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Sibling Slapstick Pencilmation creator Ross Bollinger sharpens his next big toon Gil Next Door.
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hose who’ve been following YouTube’s wild world of animation are familiar with Ross Bollinger and his hugely popular 2D animated series and channel Pencilmation. The snappy, dialogue-free toon, which features simple animated characters and slapstick situations, has entertained over 18 million subscribers since it was first introduced in June of 2009. After delivering 512 episodes of his hit web-series, the New York-based creator is getting ready to launch a new animated show, called Gil Next Door, which will be more along the lines of TV toons such as SpongeBob SquarePants and Rocko’s Modern Life. “We started thinking about the premise of the new show about a year ago,” says Bollinger during a recent phone call. “There are lots of shows about two best friends, but we started playing around with the older brother-younger brother dynamic. I have a younger brother who is six years my junior, so there’s some gap between us, and when you have that much age difference between siblings, you sometimes get a little bit of a parent-child dynamic going on, too. So, we hit upon a frog and a tadpole as a good way of capturing that relationwww.animationmagazine.net
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ship. Gil for the frog and Wolly for the tadpole.” Bollinger says one thing he loved about SpongeBob SquarePants was that the world was such an iconic underwater unit where all the elements really fit in. “I wanted to come up with a fun locale, but everything had already been done!” he notes. “Then, I realized that in the back of my mind that it would be fun to set the show in a world of pet cages and terrariums. I went to the School of Visual Arts in New York, and my wife and I lived in South Philadelphia for a while. So, we set the show in a world
that is condensed mishmash of all these different pet homes, just like a modern city.” Initially, Bollinger and his team of writers tried adapting some of the Pencilmation episodes to this new Gil and Wolly world. “Pencilmation has no dialogue, so we took an episode where Pencilmate sets out to buy a car and gets swindled into buying a crappy car, and figured out how we could reshape the situation for our characters, with dialogue. As we progressed, we moved away from the old episodes and came up with new situations. We
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