Annie keeps her family’s micro-farm on a cramped apartment balcony and gets through Year 4 with the help of Josh Zuckerman’s Pony, a sugar-rushed quadruped who thinks every crisis is an excuse for a game. Each 11-minute romp opens on humdrum suburbia and ends with fire engines, escaped livestock or an entire beach relocated to the high street, yet Annie’s loyalty never wavers. The scripts mine slapstick from the small print of city living: no pets clauses, overzealous dog catchers, artisanal jam contests, a ballet recital invaded by a runaway petting zoo.
Blue Zoo’s Brighton studio drew the short Pony for Nickelodeon’s 2017 shorts programme, and the finished series keeps the hand-drawn squash-and-stretch energy that sold the pilot. Jessica DiCicco gives Annie the weary sigh of a nine-year-old who already knows the adult world is nonsense; Abe Benrubi and India de Beaufort supply the beatific, exhausted parents who somehow fund constant property damage. After twenty half-hours on Nickelodeon from January to December 2020, Nicktoons burned off the second season between October 2021 and May 2022, by which time ratings had slipped from half a million viewers to a few thousand. Paramount+ quietly erased the lot in March 2024, but the short Coffee Run still picked up a 2022 Kidscreen Award for best short-form content.
Production Details
Nickelodeon / 2 Seasons / 78 Episodes / 2020
Created by: Ant Blades
Producer(s): Adam Shaw Denise Green
Main Cast
Jessica DiCicco as Annie McLeach (voice)
Abraham Benrubi as Mr. McLeach (voice)
Josh Zuckerman as Pony (voice)
India de Beaufort as Mrs. McLeach (voice)
Ricardo Hurtado as Blake (voice)
