Having a to-do list is pretty normal. A selection of goals equal parts massive and mundane that give you a reason to stay organised, and to keep on going. For teenagers eager to fill up their time and find themselves, having goals to work towards can be a saving grace, as Hailey finds in Disney Channel’s new cartoon, Hailey’s On It.
Hailey’s On It follows our titular character as she tries to complete such a list. While it begins as a simple means of pushing her confidence and aversion to taking risks, a new face hailing from the future informs her that failing to do so will destroy the entire world. So, no pressure!
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After watching the first three episodes and getting a taste for it, I’ve walked away eager to see more, cautiously optimistic it will circumvent a few bland tropes that otherwise hold it back. One of Hailey’s core concerns is that her list asks that she eventually kiss Scott Denoga, a close friend she spends every waking moment with. Daring to turn this sort of friendship into romance is no easy feat, not to mention Hailey is petrified of anything new. But now, she has to balance kissing her best friend, learning glockenspiel, and saving the world.
“We’ve always loved working in both animation and live action,” Hailey’s On It co-creator Nick Stanton tells me. He and fellow co-creator Devin Bunje have worked on a number of different shows from Zeke and Luther, to Brandy & Mr. Whiskers. “Our philosophy is that a good story is a good story, no matter what the medium is,” he continues. “That being said, animation has a lot of advantages in terms of how it just really opens up the world. Our previous two shows [Prince of Peoria and Gamer’s Guide To Pretty Much Everything] were live action sitcoms, so you were limited to your two sets, maybe a swing set, but in animation you can go crazy places.”
Hailey’s On It has everything from futuristic teddy bear smartphones to epic kaiju battles, all while focusing on a handful of human characters with realistic arcs and motivations. Stanton describes this change as freeing, but it also came with a number of adjustments that viewers wouldn’t necessarily consider.
“Prince of Peoria, our previous live-action show, was filmed in front of a live studio audience, so you immediately could get feedback on whether a joke was working and you could rewrite it on the fly. Animation, and we knew this going in because we had written for animation before, is such a long process. We were doing a lot of it during COVID actually, so you’d write something you think was working and then it’d take months to animate, and then it’s just not that immediate kind of feedback.”
Hailey is a lead character with intentions to grow, and will also have to deal with her very first romance while trying to complete her list and save the world. “Pretty much everyone has had feelings towards either a friend or a classmate that they either can’t or are too scared to act on,” Bunje tells me. “The changing struggle of that is so universal, everybody has had some version of that. We kind of liked the idea of hitting different points about that relationship but throughout the series.
Stanton adds: “In the American Office, Jim and Pam’s relationship in the first season is one we thought was an interesting one, and one we hadn’t seen on a kid’s TV show before. It is kind of sophisticated, I think, but I think kids will understand it. To us it was a really interesting dynamic, like a boy and a girl who are best friends but might be more than that.”
Given their history in the realm of live action, I was curious to ask whether Hailey’s On It was always intended to be an animated show, or if it evolved from a pitch that began elsewhere.
“This was always intended to be an animated show,” Bunje tells me. “We were doing a development deal here at Disney, and it actually started when we were trying to think of a really fun scene to pitch to the higher-ups and we came up with this idea of a professor coming from the future with two minutes to tell a young girl everything she needs to know about the future, and the conversation just keeps getting sidetracked by other silly questions about, like, ‘who stole my halloween candy when I was three?’ They just have all these questions about time travel and it devolves into that. A version of this ended up in our pilot and we kind of fell in love with it.”
The first two episodes of Hailey’s On It will be coming to Disney+ on June 9.
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