at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con despite the fact that it was light in the way of details about the film’s plot — “light” being the operative word, here. While Rebecca Sugar didn’t stop to just list spoiler-y details about the movie, she did drop a handful of interesting tidbits. You just had to be listening for them.
The movie’s first trailer itself actually features a significant bit of contextual information about Steven Universe’s time jump two years into the future after the events of the last batch of episodes. Following their successful campaign to change the Homeworld Diamonds’ minds about the Earth, the Crystal Gems have seemingly followed through on Steven’s dream of establishing a cordial relationship between humans and Gemkind.
Though Steven’s back to spending a significant amount of time on Earth with his friends and family, he’s also taken up some of the responsibilities that come with being a Diamond, and can be seen sending transmissions through the Diamond Communication Channel to at least one distant Gem colony. During the panel, Sugar explained that the movie will introduce a number of new, uncorrupted Homeworld gems and, interestingly, humans and gems are going to interact with one another in a larger capacity than we’ve seen before.
Sugar also explained that the team secretly prepared for the challenge of putting together a full-length movie by using earlier, entirely musical episodes of Steven Universe as practice runs:
There were some episodes of the show that were actually sort of secret practice for doing this movie. “˜Mr. Greg’ was a chance to see if we could have a full musical episode and we managed to get seven songs into eleven minutes. We were able to get more songs into this.
For “˜Just One Day Let’s Only Thing About Love’ we already knew we were going to work on [the movie], so we were just like “˜can we do a big number?’ All of us were really sort of just testing our limits with that gearing up for this. But this is a completely different, just challenge — to be able to make something so full and complete. To integrate the story into all of the music, and to just get to — oh, I can’t say anything else.
When questions from the audience became a bit more pointed — like whether the movie will introduce any new fusions — the cast on stage clammed up and played coy, insisting that the only way to learn the answer is to actually watch the movie itself. But Sugar did open up a bit about some of the lingering questions regarding Pearl and White Diamond’s relationship to one another, which has been the subject of many a fan theory and discussion.
Unlike Yellow and Blue Diamond’s Pearls, whose colours and gem placements correspond with their owners’, Pearl of the Crystal Gems has always stood out because neither of those things seemed to apply to her and Pink Diamond/Rose Quartz, leading many to assume that she was originally assigned to another Gem. Given that Pearl’s gem is in her forehead like White Diamond’s, and it’s later revealed in “Together Alone” that “White Pearl” was originally Pink Diamond’s, it very much seemed like that theory was correct.
According to Sugar, though, it’s not. “Our Pearl never belonged to White, but White is involved of Pearls in general, so there is a connection, and that’s all I can really say at the moment,” she told the audience.
The way the most recent Stevenbomb brought its story to a tidy close might have left some feeling as if the Crewniverse inadvertently glossed over some of the still-burning questions people were left with after the show’s five seasons. But from the sounds of things, the team knows exactly what it’s doing, and it’s only a matter of time before most, if not all, of Steven Universe‘s mysteries are explained.
Steven Universe: The Movie premieres on Cartoon Network on September 3 in the U.S.. There’s no current news of an Australian premiere.