Disney’s The Owl House made in creator’s image
Dana Terrace traces the origin of her Disney cartoon to a simple tagline: “A girl becomes a witch and learns under this old woman mentor.”
Terrace cultivated that short sentence into a “spooky, magical comedy-horror-adventure” series, The Owl House, which premiered Jan. 10. It follows Luz, a fantasy-loving human teenager who finds herself in the demon realm, where she meets a witch named Eda and her tiny warrior of a roommate, King. After a joint adventure, Luz decides to become the witch’s apprentice.
From early in the first episode, it’s apparent that Luz’s imagination and interests set her apart from her classmates. And neither her mother nor her teachers understand how to handle her creativity and dramatic flair. It takes traveling through a magical portal for Luz to find kindred misfits in Eda and King. Their developing relationship, as Luz tries to learn magic under Eda’s tutelage, is at the series’ core.
Luz’s emotional journey is one familiar to Terrace. “When I was a kid, and I think a lot of kids feel like this — especially if you’re artsy or creative or have any kind of offbeat hobby — you feel a little left out. You feel a little detached from people, and it might take you a little longer than most to find your crowd, your community,” Terrace said. The Connecticut native said that it wasn’t until she moved to California in her early 20s that she met people she truly connected with.
Discovering this sense of belonging is a theme that resonates with other members of the Owl House team. “The whole crew, we’re just a band of weirdos who found family amongst each other and want to create with each other,” said art director Ricky Cometa. “It’s a message near and dear to all of us.”
Terrace’s distinctive, even “offbeat” tastes shaped The Owl House from the start. Before developing the characters, she drew inspiration for the series’ aesthetic from some of her favorite artists, including Hieronymus Bosch and Remedios Varo.
Having attended Catholic school, Terrace grew up surrounded by stained glass, Gothic architecture and medieval illuminations. So she turned to illuminated manuscripts and old Christian artists and looked “at all the wacky designs they put into their work.” “The most fun part about making stuff is when you’re at the beginning of a project. It’s just an empty canvas,” Terrace said. “I just started drawing monster ideas, demon ideas. Like, ‘What would this little Hieronymus Bosch creature look like as a cute cartoon?’”
Though the series is set on the Boiling Isles — which is basically the decaying corpse of a titan — and doesn’t shy away from scary situations, Cometa said they “didn’t necessarily want to make this place like Horror Town central.” The goal was to make the world livable and friendly for all of the demon realm’s creatures. “The demons in this world, they’re not your typical scary demons,” Cometa said. “They’re actually functional families and everyday people.”
The two characters Terrace had a grasp on earliest were the sharp and sassy Eda the Owl Lady (voiced by Wendie Malick) and the cute little demon King (Alex Hirsch).
The showrunner describes Eda as a “tough-love kind of woman”: “Her personality is very much based off of my mom and my aunt and my Nana — the women who raised me,” Terrace said. King, on the other hand, is a “little trickster jerk” reflecting pieces of Terrace’s ego in a Pokémon-like package. “He’s just a little guy that wants to be big, so I always related to him,” Terrace said. “He’s tiny and no one takes him seriously. He just wants to be taken seriously.”
Luz (Sarah-Nicole Robles) was harder for Terrace to pin down. Her character only started coming together through conversations Terrace had with her roommate at the time about what they were like in high school — how they would try to cut their own hair or made fashion choices based on Final Fantasy games.
Terrace’s teenage interests included Pokémon, the Lord of the Rings books, anime, roleplaying games and works by Ursula K. Le Guin, Frederik Pohl and Isaac Asimov. “Luz (Noceda) the character started molding herself out of those stories, so I asked my roommate if I could name the character after her,” Terrace said. “The real Luz (Batista) works on the show as a story artist and consultant.” Batista’s one stipulation was that, like her, Luz the character had to be Dominican. So Terrace made her Dominican.
Despite accounting for more than 18% of the U.S. population, Hispanics receive only 5.2% of the top film roles and 6.2% of scripted television roles, according to a 2019 UCLA study. Another recent study, from the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, concluded that on the occasions Hispanics are included in films, their portrayals are often stereotypical.
“More diversity in fantasy, I think, not only helps audiences see themselves in these stories but I think it could help diversify the kind of fantasy stories we’re telling,” Terrace said. “New perspectives and new stories. I think it helps the medium itself as well.”
Perhaps those new perspectives will have another effect: to stop people from writing off certain stories as “dumb ideas.”