Creator / Lauren Faust

Lauren Faust is an animator whose projects include The Powerpuff Girls, Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, and My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. For a long time now, Lauren has been trying to get strong female leads for animation. She was attached to direct the forthcoming CGI feature Medusa for Sony Pictures Animation, but left the project in November 2015. She is currently working on her first novel and raising her first child.

She was born in Annapolis, Maryland and studied at the California Institute of the Arts (better known as CalArts) and decided to go into the animation industry. Lauren has been known for the preteen girls' Web site Milky Way and the Galaxy Girls, as well as being married to animator Craig McCracken.Her DeviantArt account is located here. She has a Twitter here. And she uses the tripcodes !5l/hHZnoEA and (on Ponychan) !cdljAQmhl.

No relation to the other Faust, although that just might offer an explanation as to how she found a way to get grown men to like ponies.

Films and other works Lauren Faust has worked on:

• The Maxx: The Animated Series, started out in the business here. She did the character layout. Was given part of Julie.
• Cats Don't Dance: Animator, she was given parts of Danny to animate on what the other animators didn't finish, and she later did a few scenes with Sawyer.
• Quest for Camelot: Animator, but she pretends that it never happened. See Old Shame on the Trivia page.
• The Powerpuff Girls: Storyboard artist, writer, director of several episodes, as well as supervising director for the show. She also was a writer for The Movie.
• The Iron Giant: Animator. Lauren's crew handled mostly Hogarth and Annie, but got to do a little work on Dean as well.
• Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends: Writer, developer, story editor, storyboard artist and character designer; she also wrote/co-wrote the made-for-TV specials Good Wilt Hunting and Destination Imagination, the latter of which won an Emmy in 2009. The design and personality of Frankie Foster is confirmed to have been partly based on Lauren.
• Milky Way and the Galaxy Girls: An original concept featuring girls named after planets and other celestial objects, a la Sailor Moon. She hopes to someday develop this into a show of her own.. Faust is holding stuffed dolls of the characters in the page pic. The web site is here.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: Series developer, executive producer, storyboard artist and creative director for the first season of the show, and consulting producer for the second season of the show. It is often considered as a Spiritual Successor to The Powerpuff Girls.
• Super Best Friends Forever: A series of roughly one minute shorts starring Batgirl, Supergirl, and Wonder Girl for Cartoon Network's DC Nation block.
• Bronies: The Extremely Unexpected Adult Fans of My Little Pony: Was a producer alongside John de Lancie and Tara Strong.
• Wander over Yonder: Craig McCracken's next major show. Lauren helped out as co-producer and head of story in its first season.
• Them's Fightin' Herds: Her first time working on a video game property. After the Indie Game team Mane 6 received a C&D from Hasbro for their My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic based fighting game, Lauren volunteered to work with them to create a new world and characters for an original property.
• Medusa: An upcoming animated feature from Sony about the classical mythology character. This would have been her debut as a feature film director, but she is no longer associated with the project.

Tropes that apply to Lauren Faust:

• Animesque: Her art style at least has the large eyes associated with anime. And at least two of her shows are also seen as Animesque.
• Author Appeal: Chocolate milk and references to The Big Lebowski, for some reason.
• Fanservice: She made a series of drawings labeled "Halloween cheesecake", featuring sexy monsters. She also did some parody "fan" art◊ of Sawyer from Cats Don't Dance that likely falls under this.
• Girls Need Role Models: Lauren takes this one seriously. She wants animation to have stronger leads for females that are outside stereotypical female roles such as sex symbol, love interest, etc. My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic is proof of what you can do with good female leads and storytelling.
• No Hugging, No Kissing: She made sure that there was to be no romance among the main characters in My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, as she considers it to be a major factor in bringing down thousands of girl's shows. Any romance shown, such as the weddings in "A Canterlot Wedding" (season 2), is for side characters only. As with her husband and his work, this applies to real life as well: the two of them never show romantic affection to one another publicly.
• Real Women Don't Wear Dresses: She is 100% opposed to this mentality, stating that most girl-centered cartoons fail due to bad writing/directing and not because of any inherent "girliness".
• Ridiculously Cute Critter: A good part of her character designs seems to be influenced by her time in The Powerpuff Girls. And most of those characters can kick a lot of butt. Including the aforementioned Powerpuff Girls.
• Strictly Formula: She says it's mostly unintentional, and there are differences between characters, but there are some recurring character archetypes in her works such as a goofy Genki Girl (Mars, Pinkie Pie, Batgirl), a hotheaded tomboy (Pluto, Rainbow Dash, Supergirl), and so on.

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