Marvel’s Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur, premiering Friday at 8 p.m. ET on the Disney Channel and streaming on Disney Plus beginning Feb. 15, is a stylistic and poppy debut for the supersmart Lunella Lafayette and her new prehistoric greatest pal.
The animated collection, primarily based on a Marvel Comics collection of the identical title, showcases Lunella (Diamond White) as a 13-year-old science genius who by accident brings the massive crimson Devil Dinosaur (Fred Tatasciore) into the current day by way of a portal she creates. She manages to befriend the creature, and the 2 accomplice as much as struggle crime within the Lower East Side neighborhood of Manhattan.
What’s significantly refreshing in regards to the present, no less than within the episodes I’ve seen to date, is that Lunella is not bestowed with fantastical powers. She’s like a kid-Batman, inventing all her personal devices, and she or he loves making new scientific discoveries that assist each her crime-fighting life and her faculty life. Lunella’s debut comes as Marvel is highlighting extra black, feminine leads all through its live-action lineup, most lately debuting Dominique Thorne’s Riri Williams in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever forward of her upcoming Ironheart collection.
White mentioned in an interview that she hopes Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur can present children that it is fairly lovely to be the good child of the category.
“You can love quantum physics and STEM and all those things,” White mentioned.
The actress mentioned she related again to her 9-year-old self to create the character, who’s additionally fiercely protecting of her neighborhood and household.
“You have to really care,” White mentioned. “I’m from Detroit, and I really care about Detroit, and I would do anything for it. … The show’s about friendship, community and love, and she has her 10-foot dinosaur helping her through it.”
For Lunella (middle), her household is simply as essential as defending Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
Marvel
Tatiasciore has to convey via dino grunts the friendliness his character creates with Lunella. The actor additionally notes that the dino is from an especially completely different world.
“He comes from a very harsh place in time and space and now he’s at this place that’s not built for him,” Tatiasciore mentioned, including that Lunella is ready to assist him modify whereas he offers the muscle for his or her Lower East Side patrolling.
Judging from the three episodes I’ve screened, the present places numerous emphasis on each its hand-drawn fashion and its high-energy soundtrack, which makes some sequences really feel like a music video. Each episode additionally focuses on a superhero battle that resonates with a extra grounded battle.
That strategy — which evokes a little bit of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer formulation whereas being far more kid-friendly — permits for the present to strategy subjects like Lunella’s neighborhood feeling neglected by conventional authority. That extra lifelike problem is paired up with an identical villain who’s additionally obsessive about stealing energy from the neighborhood. Another episode focuses on the insecurity Lunella feels over feedback about her hair, which opens the episode as much as a frank dialogue in regards to the discrimination Black ladies generally face over their hair. Meanwhile, on the extra fantastical facet of the episode, a brand new antagonist is actually fabricated from hair.
Moon Girl and her sidekick Devil Dinosaur deal with defending their local people, which generally will get neglected.
Marvel
Actor Laurence Fishburne serves as an govt producer on Moon Girl, alongside animator Steve Loter, and when it got here to artwork and music within the collection, they wished to ensure the visuals and soundtrack mirrored their experiences rising up in New York.
“You see a lot of the New York artistic benchmarks. You see Andy Warhol’s silk screening process. You see Basquiat. You see graffiti, which was really important, and New York street mural art,” Loter mentioned, noting that each one this was then blended with a hand-drawn, comedian ebook fashion.
The music influences, Fishburne mentioned, included hip-hop, reggae and Latin, to mirror the sounds of town whereas touring from neighborhood to neighborhood. In addition to being behind-the-scenes for Moon Girl, Fishburne offers the voice of the Beyonder, a personality who interjects a bit little bit of Marvel’s cosmic facet into Lunella’s adventures.
Fishburne offers a extra flamboyant, bouncy tackle the character, which is a singular angle contemplating how, in Marvel’s comics, the Beyonder typically raises the stakes by getting concerned in bigger, universe-defining Secret Wars occasions. Though the Moon Girl present seems to be separate from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the Beyonder’s look can also be prescient, since an Avengers: Secret Wars movie is about for 2026.
With Moon Girl, Fishburne is without doubt one of the few actors who’ve performed two completely different Marvel character roles spanning mediums. He portrayed Bill Foster/Goliath in 2018’s live-action Ant-Man and the Wasp. Fishburne famous that the chance to tackle the function took place through the improvement of the animated collection.
“There was no set intention on my part of voicing a character in Moon Girl,” he mentioned. “That was really Steve’s idea, and when he showed me the rendering of the character, I said, ‘Let’s do that.’ The Ant-Man thing was a scientist. It wasn’t that hard — I had to just really be cool around Michael Douglas. That was the hard part.”
Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur is scheduled to air weekly on the Disney Channel, and the primary six episodes of the present will arrive on Disney Plus on Feb. 15. A second season has already been greenlit.
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