TGON was fortunate enough to briefly interview Matthew A. Cherry, the creator of the viral short Hair Love and the newly released Young Love on MAX, which just released it’s season finale this week. Join us as we talk about the short’s rapid success, how the show managed to find it’s unique tone, and the most important question of all: How does he feel about pineapple on pizza?
The interview was recorded on October 3rd.
Thanks for taking the time out to talk with me! Checked out a couple episodes of Young Love the other day and I really loved it. I’m really excited to get to know you and more about the show itself. Can you tell everyone a little bit about yourself?
Yeah! I’m the creator of the show, Matthew A. Cherry: Former athlete turned filmmaker. This is my second go-around in animation, with my first being Hair Love.
Speaking of Hair Love, how did you feel about the short’s rapid success and later announcement of a TV series? From a six minute short– to a full TV series… That’s a huge change in scope! Did you feel excited or intimidated?
We were definitely asking for it! The book had shipped 3 million copies, the short’s been viewed 100+ million times, we got a hair-care collaboration with Dove, Blue Ivy read our audio book– all this just from the short! The characters had already been through so much in a brief six-minute short too. We thought it’d be amazing if we could expand on their world since most of the backstory was already set up from Hair Love.
We knew Stephen was going to be a music producer, Angela a hair vlogger, and Zuri was going to be this super confident and fun kid… All of it was already there! We just had to go in deeper to fully flesh out this world.
Working in animation is different since everything is clear-cut: This is for kids and this for adults, but we really wanted it to be a show that the whole family can enjoy. I think that was the hardest thing– finding the tone– making sure Zuri was treated as the main character just as much as Stephen and Angela. We dealt with a heavy issue in the short film with the health scare– so we felt like we had the greenlight to deal with more serious issues in the show: Gentrification, appropriation… It definitely took us a long time– Animation’s hard! It was hard to get people to look like people and to have them animate in a certain way. You with black folks we have all these different hairstyles and Zuri’s constantly changing her hair too… We definitely treated it like a live-action show in a lot of ways, but since animation’s animation it took us a little longer.
You talked about finding the tone, that was actually my next question! What was it like trying to properly navigate the general tone for the show? I read in other interviews that you wanted to avoid the show from feeling “too kiddy,” but you didn’t want to feel like it was just for adults either.
It’s hard man! When you think kids programming most people think shows where you’re learning your ABCs, but when you talk about adult programming people think raunchy, cursing, sexually explicit.. But we weren’t trying to be any of those things.
When you think of most sitcoms with kids they’re typically in their teens, so you’re allowed to touch on similar issues with them but the tone isn’t so wide. However, the gap becomes much wider when you’re focusing on a six-year old and her parents. What we ended up doing was taking Zuri and elevating her: expanding her vocabulary, involving her in these different situations… Bluey, for example, already has kids acting in a similar way– having moments where you think “Damn! Have they been here before?” so that helped us with finding the tone. We had already dealt with a real issue in the short while remaining kid-friendly, so we wanted to keep that going with the series. We wanted to honor the fact that Stephen is an adult and he’s dealing with these adult situations, and when Angela’s in the hair salon they’re gonna have some adult conversations, and while Zuri’s at school we’ll have fun there! That’s all we really wanted to do– honor our characters and their own worlds.
Yeah, I watched the pilot and the screentime feels very evenly distributed between the family. It’s not entirely focused on Zuri, Stephen, or Angela– they each have their own moments to themselves.
That’s how it is, your pilot sets you up and from there you can focus on each character and their individual journey. Throughout the season there’s a lot of backstory we’re implying– Stephen had to take a year off from work, so when we catch up with him he and can’t keep up with the current music scene. Eventually we see Zuri acting out in school a little bit, but at the end we see that it stems from the unresolved trauma about how she nearly lost her mother. Angela’s journey is finding herself and questioning “Is what I’m doing important?” “Do I feel like I’m doing enough?” and we see her go through that journey through the course of the season too.
You mentioned that your background is in mostly live-action, what challenges did you face while trying to adjust from one medium to the other? For example, writing for animation and writing for live-action are two completely different things.
Yes and no. In our case we were aiming for an animated series that had live-action sensibilities, so it wasn’t too different honestly. The hardest thing was making sure that Zuri still felt like a main character too, and once we figured that out the scripts felt no different than the average episode of Black-ish.
The hardest thing was working on the show during the pandemic. We had screenings for the show about a couple weeks ago and I realized that I’ve been working with these guys for three years and this is my first time seeing them in person! That was hard for me to work through because you need that in-person time too, it can’t just be all Zoom.
Now to close things out on a lighter note– How do you feel about pineapple on pizza?
I don’t mind it man! I’m from Chicago, so we do some wild stuff with our food. You ever see a Chicago dog? They put everything on it.
I’ve always wanted to try a Chicago dog since it’s piled up with so much stuff.
If you can get used to a Chicago dog then pineapple on pizza should be nothing!
I don’t know. I just can’t do sweet and salty.
I hear you. (Laughs)
