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This Show Really Grows on You! Creator Stephen P. Neary gives us the scoop on his wonderful new HBO Max series The Fungies!
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hen Stephen Neary was a kid growing up in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, he didn’t know that working in animation was a realistic goal. He loved cartoons, drew a lot and made little stop-motion movies in iMovie. After high school, he started taking animation classes at New York University, and that’s when he fell in love with the medium all over again. “Every time I watched a storyboard pitch from a movie’s DVD extras, I thought that would be my dream job!” he says. This summer, the talented 35-yearold saw the launch of his own 2D-animated show on HBO Max. The colorful, imaginative series is called The Fungies! and is set on a mycological metropolis of Fungietown and follows the many quests of Seth, one of the town’s young mushroom inhabitants who loves scientific adventures. The idea for the show came to Neary as he was reading about prototaxites — ancient fungi that grew on our planet about 400 million years ago. “I had never even heard of them,” he tells us. “Thinking about the world in its ‘youth’ made me think about being a kid, and what it’s like to gradually become more aware of your feelings as your world grows larger and larger. There’s so much wonder, but the emotions can be new and overwhelming. I wanted to explore these ideas in a show that had a sincere www.animationmagazine.net
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tone but was still weird and funny, like how I remember ‘90s cartoons from my childhood.”
Creatures Rule Neary says he loved all those fun “creature” shows — toons like The Smurfs, The Wuzzles, Noozles, Popples and Fraggle Rock. “I think of The Fungies! almost like we’re rebooting a cartoon that never existed in the first place. It all sounds a little nuts, but a prehistoric setting was the perfect setting for all the stories we found ourselves wanting to tell,” he notes. “Fungies are weird little fungus people,
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but they love each other,” he further explains. “The characters drive the story, so while they can pull apart their bodies to form a bicycle, we keep the show grounded in real emotions. We’ve got an amazing cast. Funny ad-libs and slice-of-life character moments are a big part of every episode. Art-wise, we draw all the backgrounds in pencil and paint them digitally. It gives the cartoon a rich storybook quality I love. It’s fun to see the line difference between the backgrounds and the digital characters and props. It’s like being a kid and knowing which door Scooby would open because you could
september|october 20
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