Rebooting ‘Zany to the Max

Exec producer Wellesley Wild and co-exec producer Gabe Swarr talk about the art of recapturing the Animaniacs’ lightning in a bottle.

For those of us who lived through the ‘90s, the popular Warner Bros. toons Animaniacs and Pinky and the Brain were two of the seminal pop culture phenoms of the decade. The good news is that show, which was created by Tom Ruegger and ran for fve seasons on Fox Kids and Kids’ WB From 1993 to 1998, is being revived and rebooted on Hulu this month thanks to the team at Warner Bros.

Animation.

Animaniacs’ original exec producer Steven Spielberg and principal voice actors Rob

Paulsen (Yakko), Jess Harnell (Wakko), Tress

MacNeille (Dot) and Maurice LaMarche (Brain) are also back for the revival which is also exec produced by Sam Register, and showrunner Wellesley Wild (Family Guy, Ted and Ted 2) and Gabe Swarr (Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness, Penguins of Madagascar, El Tigre). This time around, the show’s music is composed by Steven and Julie Bernstein, protégés of the original composer, Richard Stone. One of the revival’s biggest hat tricks is that it’s still fresh and relevant today, and the character designs and animation are remarkably faithful to the original show, while keeping up with the look and technology we expect to see in 2020. As Swarr explains, “When you see the new designs, they instantly feel familiar to the fans of the original show, but there are some big changes in how the characters are drawn. It’s kind of like the designs you remember them looking like, not so much what they actually look like.” The team at Warner Bros. Animation Burbank handles all of the show’s pre- and postproduction work, while the animation production is aided by teams at Yowza! Animation (Toronto), Tonic DNA (Montreal), Titmouse (Vancouver), Snipple (Manila) and Digital eMation, Tiger Animation and Saerom Animation (Seoul).

Not Your Typical Process Wild says Spielberg and Register wanted to take the reboot in an interesting direction since most children’s and family shows are storyboard-driven, while adult animation

‘I like to think of Animaniacs as the heir of the Looney Tunes. The slapstick, the self-aware comedy and the hand-drawn feeling are all part of the staying power of the show.’

— Exec producer Wellesley Wild

projects have a showrunner and a co-head of animation, with a writers’ room. “They wanted to set the show up like an adult series, and I was tapped as the showrunner because of my background in shows such as Family Guy and the Ted movies,” recalls Wild. “Steven wanted a very thorough look into what I was going

Timeless Toon: Wellesley Wild, Gabe Swarr and their team at Warner Bros. Animation strove to put a new, modern spin on the beloved Animaniacs characters while staying true to the special magic that made the original show such a huge fan favorite.

to shape the show as, and I was very honest about what I was going to do. So, after lots of back and forth, he ended up picking me.” Soon after, the show found its head of animation in Swarr, who has decades of experience in TV animation. “I remember I was working at Nickelodeon at the time I was frst approached,” says Swarr. “I was so worried about ruining the original show that I said no. There are some die-hard Animaniacs fans out there, and they have such hardcore ideas of the what the show was, that I hesitated. But then after meeting with Wellesley at Amblin in late 2017, we hit it off and realized that we had the same idea for the show.” Wild says he loves working with Gabe because they are open-minded about each other’s suggestions and ideas. “We have an excellent working relationship,” says Wild. “In a way, I’m in charge of what the characters are

‘The goal was to take the best DNA from the original and plus-ing it by using the latest developments in animation

— Co-exec producer Gabe Swarr

technology.’ saying and Gabe is in charge of what they look like. So, the key is to be open-minded and respect each other’s opinion and consider each other’s thoughts and ideas.” Both the producers admit that working with someone as iconic as Spielberg on such a popular franchise was a bit daunting at frst. “You have to put yourself on the spot,” says Wild. “Steven has very specifc ideas about what he wants in all of his projects, and Gabe and I were there to meet those specifc needs. Neither Gabe or I are schmoozy types, so we

just went in as ourselves and said, ‘This is what we do!’” Swarr says he and his team had a very broad approach at frst. “We presented Steven with a bunch of different looks and gradually narrowed it down to fnd out what he was looking for,” says the animation director. “The trick was, how to modernize it without departing too much from the original? The big thing was cracking that code.” Wild adds, “The goal was to take the best DNA from the original and plus-ing it by using the latest developments in animation technology to bring the property up to the 21st century.”

Yes, Mister Spielberg! As expected from a perfectionist auteur like Spielberg, the two-time Oscar-winning director was very involved at every step of the show’s production. “He looks at everything … every outline, pitch, script, animatic, design,” says Wild. “My initial outlines and scripts were the ones that went through the gauntlet, so it