are.’”
Kaliner echoed Beaton’s sentiments and praised Pinecone’s humanness. “It’s important to me that Pinecone is a flawed character. I think her flaws are beautiful. She has a good heart and she always wants to do better, but she’s learning in a real way, and sometimes a hard way,” she said. “We wanted to make Pinecone and all the characters three-dimensional. The writers dug deep and drew on personal experiences so that everyone would feel like a real person and the stories would feel honest and not contrived. We also pushed the comedy everywhere we could, in the writing but also the art. Kate’s art style is so funny because the expressions say so much and are instantly relatable. The character designers, board artists, and animators worked hard to capture Kate’s style. And director, Wayne Michael Lee, was always on top of plussing the comedy, in addition to making the emotional moments shine.”
That Pinecone & Pony is so committed to be graspable to children was the overarching theme of my conversation with Beaton and Kaliner. They repeatedly stressed the importance of making sure the characters were as human as possible such that audiences could catch glimpses of themselves, personality-wise, while also continually challenging society’s patriarchal, sexist views on “appropriate” gender roles. The show may be fictive but its roots are very much based in reality, according to Beaton. “Our version of a fantasy medieval past is that of a kid’s imagination of the past, which gave us a lot of elbow room for what to include,” she said. “It was a goal to make it fun, and to make that fantasy world inclusive.”
For a piece of art meant for young children, Pinecone & Pony is rather complex and sophisticated. It fits well with modern sensibilities around diversity and the uniqueness of everyone’s lived experiences. The writing is at times so clever with banter it would make Miriam Maisel or Howard Hawks blush. It sparkles in ways that speaks to the show’s complexity, but remains laser-focused on appealing to the target demographic.
As for the production itself, both Beaton and Kaliner’s experiences tracked with those of other Apple TV+ showunners I’ve spoken with over time. Both women praised Apple for their willingness to let the creative processes happen organically, only stepping in when guidance was truly necessary, and of their championing of furthering diversity. Kaliner noted how impressed she was with the artwork done by Atomic Cartoons, saying the studio “did an incredible job” in expressing that people have different, unique ways of being. Moreover, Kaliner said the creative team was delighted by the eclectic nature of the world’s design, telling me the styles combined a myriad of elements from different time periods, places, and more. The team worked with various consultants to make Sturdystone come alive. The goal was to make “everyone watching to feel represented and part of the world in some way,” Kaliner said.
Feedback on Pinecone & Pony has been positive thus far. Kaliner was effusive in her comments about working on the show, speaking highly of the “many departments of creative people who left their mark on the show and made it fuller and richer than I could have ever imagined.”
“It was the most fun I’ve ever had at work,” she said.
Beaton, although she wrote the book on which the series is based, is decidedly modest about her role. She sees herself as more of a “key background figure” on the show. Her work involved “wearing a few different hats” but deferred to Kaliner as being the woman in charge. “I kept my finger in the pie, [but] Stephanie was the real star,” Beaton said.
To appreciate Pinecone & Pony from a diversity standpoint is to recognize Beaton and Kaliner’s ultimate goal in terms of messaging. While the show doesn’t expressly feature disability like A Little Wild or El Deafo or even CODA does, that Beaton and Kaliner wants people to know that everyone is unique and everyone belongs is eminently applicable to disabled people. Considering the incongruence with the disability community perpetually being an afterthought in DEI conversations—despite being the world’s largest marginalized group with over a billion people living with a disability—Beaton and Kaliner’s “you matter too” theme drives home a salient point that also resonates with why accessibility and assistive tech is so important. It’s okay to be who you are, whether it be a kick-butt warrior-in-training like Pinecone or a hard-of-hearing girl like Cece with equally kick-butt hearing aids.
Besides, nothing says acceptance like tolerating Pony’s frequent farting.