STEVEN UNIVERSE Creator Rebecca Sugar Talks Spinel's Intentionally Old-Timey Design

While the Steven Universe animated series may have come to a close back in January, Steven Universe The Movie premiered in September — and Steven Universe Future is set to debut in December.

Steven Universe The Movie takes place after the events of season five and sees Steven, Garnet, Pearl, and Amethyst living peacefully until the unexpected invasion of Spinel. This new character is a gem in and of herself and serves as the film's antagonist. Spoilers for Steven Universe The Movie beyond this point!

Spinel was a jester of Pink Diamond who was left alone and abandoned for thousands of years. She resurged with a vengeance upon finding out that Pink Diamond was no more and all that remained of her was a son — Steven. What noticeably seperates Spinel from every other character in Steven Universe is her animation style and overall design.

Unlike everyone else, Spinel appears to be based on old-timey cartoons. In a recent interview with ComicBook.com, the series' creator Rebecca Sugar details the design philosophy behind Spinel.

Oh, that is very much in her DNA. When we started working on this, the first concept for her is that she would be an old rubber hose cartoon because you have to understand that she has been frozen in time, that she's old. She hasn't had a chance to develop, and to change, and live these arcs that our main character cartoons have. Looking at animation semiotically, it made sense that she'd have to look like this cartoon that's been trapped in time and denied this opportunity to grow. From the very beginning we knew that she would have to look, and move, and feel specifically out of place in the present and that that would be part of what makes her threatening and part of what makes her charming.

Sugar explains that; Spinel being designed as she was, in the style of rubber hose animation, was fitting both thematically and narratively. The character's songs were even intentionally meant to evoke an older style rather than the more modern tunes that other characters spit out. Sugar continued to talk about Spinel's design:

There's also a recurring theme in Steven Universe where he's faced with animation tropes that are old, and they just don't really work for him. He's clashing with them. All of the final arc of season five is Steven coming up against these old animated fairytale concepts that he just doesn't fit inside. There was a piece of Homeworld, there was a piece of that conflict that we hadn't gotten to do yet, and that is the old school rubber hose cartoon. We did returning to the castle. We did the mice making his clothes.

We have always had this theme of the friction between Steven and old notions of what a cartoon or what an animated piece of media should be, so it was only right. I've been waiting for so long to get to do a cartoon character like this because some of my favorite animation of all time is Fleischer cartoons, especially Grim Natwick, Betty Boop drawings. I really wanted to pay homage to the classic Ub Iwerks cartoon bounce. It was just exciting to have a story that lent itself to needing someone to feel old in that way.