Writing Steven Universe taught director Kate Tsang to take movies anywhere she wants

polygon.com:

After working on the writing teams for Steven Universe: Future and Adventure Time: Distant Lands, first-time film director Kate Tsang is no stranger to the inner workings of coming-of-age stories. Steven Universe: Future in particular tackles emotional expression, as the title character grapples with processing the trauma of his past and the question of what his future holds, once he doesn’t have the weight of the world on his shoulders. While the first drafts of Tsang’s script for her movie Marvelous and the Black Hole were already written before her time on Steven Universe: Future, working on that show helped her approach her rewrites.

And Tsang says if there’s one big thing she learned from her days on those projects, it’s that she shouldn’t be afraid to embrace sincerity, or to create the stories she feels the world needs, even if there isn’t a previous show she can emulate.

“I could write what I wanted to see,” Tsang tells Polygon. “It didn’t have to quite exist yet. I feel like sometimes sincerity is not as desired as edginess and bleakness. With Steven [Universe], that’s what I love so much about it. There’s a heart to it, and there’s an optimism. I wanted that for my film as well.”

Marvelous and the Black Hole is a coming-of-age story about prickly 13-year-old Sammy (Miya Cech) and surly stage magician Margo (Rhea Perlman), who takes the angry young girl under her wing. The two begin an unlikely friendship as Margo teaches Sammy how to perform stage magic. In the process, she falls neatly into the tried-and-true trope of a wise old mentor, à la The Karate Kid.

But there’s a key difference in Marvelous and the Black Hole that Tsang identified when she was looking at other works in a similar vein.

“I had so much