A new Kickstarter project aims to create an animated cartoon, possibly a series, about a girl with two dads and her friend with two moms.
Ava – The Lucky Girl With Two Dads is being developed by actor and storyteller Sandro Isaack based on characters from his 2010 book, Stork M.I.A.
But first, she has to figure out how to become president of Second Grade. Although exciting and fun, it may not be as easy as one may think. She has some competition – some competition that doesn’t always play fair. But, she also has help and a lot of friends. She has the stork, who decided to retire, and is now Ava’s campaign manager and sidekick. By the way, she likes to be called Dolores, not Stork. There’s Paco, her BFF, and Mom and Mom’s son, and the twins, Joe and June, Mr and Mrs McBrolic’s kids.
Ava will be, he says, “a cartoon that features same gender couples and their kids as a natural part of life. Not as something special or different.”
This isn’t the first attempt at an animated kids’ show featuring the child of same-sex parents. Back in 2007, two lesbian moms launched BuddyG: My Two Moms and Me, which I wrote about here. The project is now defunct, pointing perhaps to the difficulty of producing and maintaining such an endeavor. On the positive site, mainstream children’s cartoons are slowly increasing LGBTQ representation (see articles in South Florida Gay News and the Guardian), but as this past week’s uproar over LGBTQ representation in children’s magazines shows, LGBTQ inclusion in mainstream media, especially for young ages, is still a work in progress. We need to encourage it, to be sure, but we also need independent efforts like BuddyG and Ava (not to mention live-action children’s programming such as Dottie’s Magic Pockets and Family Restaurant, both also now ended, alas). And we need to find ways to match people who have knowledge of LGBTQ families with those who have a knack for children’s storytelling, artistic talent, and technical production skills, so that the programs are of a quality that we’re proud to show our children.
Learn more about Ava in the video below.
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