previous page
TOC
TV/Streaming
Sonia Manzano
Everybody Loves Alma Sesame Street veteran Sonia Manzano guides us through the charming Nuyorican world of Alma’s Way.
A
nyone who grew up watching Sesame Street has beautiful memories of actress Sonia Manzano’s dynamic presence as the character Maria on the show from 1971 to 2015. The 15-time Emmy-winning writer/actress/singer-songwriter, who also wrote for Sesame Street and the animated series Little Bill, will return to the PBS and the children’s entertainment world this month as the creator of the series Alma’s Way. The beautifully animated show, which is produced by Fred Rogers Productions, follows the adventures of six-year-old Alma Rivera, a confident Puerto Rican girl who helps kids recognize their own power to come up with solutions to their problems. Manzano tells Animation Magazine that she started thinking about the idea for the show back in 2015 when she was still on Sesame Street. “Linda Simensky [head of content at PBS Kids] asked me to create an animated show based on my own Puerto Rican background and to have Alma
be a Nuyorican girl who is raised in the south Bronx neighborhood, just as I was,” she recalls. “Animation was a new format for me to work in because I had only worked on the live-action parts of Sesame Street. I learned that it’s a much longer, more labor-intensive process than
what I used to. But I found it all fascinating.”
A Talented Trailblazer Manzano, who broke ground as one of the first Latina actresses on national TV, says Alma reminds her of herself as a young girl. “She is just like I was, but better and nicer!” says the actress. “She’s curious, inquisitive and likes to think things out. She finds refuge in her mind, and that’s what I wanted kids to take away from our show.” As the show creator, Manzano says she loves the fact that animators are able to tell a different story than what’s written on the page. “They can embellish things and make something really come to life,” she notes. “For example, when a toy falls down the stairs, it doesn’t just simply land, it bounces around a few times until it finds the right spot. When one of our characters, Junior, loses his tooth, the
www.animationmagazine.net 24
TOC
november 21
previous page
