Natasha Kline Got Death Threats for Telling Her Story In Disney’s Primos. That Didn’t Stop Her

For Mexican-American creator Natasha Kline, the forthcoming animated Disney show Primos is a reflection of her experiences growing up in Los Angeles. “I wanted to make the show to create a place where all stories are accepted,” she tells Refinery29 Somos. The series follows Tater, an introverted 10-year-old girl modeled after Kline and her childhood when her home would become the site of a summer-long sleepover with her many cousins. “It's been really cathartic for me because that was what my family did for me — they were a source of acceptance, and that's what I wanted to project with the show,” Kline adds. Unfortunately, when Disney first shared the 49-second theme song and opening sequence in an attempt to begin marketing Primos, Kline got the exact opposite reaction — specifically from Latines.

Instead of approval for a show she’s been dreaming of since she was a kid, she received death threats. Critics, many in Latin America, blasted Primos and its creators for perpetuating what they saw as stereotypes of their communities (e.g. crowded houses, low-income families, and earthquakes) and general disrespect through so-called improper Spanish and sepia tone animations. With Primos, Kline aimed to tell her specific, state-side story, but that messaging became lost in a swirl of social media fervor and poorly implemented marketing.

A year later, ahead of Primos’ July 25 premiere, Kline looks back at that experience, calling it “painful” but not “totally a shock.” With ancestry in Mexico and the southern U.S., she says, “My whole life, I never really felt like I was completely accepted by either side.”

She tries to see the upside of that initial backlash, noting that “when you're an artist, you're making something in the hopes that you'll get feedback and that you'll get noticed and you'll get people talking about it. And it definitely created a conversation.”

Today, she shares that “it just made me realize how much people have longed to have their own story told. And that's super valid, for people to look at this and be like, ‘Well, why can't that be me?’”

But even if the premise was different, Kline — or any other creator — couldn’t capture most Mexican-American experiences, let alone those of all of Latin America, with one show.

She declares herself “lucky” to have had the opportunity to make Primos and then refine it after the criticism (it looks like the earthquake asides and sepia tone are no more), but she’s also put in the work. 

“I was 4 or 5 when I decided I wanted to be an animator,” she says. Generally, she didn’t see herself and her multicultural family on TV, but that didn’t stop her. “As a little kid, I was thinking, ‘Man, I would love to make a show one day that featured all the different skin tones that could happen in one family, all the different cultures, and have it be sort of like, Hey Arnold!, [but] based in the reality where we lived. So I always was working with that goal in mind,” she reminisces, praising the diversity and “realness of the city” of the ‘90s Nickelodeon animated series.

“I worked in the animation industry for like 15 years before I pitched my show,” says Kline, who served as a director, storyboard artist, character designer, and more.

She began to develop the show in 2019 right before the Covid-19 pandemic hit and recalls that time fondly. “The best part of my career, honestly, was just having this cool little bubble at home of creativity, where I was just working on this project,” she says. “And it was also really fun, too, because my family was very involved in the development of it.”

Kline crowdsourced memories from her real-life primos and put details big and small — recounting conversations that went: “I remember that dog, but remember the chickens? Remember this? Remember that? Remember the way that pop would pour three different types of cereal into his cereal bowl?” — in a Google Doc. She later layered that texture into Primos.

The result is a mischievously joyful celebration of family and self-love that doesn’t homogenize identity and culture. Take for example “Summer of No Sabo,” where all the primos team up to get Tater to speak Spanish, believing, as one character says, “Spanish is just asleep in her head somewhere.”

“That idea where Spanish is in your DNA deep down — real people have actually told me [that],” she says. “And I wish that was the case, because definitely, if I could speak Spanish completely fluently, then I would.”

The primos fail to get Tater to speak Spanish — but the story finds a way to conclude joyfully anyway as the plot then becomes about acceptance. When Tater gets overwhelmed, the primos switch from pushing her to embracing her. They love her regardless of her Spanish, and their love nudges her to stop judging herself for her language abilities.

And that’s the crux of Primos — it takes what can be negative aspects of our cultures, like questioning someone’s identity based on their Spanish, Portuguese, or Haitian Creole abilities, or lack thereof, and reimagines them. “Summer of Quehaceres” artfully pulls off the same trick by examining the expectations of eldest daughters. Tater’s mom asks her to help maintain the household, but that doesn’t mean the mom’s the villain. “Because the truth is that parents do this because they have a lot of responsibilities,” Kline says. “My mom used to tell me she was really glad that I was there to help her, and it was a source of pride for me. But at the same time, I had to balance being a kid and being the oldest.”

In Primos, Tater manages this balance by getting the other cousins involved — including the boys. In fact, upon being asked, the “nacho bros” declare that they “were raised right” and get right to work. Here, household duties cross gender lines, emphasizing that everyone should do their fair share. It’s the best of our culture without passing over the problems. Kline clearly renders these lessons with love and affection. 

And she even brings this same positivity to her critics. When remembering the backlash a year ago, she recounts she received “this amazing encyclopedia of human experience” from “people writing just giant letters to me saying, ’Here's my life; here's what my life is. Why couldn't you have done that or something like that?’”

Kline doesn’t think she’ll be able to use any of it in her career or in Primos (the show is “just my story. Sorry about that,” she remarks). But she affirms, “It’s useful to me just as a human being to be able to see so many stories and be able to empathize with people.”

And that feeling of generosity, of meeting people where they are, and using that moment of acceptance to grow is at the heart of Primos. It’s a lesson Primos has already inadvertently proved many of us could use — thanks to the kneejerk, judge-a-book-by-its-cover (or here, a show by its theme song) reaction to its initial marketing. Hopefully, now that we can see the full show, adapted in good faith by Kline to address the criticism, we can learn from Tater how to form radically accepting families that free each of us to practice self-love and dream big — even or especially if that dream is just to tell our own stories.