Apple TV+ actually offers quite a lovely array of different projects for a large number of audiences and demographics. The streamer isn't just littered with dark and mature dramas, it also has light and family-friendly animation too, projects like Stillwater. This show is an adaptation of the work from author Jon J Muth, specifically his Zen series that revolves around a panda called Stillwater. With the show continuing to prove a hit on the streaming platform, you might be interested in how Stillwater came to be a reality? We asked Muth specifically this during an interview at Comicon Napoli.
Muth explains initially how the idea of Stillwater came to be, stating: "Stillwater grew out of my taking trips to visit with children. When I was beginning to do work in children's books, I would take tours and I was touring with a book I'd done called Stone Soup where I'd taken the story of Stone Soup and set it in China. And while I was there, like if I'm in a library with children, I would read or I'd tell them stories while I was drawing. And I'd draw with this huge Japanese brush and that always seemed to get them excited. And I would start telling them stories, and I realized the stories I was telling were oftentimes from Zen. They're Eastern stories, you know, from China or from Japan, stories from Buddhism. And they had never heard these stories, so I wanted to find a way to convey more of those to them. That's what led to making Stillwater."
He then picked up on this and addressed how the Apple TV+ adaptation came to fruition.
"Anyway, long story short, cut forward to after the books are out, I was approached by Apple Television saying that they would like to do an adaptation through my publisher, Scholastic, and they did. They did animate it. We went back and forth about how to do it. I originally saw it as kind of a Miyazaki approach to drawing it, very hand-drawing. They wanted to do it more computer. At first I was like, eh. But they convinced me, and I think the people who worked on the show did a beautiful job of bringing this character to a different kind of audience.
"They took him in a nice direction. Maybe not my direction exactly, but I was there at every step and I was able to do drawings to help them figure out how to do things. So I was pretty hands-on about it, and that was nice."
You can see the full interview with Muth below, in localised subtitles, for more on his background, education, technique, and other works.
