Even though my kid is a tween and doesn’t watch television geared for the six and under crowd anymore, I still do, especially when it has positive queer-adjacent messaging. Apple TV+’s new hour-long film Lulu Is a Rhinoceros, based on the popular 2018 picture book of the same name by Allison and Jason Flom (who also executive produced the project) seemed to fit the bill. It’s 45-minute long story full of catchy songs that remind you there’s nothing more important than being who you know you are.

Lulu (voiced by Auli‘i Cravalho) is a rhinoceros; that’s what she sees when she looks in the mirror every day. She is also “brave,” “kind,” and loves who she is. So why is that when people look at her, they can’t see the same things? Lulu meets her icon Regina the Rhino at a local park event, and shares with us that she lives by Regina’s edict to do daily acts of kindness to uplift her community, which is part of what makes her a rhino. She sings about self-love and later, when she tells her friend Cory (a cow with fabulous footwear choices) that she’s feeling low after being told she’s not a rhino multiple times, Cory shares a little tip with her: you can change your perspective any time of day. Even if it’s right before bed, all you have to do is remind yourself that you have the power to change the narrative. It’s a message for everyone, not just kids.

I had the pleasure of speaking with Tony Award winner Alex Newell, who voices Cory, via Zoom. “It’s a story about acceptance and love. Not just about acceptance from other people — your own acceptance of what you want, who you are, and what you wanna be,” they told me.

The messaging in Lulu Is a Rhinoceros is one of the main things that drew Newell to the project, and why they keep coming back to projects geared towards young children. To them, early childhood is the “formative years of acceptance,” and stories like Lulu are good examples of how accepting yourself and others and being kind to everyone makes a huge difference. They told me they gravitated to the “understanding that just because people don’t see you as one thing does not stop you from being able to be your true self,” Lulu possesses.

Throughout the movie, Lulu encounters others who try to invalidate who she is. There are a pair of chickens who tell her that to be a rhino, she needs to be covered in mud and have pointy ears. A goose tells her that to be a rhino, she has to make honks and squeaks, while a cat tells her that a rhino has to know how to make good jelly sandwiches. In an attempt to get people to believe her, she tries to conform into what their views of a rhino are.

When watching the movie, you can’t help but draw the parallels between Lulu and the LGBTQ+ community. In a 2018 interview about the book, co-author, music executive Jason Flom said he “wanted to create a story that would speak to kids who are feeling down because they are being victimized.” Additionally, he hoped he “could have a chance to have an influence on kids, as their young minds are being formed, on whether or not they’re about to turn into a bully or an empathetic being. I want to help steer them down the right path.”

Newell, who was the first nonbinary actor to win a Tony Award for Featured Actor in a Musical, definitely had the queer community in their mind while they were performing Cory.

“I think that during all this time, we need more things like this to show the love that you can have for somebody else or something else, and still have nothing being taken away from you,” they shared.

They shared with me that they were “pretty steadfast” in their identity even as a child when I asked how seeing something like Lulu Is a Rhinoceros would have impacted them as a child. Despite having a strong sense of self, they believe that seeing a story like this “validates” what those steadfast kids may already know about themselves.

At a time when there is so much outside messaging that tells queer kids they shouldn’t exist, it’s easy to cling to a character like Lulu. Lulu is the steadfast kid that Newell was. It’s not that she doesn’t feel hurt by people thinking they know who she is better than she does. It’s that in the end, she doesn’t let them have the final say in how she feels about herself. She knows that one day they will see her the way she sees herself.

And it does help that she has other characters like Cory the cow, a beatboxing rabbit named Hip Hop, and a tickbird named Flom Flom to remind her that even if others don’t see it, they know she’s a rhino in her heart.

At the end of my conversation with Alex Newell, I asked what they hope people take away from watching the movie. “I think we have to start affording people more grace,” they said. “Grace is acceptance, time and space. We aren’t congruently the same all the time and that’s okay. We have to give grace to those who don’t see that, and we have to give grace to those who are still on their journey to accept that for themselves.”

On a repeat watch of the movie, my 11-year-old watched with me, even if he was trying to pretend he wasn’t that into it. “Why are they trying to tell her she isn’t who she says she is?” he asked me. “They don’t get to tell her who she is.” That’s the power of Lulu.

Lulu Is a Rhinoceros begins streaming on Apple TV+ on May 30.

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