High Guardian Spice was one of the first Crunchyroll Originals to be put into production, bespoke animated shows that seek to tell distinct, imaginative stories on the streaming service. Given that Netflix, Amazon, and Disney+ dabbled in their own programming with massive success, it was only a matter of time until more niche companies caught up.
Helmed by Raye Rodriguez and a diverse production team, High Guardian Spice is a show that isn’t afraid to showcase its queer identity. It’s characters are bright, colourful, loving, and geared towards a younger audience who can relate and understand the message it seeks to convey. Western cartoons and anime don’t always do queer people justice, and Crunchyroll seeks to address that empty void with a compelling adventure of its own.
I recently caught up with Rodriguez ahead of the show’s release to talk about its world, characters, and how it aims to tell an inclusive story ideal for all audiences.
Before diving into the show itself, I’d love to ask about your history in the world of animation, art, and production and how you got involved with the project?
I’ve been a big anime fan for a long time -- my older sister got into Sailor Moon before I was born so I’ve always had anime around in my life. Growing up I wanted to be a comic book artist, then a voice actor, then a movie director… It wasn't until I went to NYU for Film & TV that I realized that I didn't enjoy being on set, and was much happier behind a drawing tablet than a camera. I was in college during what I think of as a golden age in TV animation, when Adventure Time was in its early seasons and Gravity Falls was coming out, and I was so inspired by these shows that it made me want to follow in their footsteps and make TV cartoons as well!
I created High Guardian Spice in 2013. It started as a 5-minute storyboard pitch for Frederator while I was interning there. It didn’t get picked up, but it gave me my first real experience pitching, and I’m forever grateful for that! The show has grown a lot since then, but the core of the characters and relationships are the same. Since that first pitch I used Rosemary in my college thesis film “Treasure Hunt” and then continued to develop HGS and pitch it every opportunity I got. Eventually I pitched it to Crunchyroll in 2016 and they liked it a lot, though they didn’t have the bandwidth at the time to make it as a show. We started developing it as a comic in 2017, then I repitched it to them as a show when Marge Dean started at the company in 2018, and it quickly changed from comic to TV show! It was a very unusual process.
Representation is so important to me as a queer trans woman, and since the production of High Guardian Spice began we’ve seen animation embrace LGBTQ+ themes and characters like never before. The Owl House, Steven Universe, and so many others have broken new ground, but we’re still far from where we want to be. Do you feel animation on a global scale is stepping towards more inclusive representation in this way, and why is it so important to you?
I’m a queer Cuban trans guy so we’re in a similar boat! Having diverse representation is very important to me in the work I create.
Animation is definitely getting more inclusive! I don’t think I can speak for the entire world, but the change is very apparent in American cartoons. Steven Universe broke so many boundaries, I remember being shocked at how open they were able to be with Ruby and Sapphire’s relationship, and that was less than 10 years ago. That show paved the way for all the cartoons that came after it.
A big part of why I created HGS was because I wanted to make a show centering around 4 normal girls who aren’t chosen ones or princesses, who go on adventures and become heroes, all while being supportive friends to each other. I know it sounds simple (because it is!), but when I was growing up it felt like there were very few shows that fit that criteria in American cartoons. Because of that I gravitated toward anime -- I was obsessed with Magic Knight Rayearth as a kid, and I think a large part of that was the fact that they were an all-female friend group that kicked ass and took care of each other. I loved that the girls weren’t just fighting with magic (although, that too), they were using swords and bows and arrows to cut monsters in half. And at the end of the day they weren’t token girls with a male protagonist hero, they were heroes of their own story. I wanted HGS to have that same kind of comradery and love, and I was channeling a lot of my own close friendships when creating the HGS girls and their friend dynamics.
For a long time I was chasing down female characters in cartoons that I felt represented me, and it’s only now as an adult who’s come to terms with being a transgender man that I’ve realized the biggest reason I didn’t click with the characters from my childhood was me, not them. But I still love my spice girls who were born of that angst, and I hope their friendship resonates with others as well.
Knowing this, is High Guardian Spice a show that will feature queer characters and themes, or explore these ideas in meaningful ways across its narrative?
HGS is very queer and it’s not a secret. That was one of the best parts about working with Crunchyroll, our team never got pushback when we wanted to make characters gay or trans. The writers and I thought of something and we were able to just make it happen!
For me personally I can be attracted to people all over the gender spectrum and I wanted High Guardian Spice to take place in a world where that sentiment is a lot more common and accepted. There’s still homophobia/transphobia in their world, but people are generally a lot more chill about LGBTQ+ people than they are in real life.
As a Crunchyroll Original the show takes a lot of inspiration from both Western and Japanese animation, did you see this as a unique opportunity to create something we might not have seen in the field before? Were there any influences that you wanted to include or wore proudly on your sleeve?
Yes absolutely! It was never meant to be an anime since we weren’t working with a Japanese animation studio, it was always meant to be a hybrid Eastern-Western cartoon style. I’m very inspired by the character designs and expressions in shows like Sailor Moon, Petite Princess Yucie and Little Witch Academia, and I wanted to come at that cute, round, squishy style from a Western perspective.
Anime and Manga have a handful of excellent queer stories, but many of these can still rely on queer-bating or at times can feel catered to a straight audience. Do you feel this is changing, or could High Guardian Spice help provide something that other productions might not have been able to before?
For a very long time the only queer stories I saw were in anime and manga, they’re basically what introduced me to queerness as a kid. Like lots of other transgender weebs I was very into Ranma ½ -- I was unsurprisingly transfixed and envious of Ranma’s ability to change from boy to girl to boy. As I got older I got really into boys love/yaoi, which was great at the time but often pretty #problematic when I look back at the stories I loved. I knew the relationships weren’t great at the time, but when it’s all you have you work with what you got.
I’m generally a few years behind on anime and I don’t watch everything that comes out so I could be missing something, but I haven’t seen the same huge changes in anime representation of LGBTQ+ characters the way I have in western animation. That isn’t to say there aren’t great new shows, like Banana Fish or Yuri on Ice, the change just doesn’t seem as ubiquitous as it is in America.
I hope HGS helps to push the needle forward! I don’t know that it’ll affect the anime industry all that much because at the end of the day anime is made by and for Japanese people who are creating stories that reflect the values of their own culture. But more queer representation is never a bad thing!
Could you tell me about the production crew who worked on High Guardian Spice? As a creator was it refreshing to work alongside like-minded people on a project this vast?
This is kind of a hard question because how do I talk about my crew without name-dropping every single person who worked on the show? Everyone who worked on High Guardian Spice did a fantastic job. It was not an easy production by any means and my crew put in their all to make HGS as good as it could possibly be.
Working on this show allowed me to meet so many talented, interesting, kind and powerful people from all corners of the animation industry and from all over the world. There were artists I’d been following for years that I was able to work with on the show, TV animation veterans, and totally new and undiscovered talent… So many different people have touched HGS and helped make it what it is, and I’m so thankful to have been able to work with them.
I adore how all of the characters in High Guardian Spice have different and relatable body types, not filling the archetypes genders are often forced to rely on. Did you hope to make characters that audiences could see themselves in, especially young people who might still be discovering who they want to be.
Thank you and absolutely! I love that it’s become more common in cartoons for characters of all shapes and sizes to be represented, and I think it’s incredibly important to keep on showing diverse bodies in the shows we make moving forward! Again, more representation is always a good thing.
In a nutshell, what is High Guardian Spice about from a narrative perspective? Does the show have an overarching message it hopes to deliver that will resonate with viewers?
High Guardian Spice is a story about four girls working together to follow their dreams of becoming heroes. Rosemary and her best friend Sage travel from a tiny village in the middle of nowhere called Pebble to the large city of Lyngarth, where they attend High Guardian Academy, a school for adventurers. There they meet Parsley and Thyme, who quickly join their adventuring party. The girls start the show naive about what it means to be a Guardian, a protector of the land, and they learn over the course of the season that it isn’t just a cake-walk. Being a Guardian means putting your life on the line to stand up for what’s right, and the girls each have to decide for themselves if this really is the path they want to walk down.