Gwen Stefani's new cartoon 'Kuu Kuu Harajuku' is 'God’s timing'

For Gwen Stefani fans of a certain generation, “Harajuku” is a part of her identity.

Stefani’s 2004 debut solo album Love. Angel. Music. Baby. introduced the singer’s candy-colored, Tokyo-inspired visions of pop music, starring her entourage of “Harajuku Girls.”

Over a decade later, Stefani is introducing her Harajuku universe to a new audience with an animated children's show, Kuu Kuu Harajuku, which premiered Monday on Nickelodeon.

The singer and designer didn’t want her Harajuku fascination “to just be a musical record,” she told USA TODAY. “I wanted it to be a world.”

“Doing interviews about it, I kind of realized, ‘Oh, it’s God’s timing,’” she said about the show. “I had to go through all that, I had to wear all those costumes, I had to have kids for eight years and watch cartoons for ten, to get to this point.”

The show follows the adventures of the girl group HJ5 as they navigate their fictional Harajuku World. While Stefani’s Harajuku Girls were of Asian descent and her Harajuku Lovers clothing line specifically drew from Japanese fashion, her new show presents a global, ethnically ambiguous take on Japan’s cutesy Kawaii culture.

“The show’s DNA, its visual ideas, was taken from Harajuku land, or whatever, but the show is definitely not that,” Stefani said. “It’s a make-believe world where anything can happen.”

Girl power is ever-present in Stefani’s music, and Kuu Kuu Harajuku’s five heroines, Love, Angel, Music, Baby and G, were brought to life by women with their generation’s daughters in mind.

“Once it was coming together, we went to Nickelodeon and said, ‘Hey girls,’ because it was mostly girls that we talked to,” she said. “‘We have this idea.’ And they went for it.”

The singer described the show’s main characters as “everything I am, the girly girl that likes to get dressed up and have fun, but also hold her own and make things happen,” pointing to the absence of female-focused kids’ shows when she was younger.

“And a cartoon for girls? There’s not very many, and we certainly didn’t have them growing up,” she continued. “So I think it’s fun to take everything I loved as a little girl and put it all in this world.”

For Stefani, part of of developing the series’ main characters was giving her Harajuku Girl a modern update for a younger audience. “They needed to have more human bodies,” she explained.

“Over the years, we’ve had so many incarnations of these girls,” she said. “Now, I wanted to make sure they can dance, they can sing, they can move, they have the right bodies where they can wear clothes. “

And as a mom to three boys — Kingston, 10, Zuma, 8, and Apollo, 2 — Stefani made sure that Kuu Kuu Harajuku appealed to kids of all genders. “My boys still watch ‘girl stuff,’ my niece plays with ‘boy stuff’ too, and that’s what’s so fun to me,” she said.

From her kids’ reaction to the show, she’s succeeding. “They love it. I’ve been able to put their names in some of the episodes, and some extras kind of look like them, and our dog is in there somewhere.” (Stefani obsessives, keep your eyes peeled.)

“All I know is that if you put a show on, and they don’t hear you when you talk to them, that’s good,” she said. “If they’re ignoring you, you did something right.”

Catch Kuu Kuu Harajuku daily at 4 p.m. ET/PT this week, then Saturdays at 8:30 a.m. on Nickelodeon.