Editor's Note: Anthony Sturmas has been part of the FC community since day one. When Ninja Girl launched, we knew we wanted to cover it properly. We compiled this piece from conversations with Anthony about the project, its origin, and what it means to finally launch Ninja Girl.
From a TikTok Idea to a Full Franchise
Anthony Sturmas is the specialist a director calls before a single frame is shot. Over 26 years and 106 titles, he's been the one translating scripts into visual blueprints: the storyboards that shows exactly how a scene should look, move, and feel before the camera rolls. Feature films, network television, commercial campaigns. He’s the “middle man” between script and filming.
Ninja Girl didn't start as a franchise. It started as an animatic Anthony posted to TikTok: Biker Girl, a Kawasaki Ninja H2R-riding vigilante who robs drug dealers and the mafia to give back to her neighborhood. Raw, street-level, unapologetically fun. Stephen Meier, his creative partner, connected with it instantly. The two started going back and forth on ideas, and somewhere in those early sketches, Ninja Girl was born.
"What started as a small idea evolved into a multi-platform franchise," Anthony says. "The world kept expanding every time we touched it. It didn't stay an idea on paper. It became a movement."
That movement now lives across Roblox, Webtoon, animation, and a growing merch line, with live appearances on the horizon. Whirlygig Studios, led by CEO Russ Uttley, came on board to build out the game world and handle cross-platform production. The Ninja Girl universe, as of July 2026, is fully launched and running.
So, Who Is Ninja Girl?
She's a Chinatown kid. A delivery worker grinding long hours at a pizza shop, navigating the neighborhood with her mischievous monkey sidekick. She's not a princess, not a prodigy, not a chosen one with royal blood or a cosmic destiny. She's an ordinary kid who decides she's done being underestimated.
Chinatown in the Ninja Girl universe is Los Angeles, specifically: lowriders and skateboarders, walls covered in graffiti and tributes to Bruce Lee, markets and alleys and narrow streets that feel like a world of their own. "It's a vibrant, dense neighborhood," Anthony says, "where culture and chaos and community all collide." It's the kind of environment that shapes a character rather than being chosen by one.
Her weapons come straight from her delivery bag. Pizza boxes as shields. Fortune cookies as distractions. Soy sauce packets as swift, surprising strikes. She also carries nunchucks, her one genuine weapon, kept for the moments when the stakes demand it. The contrast is deliberate: playful and unpredictable most of the time, focused and serious when she needs to be.
"True power lies not in the weapon itself, but in the strength of the girl wielding it." That's the core of the character and the DNA of the whole franchise.
The Anti-Chosen-One
The genre Ninja Girl lives in runs almost entirely on the chosen-one trope. Destiny, prophecy, royal lineage, special powers. It's the scaffolding underneath most of the major franchises aimed at young audiences. Anthony deliberately stripped all of it out.
"In a landscape saturated with characters born into greatness, Ninja Girl is a refreshing alternative," he says. "Her abilities are not a result of inheritance or fate. They're the product of relentless effort and the harsh realities of her upbringing. Her triumphs are hard-won and her setbacks carry weight because they're not softened by any foretold destiny."
For a franchise explicitly built around empowering young girls who get bullied, that choice matters. She's not a hero because the universe decided she was. She's a hero because she refused to be underestimated. That's a story any kid can (and should) actually inhabit.
The tagline is "We are all Ninja Girl." Anthony's explanation of it is the clearest articulation of what the franchise is actually for: "It's not a slogan. It's a mirror. Ninja Girl is built on the same raw material every kid already has: focus, grit, instinct, and the ability to stand up when life pushes down. Everyone has had a moment where they needed to be braver than they felt, sharper than they were, or louder than people expected. The tagline says heroism isn't exclusive. It's accessible."
26 Years of Other People's Stories
The thing that makes Anthony's perspective on Ninja Girl unusual is the 26 years of storyboarding sitting underneath it. He's spent nearly three decades taking scripts he didn't write and making them move. That's a particular kind of discipline: you're the interpreter, not the author. You work inside someone else's rules.
Building your own IP is the opposite. "You are not merely visualizing decisions made by others," he says. "Instead, you are the one making those choices. Every aspect of the world you build is a question only you can resolve, from the sensory details of the environment to the cultural fears and moral dilemmas faced by your characters. When working on a studio script, you shape specific moments. When developing your own IP, you're crafting an entire mythology."
The hand-drawn aesthetic of Ninja Girl is a direct extension of that 26-year foundation, and a deliberate stance against what's possible in 2026. "While AI can mimic artistic styles, it lacks the nuanced human decision-making that infuses each line with emotion: hesitation, pressure, rhythm, and the unique imperfections that contribute to a piece's emotional depth. Hand-drawing demands significant time and energy, but it offers something AI cannot replicate. A true sense of identity."
Translating that instinct into a Roblox game required a different kind of thinking. "A storyboard artist's brain doesn't switch disciplines," Anthony says. "It translates. The same instincts still fire: geography, clarity, silhouette, rhythm, cause and effect. The difference is that instead of drawing a moment, you're designing a system of moments. You stop thinking in frames and start thinking in loops. It's storyboarding with physics turned on."
Alignment, Not Uniformity
Ninja Girl is a collaboration, and Anthony is specific about what each person brings. Stephen Meier is the narrative architect. "He can take raw instinct, fragments, and emotional beats and turn them into a spine. A story that knows where it's going and why. His writing gives the visuals purpose, direction, and emotional stakes."
Russ Uttley and Whirlygig Studios built the game world and handled the kinetics of the 3D environment. Anthony brings the visual DNA: line weight, character silhouettes, spatial dynamics, the grit and humor and rhythm that define how the world looks and feels.
"The shared identity comes from alignment, not uniformity," he says. "It's not about making the same thing. It's about making things that feel like they belong to the same world. When the writing, the directing, the boarding, and the production all orbit the same creative philosophy, the result is a world that looks authored instead of assembled."
What's Next
The Roblox game is live now. The Webtoon is the piece Anthony is most focused on getting right alongside it, where the visual storytelling can run without the constraints of a game engine. Merch, live appearances, and animation are all in motion.
"A year from now, I want Ninja Girl to feel inevitable," Anthony says. "Like one of those characters who suddenly shows up everywhere and people swear they've known her forever. The goal isn't just visibility. It's cultural presence."
Most of all, he wants the audience to choose her. "I want her to stand as a fully realized hero, not because she was engineered to be one, but because audiences chose her."
Why We're Featuring This
Anthony was one of FC's earliest contributors, and we've watched Ninja Girl evolve from a TikTok animatic to a launched, multi-platform franchise. This is the follow-up that piece always needed.
Beyond the FC connection, this is a story about what happens when someone who has spent decades executing other people's creative visions finally builds one that's entirely his own. The result, in this case, is a street-level hero built for young girls who need one, drawn by hand, launched independently, and designed to last.
"We are all Ninja Girl." Go find out what that means.
About Anthony Sturmas
Anthony Sturmas began his artistic journey as a graffiti artist in Los Angeles and Long Beach in the early 1980s. He received a Marvel Comics Scholarship to The Kubert School before opting to stay on the West Coast, where he created murals across Los Angeles. He later earned a BFA in Multimedia Animation from The Art Institute of Los Angeles and a scholarship to Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, where he trained under Marc Stricland. His storyboard mentors include Bill Recinos (Ghostbusters) and Douglas Kirk (DreamWorks). Over 26 years and 106 titles, he has worked across feature films, network television, and commercial advertising. Ninja Girl is his first original IP.
Play Ninja Girl on Roblox: HERE
Ninja Girl Website: WeAreAllNinjaGirl.com
Anthony's Website: ASturmas.com
