Animation Magazine - Siggraph Issue - Aug #332

VOLUME

THE MUST-HAVE LIST 4

Shahidi introduces us

5

Jeff Rowe and Kyler Spears tell us about the magical mania of making Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem A SINGING AND DANCING ORIGIN STORY

The team behind Miraculous: Lady Bug & Cat Noir, The Movie discusses mixing musical and Marvel tropes in their much-anticipated project. MONKEYING

6

The First Slam Dunk producer Toshiyuki Matsui and creator/director Takehiko Inoue discusses the making of the beloved basketball movie.

The team behind the new Justice League: Warworld movie shares their thoughts on the innovative summer home release.

TELEVISION/STREAMING

new show Mech Cadets promises to take sci-fi animation to new heights this summer.

Mutant Mayhem will entertain audiences in theaters on August 2. DAY IN THE LIFE A DAY IN THE LIFE 40 Tiny Toons Looniversity showrunner Erin Gibson takes us through her loony-toony day. VFX & TECH THE MAGIC OF DIGITALLY DE-AGING A BELOVED HERO 36 ILM’s digital animator Matt Shumway tells us about his digital adventures on Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny TECH REVIEWS 38 Wacom Cintiq Pro 27, HP Z4 G5 and Dehancer OFX 7. SIGGRAPH AT 50 32 This year’s computer graphics confab in L.A. celebrates the early days of CG while offering a striking look at the best of today’s animation achievements. EVENTS A VISIT FROM ABOVE

THE GREEN DUDES ARE BACK!

Jeff Rowe and Kyler Spears tell us about the magical mania of making Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem.

FEATURES 22

VFX & TECH

THE MAGIC OF DIGITAL DE-AGING A BELOVED HERO 36

6 36

LOOK WHO’S BEEN DEFROSTED AGAIN! 22

ILM’s digital animator Matt Shumway tells us about his digital adventures on Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.

Animayhem

at Comic-Con: Enter the 2nd Dimension!

Hulu Animayhem invites you to enter the 2nd Dimension with your favorite adult animated series at Comic-Con in San Diego. This delightfully out-of-whack experience immerses you in the 2D worlds of Futurama, Solar Opposites, The Great North, Family Guy, Archer, Bob’s Burgers and American Dad. Surprises and exclusives await those who travel to the 2nd Dimension with Hulu Animayhem!

Location: 501 Convention Way

Times: July 20: 11:30 a.m. – 7 p.m., July 21: 9:30 a.m.

–

July 23: 9:30

Déjà Vu All over Again?

Everything old is new again this summer! We have Indiana Jones and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles entertaining us in theaters, while the gang from Futurama is making us laugh at our insane world on TV. The animated characters that ruled our imagination in the ‘80s and ‘90s are continuing their adventures in shiny new packages and finding another generation of fans along the way.

We are thrilled to put two of these favorites (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem and Futurama) on two special collector’s edition covers of Animation Magazine this month. Fortunately, we were able to interview longtime Futurama producer Claudia Katz and supervising director Peter Avanzino as well as actor Billy West, who voices many of the show’s fan-favorite characters, in time for the new season premiere on Hulu this month. Our regular contributor Jeff Spry has also prepared a terrific interview with director Jeff Rowe and co-director Kyler Spears about their innovative new take on the Turtles in the big Paramount animated movie.

Another hot animated show makes a smooth transition to the big screen in Miraculous: Ladybug & Cat Noir, The Movie. French animation veteran Jeremy Zag, producer Aton Soumache and their teams at Zagtoon and Method Animation have done a terrific job of bringing us a musical origin story for their popular young superheroes. Make sure you read Karen Idelson’s insightful interview with the creative team behind this much-anticipated feature set against a beautiful Paris backdrop.

Comeback Kids: Futurama and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were our cover stories back in Dec. 2002 and April 2007.

Everyone’s favorite computer animation conference, SIGGRAPH, is celebrating its 50th anniversary August 6-10 at the L.A. Convention Center. Veteran journalist Ellen Wolff spoke to the show’s Electronic Theater director Kalina Borkiewicz and CG pioneer Jim Blinn, who is best known for his revolutionary depiction of the planets in Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. Ellen has prepared a terrific round-up of what to expect at this year’s edition, which takes a look back at half a century of eye-popping achievements. If you happen to be at SIGGRAPH this year, please make sure to stop by the Animation Magazine booth and say hi. We’ll have some fun giveaways and free magazines for our friends as usual.

By the way, make sure you order the next issue of the magazine (which arrives in early September). I am already excited about some of the new indie movies, TV shows and festival shorts we are going to cover next month. The entertainment industry has had a rough year, but common wisdom used to dictate that audiences would always pay to see a fantastic movie or watch a well-crafted animated show at home. Let’s hope that doesn’t change anytime soon, or else we’ll have to find other ways to entertain ourselves before our planet turns into a giant ball of fire.

Ramin Zahed Editor in Chief ramin@animationmagazine.net

AUGUST 2023

VOL. 37, ISSUE 7, NO. 332 info@animationmagazine.net

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In-Betweens by Bob Harper

The Must-Have List

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse — The Art of the Movie

Embark on a guided tour of the Sony Pictures Animation blockbuster through exclusive imagery and text collected from the production. Penned by Animag’s own Ramin Zahed, the vibrant 224-page hardcover features concept art, sketches, character designs and storyboards from the envelopepushing sequel to Miles Morales’ Oscarwinning 2018 adventure Into the Spider-Verse, as well as interviews with key creatives such as writers/

producers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller. Pull up a chair and discover your new favorite corner of the multiverse web! [Abrams, $40]

Gurren Lagann Archives

Bust through the heavens with your soul, Gurren Lagann! Sixteen years after the original manga and anime series debuted, fans can dig into this tale of teens who escape their subterranean world in a powerful mecha and join the human rebels in a fight against the Spiral King! The 488-page paperback from studio Gainax is an epic collection of illustrations, designs for characters, vehicles, mecha

Mystical Medleys: A Vintage Tarot Poster Book

and environments, as well as full-color art and rarely seen pieces. Treat yourself to true anime indulgence — and remember what Kamina said: “Go beyond the impossible and kick reason to the curb!” [Udon Ent. | $60]

Ed Hooks’ Acting for Animators (Fifth Edition)

The essential guide to creating empathetic and dynamic character performances, fully revised with four new scene-by-scene analyses (Flee, Soul, Porco Rosso and The Triplets of Belleville), updated “Classroom Notes” section and access to an online database of all of Hooks’ previous film analyses. [Routledge | HC $160 | PB $49 | Dig. $38]

Tap into the surreal appeal of old timey toons with this perfect blend of the adorable and the occult. Based on artist Gary Hall’s best-selling Tarot deck (avail. from Sterling Ethos for $24), this book is packed with removable prints to brighten up any empty wall and draw the eye of fortune upon you favorably. [Liminal 11 | $23]

The Super Mario Bros. Movie: Power Up Edition

Replay the epic video-game adventure whenever you like with this multi-format release of the year’s biggest box-office hit yet! In addition to the eye-popping Illumination/Nintendo animated feature — directed by Aaron Horvath & Michael Jelenic and featuring an all-star cast led by Chris Pratt, Anya Taylor-Joy and Charlie Day — the set includes making-of and cast featurettes, the “Peaches” lyric video and a field guide to the movie’s hidden levels. [Universal | 4K $30 | BD $25 | DVD $20]

One Piece Film Red

Toei Animation’s global anime hit (the #1 film in Japan for 2022) comes home with the full Straw Hat pirate gang in tow! The franchise’s 15th

Gotta Catch ‘Em All!

A pop culture phenomenon meets ancient craft techniques in the fascinating exhibit POKÉMON X KOGEI | Playful Encounters of Pokémon and Japanese Craft , on view at JAPAN HOUSE Los Angeles from July 25, 2023 to January 7, 2024. The show features 70+ artworks by more than 20 artists reimagining the hit brand through ceramics, textiles, metalwork and more. [japanhousela.com]

feature anchors on a performance by Uta, the world’s most beloved singer, and her surprising ties to Luffy. Bonus features include A Faint Memory! Luffy and Red-Haired’s Daughter Uta!, A Pledge for the New Genesis! Luffy and Uta!, The Captain’s Log of the Legend! ‘Red-Haired’ Shanks! and more. [Crunchyroll | BD $23]

South Park: Seasons 21-25

With audio commentary by Trey Parker & Matt Stone, deleted scenes and art gallery.

[Paramount | BD $47 | DVD $23]

Animal Treasure Island

1971 feature directed by Hiroshi Ikeda with key animation by Hayao Miyazaki, new to Blu-ray. [Discotek | BD $25]

Elemental

Table Top Fun

Immerse yourself in a fantastical world of adventure in Avatar: The Last Airbender — Crossroads of Destiny, a new board game for ages 10+ (2-4 players). Team up with friends to play as Team Avatar (Aang, Katara, Sokka and Toph) on a quest to defeat the Fire Nation as you navigate story encounters and level up through combat challenges inspired by the iconic animated series. [Funko Games | $33 | funkogames.com]

— Mercedes Milligan

image credit-- “Jolteon” by Taiichiro Yoshida [ph: Taku Saiki]

A Visit from Above

Mitra Shahidi introduces us to her charming Tribeca prize-winning short, Starling.

Last month, Starling, Mitra Shahidi’s beautiful short about the spirit of a cute little girl who shoots down to Earth so spend her birthday with her parents won the top animation prize at the Tribeca Festival. We caught up with the talented director to find out more about her project:

On the short’s origins and team: I started working on it in late 2018 when I couldn’t stop drawing a little cute spirit that comes down to Earth to visit. In my mind, it represented a lively soul that lived on and shined upon me. It percolated in my mind for a long time before I realized I needed to make this into a film, since that is the medium I work with. We teamed up with Jessica Heidt and the film started to take shape into reels after that. It was a Pixar Co-op, which means we get to use the equipment at Pixar, but we own the film.

Lots of incredible colleagues at Pixar held the leadership helm, such as producer Jessica Heidt, animation supervisor Holger Leihe, director of photography and composer Andrew Jimenez, film editor Ayse Arkali, production designer Celine You and VFX supervisor Kristoffer Landes. More than 70 people worked on it from 14 different countries. We used everything we could get our hands on, such as TVPaint, Toon Boom, Blender, Photoshop, After Effects and more.

Can you tell us more about how your child-

hood friend’s passing inspired the short? My friend was an absolute shining star. She was larger than life, extremely energetic, funny, full of hopes and beautiful dreams. She invited me to her birthday one summer, I was abroad and couldn’t make it, but she was not well enough to celebrate it the way she wanted to. Her passing devastated me, and I still have a hard time believing she is gone. Maybe because she isn’t.

The visual style: It really came from my own soft spot for everything chibi and cute, and when we teamed up with the incredible Celine You, she really breathed life into ‘90s Istanbul and all the colorful characters that live in it. The movie’s style is really  her  wonderful style, of which I’m a huge fan.

Influences: Definitely Miyazaki. Yoshifumi Kondō, who made Whisper of the Heart; Disney movies like Fantasia and Bambi; Naoko Takeuchi (Sailor Moon) for sure; Brad Bird and his total masterpiece Ratatouille. A lot of current colleagues greatly inspire me every day.

When did you know you wanted to work in animation? I knew I loved animation when I watched Fantasia super young, perhaps five or six years old. I also watched my mom illustrate children’s books, so I knew someone drew those films. I have been pestering everyone around me about everything animation since then.

Biggest challenge: It was definitely figuring out how to tell this very delicate story. I just wanted to bring my friend back to life for one night and eventually her personality and mine meshed into the Starling character, who took on a life of her own. It was really difficult to try to figure out what she does on Earth, what it means, how she navigates the city. Another super tough part was to do this whole thing with zero budget, before and after fulltime job responsibilities — lunch hours and weekends. I am forever grateful for all the incredible artists and animators who put in an enormous amount of energy and talent into this passion project.

Audience response: So far, I’ve been getting very emotional and poignant feedback — people have been taking away different things from this film, some I didn’t even think about. I’d like the audiences to watch it and interpret it however they like. Feel the presence of a loved one maybe. Remember to enjoy our time on the ground perhaps, since we are all joining them in the skies in the end.

Future plans: I just made a live-action short film called Good Egg. I’m interested in exploring live action and animation, combining both sensibilities and discovering new ways of storytelling. I just love filmmaking and plan to make as many as possible to get these ideas out of my head. ◆

Mitra Shahidi

GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN: In Starling , director Mitra Shahidi pays tribute to a good friend who passed away at an early age.

The Green Dudes Are Back!

Jeff Rowe and Kyler Spears tell us about the magical mania of making Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem.

- By Jeff Spry -

marks the 40th anniversary of those pizza-loving heroes in a half shell, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and in a happy accident of cowabungaian proportions, a new animated film from Nickelodeon and Paramount Pictures is slicing its way out of the Big Apple’s Ooze-infested sewers and onto the silver screen.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem arrives this month as a late-summer smackdown from directors Jeff Rowe and Kyler Spears and executive producers Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg and James Weaver. Its raw urban environment and kinetic tone was created to capture a gritty cityscape where younger teen versions of Raphael, Donatello, Leonardo and Michelangelo could carve out a new home within the $15 billion Turtles empire created in 1983 by Peter Laird and Kevin Eastman for Mirage Comics.

Featuring a terrific garage band score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, the new pic finds the Turtles bros. Raphael, Leonardo, Donatello and Michelangelo (voiced by Brady Noon, Nicolas Cantu, Micah Abbey and Shamon Brown Jr.) setting out to win the

hearts of New Yorkers and be accepted as normal teenagers through heroic acts. Their new friend, April O’Neil (Ayo Edebiri), helps them take on a mysterious crime syndicate, but they soon get in over their heads when an army of mutants is unleashed upon them.

The stellar cast also includes Jackie Chan (Master Splinter), Ice Cube (Superfly), Seth Rogen (Bebop), John Cena (Rocksteady), Rose Byrne (Leatherhead), Paul Rudd (Mondo Gecko), Post Malone (Ray Fillet), Natasia Demetriou (Wingnut), Giancarlo Esposito (Baxter Stockman) and Hannibal Buress (Genghis Frog).

Gnarly Teenagers

“The first tentpole we planted in the ground was authenticity,” Rowe tells Animation Magazine. “We wanted it to be a real coming-of-age teenage movie. Past versions of the Turtles have been muscular and ripped and few teenagers are as jacked as many of the Ninja Turtles have been. They need to look like real teens. Lanky. Awkward. Maybe not comfortable in their bodies yet.”

Rowe, who is best known for co-directing Sony’s 2021 hit The Mitchells vs. the Machines

and working on acclaimed shows such as Disenchantment and Gravity Falls, said he and his Nickelodeon team made the decision to cast actual teenagers in the Ninja Turtles roles for the first time, which shockingly had not been done before. Then in selecting an appropriate visual style, they took inspiration from Sony’s Spider-Verse movies.

“Something that was successful about Spider-Verse was that they had this North Star comic-book look,” he explains. “So, we wondered what our North Star was. If we could make this movie look like anything, what would it be? And we found ourselves going back to sketches you make when you’re a teenager before you really know how to draw. The incredible thing about those drawings is that they’re so passionate. We thought, ‘What if we made a multi-million-dollar movie look like these rough drawings and be misshapen and lumpy and human?’”

Weeding through four decades of comics, games, toys, action figures, films and animated series to extract the franchise’s core appeal was a herculean task for the creative gang. “The Ninja Turtles have never been

cool, which is what makes them cool,” Rowe adds. “They’re weird. The art style is not like a slick, polished, perfectly drawn thing. They’ve always been a bit silly and old-fashioned and that’s something I adore about it. There’s this period in the early ’90s where gross became an aesthetic, between Creepy Crawlers toys and the Garbage Pail Kids and the Ninja Turtles. There were all these weird mutant toys, and as a kid, I loved those inventive designs. They were funny and not trying to take themselves seriously. In films, there’s a tendency to make things look tactical and dress them in black. And you need some of that so you feel stakes in the story and understand the world, but we can’t lose the weirdness. People being slimed and huge monsters and eating candy

bugs. That’s what this movie draws from.”

All pre-production on Mutant Mayhem took place on the Nickelodeon side and began during the pandemic period, then shifted over to Mikros and Cinesite for the actual CG animation process.

“It became this wonderful opportunity because it completely changed the boundaries of who we could hire,” says Rowe. “For example, we were able to use amazing artist, Sean Sylvester, who did so many of the color keys and character paints. He took a lot of our character designer Woodrow White’s designs, and translated them into something that could exist in 3D and receive light. Sean lived in Scotland, and we found him on Twitter. In a traditional studio world where people are required to be

in the office, there’s no world where we could have hired him. He’s a key part of why the movie looks the way it does. We were able to assemble this great team, generate targets here and give them to Mikros and later Cinesite. We wanted it to feel like we’re all filmmakers co-creating this movie.”

At many points in the production, Rowe and company broke with established techniques. They’d look at each other wondering if they were breaking rules and whether they could do this.

“The characters are very textured and they’re on top of textured backgrounds, and that’s generally an animation design no-no,” Rowe says. “The backgrounds can be complex but the characters are simple, or the characters can be complex but the backgrounds have

‘We found ourselves going back to sketches you make when you’re a teenager before you really know how to draw … What if we made a multi-million-dollar movie look like these rough drawings and be misshapen, lumpy and human?’

— Director Jeff Rowe

STAYING AWAY FROM SLICK TOWN: the creative team behind the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie were inspired by the down-anddirty origins of the beloved characters, first introduced by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird in the 1980s.

to be simple. We didn’t think it was okay, but it sure looked cool. There were a lot of anxieties up front. It took a lot of faith through a lot of people and many really talented artists locking arms and wanting to be bold and different while seeing it to completion.”

Pairing the carefully conceived characters with natural sounding voice actors was a vital piece of the boundary-pushing puzzle and Mutant Mayhem is blessed with an abundance of vocal talent.

“It was a dream come true,” says the director. “The kids are so naturalistic, and we surrounded them with these icons. Jackie Chan is like Elvis to me! And he’s everything you’d hope he would be. He’s so hardworking and wants to do a good job and get it right. Some of those stars were big asks. I wrote a letter to Jackie Chan and asked him if he wanted to do a Ninja Turtles movie. We had a meeting with Ice Cube and when we told him his character’s name was Superfly, he laughed, and we knew he was in. He later told us that he watched Ninja Turtles a lot with his son as his son grew up, so it was a meaningful franchise to him. He’s very funny, and there’s not a lot of what he says that we can use in a kids’ family movie, but I’m really excited for the world to hear his vocal performance in this.”

Co-director Kyler Spears signed onto the high-profile project because he’d worked with Rowe previously on The Mitchells vs. the Machines and trusted him immensely. Plus, Mutant Mayhem offered ample opportunities to get wild and crazy.

“You can pause the film at any moment, and it would look like a piece of key artwork from any one of the members of the art team, which was a very common occurrence during meetings,” Spears admits. “High school drawings come to life is another way it’s been described. Let’s take all the qualities of how naive and inexperienced we were as artists in high school and try to make it look like it was done on purpose. And that translates to the character design and the animation style. We let them run loose with frames rates — whatever they wanted, whatever conveyed the feeling we were going for. It culminated with it looking rough, dirty, unprofessional and underdeveloped — just like the Turtles are.”

Cool Reptiles Hanging Out

With 40 years of Ninja Turtles mythology behind that iconic property, Spears worked alongside Rowe to keep the storyline on track

while preserving the mystique for fans young and old.

“We focused so long on just trying to make sure that the Turtles felt authentic in talking with each other and relating to each other, that everything they get involved in feels secondary,” he adds. “Their hopes and their dreams and making sure that was relevant to the universal experience of growing up and what a 15-year old would relate to today. And ensuring that it’s something fans who grew up with the Turtles in the ‘80s and ‘90s would also enjoy. Most of the movie is them hanging out together and talking about how they react to things they just saw.”

“I think people are going to leave the theater hopefully wanting to see it again,” concludes Spears. “There are so many nuances and little details you may miss. Those are things we worked so hard to put in there. It’s a fun, beautiful film with an honest story and gorgeous art that’s so dense that you’ll want to watch it again and again to appreciate new stuff you didn’t notice the first time.”

Paramount will release Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem in theaters on August 2.

FAMILIAR CREATURES: Mutant Mayhem features a great cast of familiar voices including Hannibal Buress, Rose Byrne, John Cena, Jackie Chan, Ice Cube, Natasia Demetriou, Ayo Edebiri, Giancarlo Esposito, Post Malone, Seth Rogen, Paul Rudd and Maya Rudolph.

‘We let them run loose with frames rates — whatever they wanted, whatever conveyed the feeling we were going for. It culminated with it looking rough, dirty, unprofessional and underdeveloped, just like the Turtles are.’

- Co-director Kyler Spears

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A Singing and Dancing Origin Story

The team behind Miraculous: Lady Bug & Cat Noir, The Movie discusses mixing musical and Marvel tropes in their much-anticipated project.

- By Karen Idelson -

When audiences see  Miraculous: Ladybug & Cat Noir, The Movie this summer, they will be able to embrace their favorite teen French superheroes in a new story that marks the first feature-length adaptation of the beloved TV series. Director Jeremey Zag is offering fans something sacred in the superhero realm — the origin story.

Zag, who also developed the hugely popular series with Thomas Astruc, was inspired to create the origin story for the characters Ladybug and Cat Noir by his own love of film, animation, song and dance. The colorful film brings together the things he’s admired in a way that he hopes audiences will find interesting and original.

“Because I grew up in France, and I watched a lot and read a lot of manga and superheroes comics, I felt there was nothing in between those things,” says Zag. “The way girls were presented was as an object. There wasn’t something that was about girl power and girls being the superhero. In the past, in Japanese animation, the girls are always very sexy. Now, when you watch all the Marvel superheroes with your kids, you may not realize this, but it’s all military stuff, and the boys are very strong and masculine. So, I really wanted to create something in-between, where the girl superheroes are very

much into their girl power, are very iconic, and the final results don’t look like something militaristic.”

It Had to Be Paris

Zag adds, “The male character could be a boy who is not just very masculine and military either. He can still be very iconic. I also wanted to add an element of a love story because I’m French and we enjoy love stories. The setting had to be Paris, where I can show the audience this beautiful city that we destroy when there are supervillains for our heroes to fight. The final thing I had to have — songs. I grew up watching Disney princesses who would sing their feelings and move the story forward and I never understood why we didn’t see that as much with superheroes. In a way, I made this movie for myself. I wanted to do it this way with these things simply because I wanted to watch it.”

Zag often worked on the songs and lyrics first with Chris Read, Michael Gracey (The Greatest Showman) and Britt Burton when it came to developing the story. He found the songs were a kind of emotional shorthand that communicated the emotions of the moment that he was trying to capture and invited the audience into that moment at the same time.

The voice cast for the movie includes Cristina Vee Valenzuela (Marinette/Ladybug), Bryce Papenbrook (Adrien/Cat Noir), Keith Silverstein (Gabriel

Agreste/Hawk Moth), Carrie Keranen (Alya), Selah Victor (Chloé Bourgeois), Zeno Robinson (Nino), Chris Smith (Tom), Anne Yatco (Sabine), Paul St Peter (Wang Fu), Mela Lee (Tikki), Max Mittelman (Plagg), Cassandra Lee Morris (Sabrina) and Sabrina Weisz (Nathalie).

Zag Animation Studios was the creative studio on the film and ON Animation (The Little Prince, Playmobil: The Movie) in Montreal was the CG animation production studio. Zagtoon and Method Animation produced the film. Since much of the film was made during the pandemic, Zag and his crew found ways to work from different time zones and online.

Crimefighting with Music

One of the most demanding areas for this process was the sort of dance style used in many of the fighting sequences. Ladybug and Cat Noir were already known for their elegant and entertaining way of moving while fighting off villains and generally saving the day in each episode of the series, which first premiered in 2015. Zag was looking for heightened sense of movement that was inspired by karate as well as dance for this film.

“It’s very specific, because I worked with a choreographer who has done lots of action sequences,” says Zag. “These are the same people I’ve worked

with [on the series], because I didn’t want to have something totally disconnected. There’s a dance when there is fighting. And we also have songs in our movie so it’s very important to have the right kinds of movement and dance.”

Zag’s team for choreography and visualization were Cameron Sonerson and Shannon Holtzapffel, who have been working together since 2015 and have collaborated on live-action musicals like  The Greatest Showman. They have also lent their expertise to animated films such as  Luck and  Minions: The Rise of Gru, and last year’s hybrid pic  Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile. Sonerson is an expert in CG, action/fight sequences and camera design, and Holtzapfle is a trained and experienced choreographer, dancer and stage performer.

“Ladybug’s ballet and jazz line style naturally existed within her character presentation, posing, posture and femininity — and while kicking butt,” says Holtzapffel. “We also needed to show the innocent romanticism of a young relationship progressing as they find the strength to come together as a couple, so a waltz was fitting for exposition. The characters also believe in the fairy tale themselves.”

Sonerson mentions that it was crucial to design with a strong sense of timing and rhythm to the music and to make the audience feel the emotions of the characters. “Once we had a clear idea of the scene, we started with video blocking (video-viz),” he says. “If there were any storyboards or concept art, we would honor those references and build

from there. I would film Shannon’s performance as we developed the movement and created an edit of video choreography. This allowed a very fast turnaround of ideas and pacing of the sequence (plus a lot of funny bloopers).”

The team would then review the footage with Zag and iterate any new ideas. “This process was very important, as especially with action/musicals, the character and camera need to complement each other,” he adds. “This gave us a strong edit base to then start developing how the choreography would fit into the world of the character and the staging of the shots. We referenced the video and created a CG blocking pass on the edit; This was usually Maya CG character/camera posing or motion capture. I would then work with some temp

‘I also wanted to add an element of a love story, because I’m French and we enjoy love stories.’

-

Writer-producer-director Jeremy Zag

FLYING HIGH ON FRENCH APPEAL:

The new movie tells the origin story of the beloved characters first introduced to the world in the fall of 2015 in the French CG-animated series from Zagtoon and Method Animation.

sound design and recorded the character’s lines as ADR. Once approved, the CG edit and video was passed onto the animation team to use as final reference to add all the amazing details.”

Another important part of the movie is the backdrop itself, the timeless city of Paris. While American filmmakers often destroy New York City in a superhero film, Zag wanted to take Paris down in a memorable way, according to the film’s executive producer Emmanuel Jacomet (Playmobil: The Movie).

“We always believe that all those superhero stories will always happen in New York or in Tokyo, and the story and the action will happen on those big buildings in these well-known cities,” says Jacomet. “So, we decided we wouldn’t just have this romantic cobblestone version of Paris. It’s a city that usually makes people think of love, but it can be more than that. We were paying tribute to Paris, but also making it a place where the superheroes could fight the villain to save the city. We wanted to capture

the mystery and the history of the city as well. We wanted Paris to be seen as a city where action can happen like New York and London. Our goal was to make Paris into an action city.”

“We were excited to work with destroying the city when our villain begins to go after our superheroes,” he notes. “Some people probably think of Paris as not a place you would want to destroy, but that’s part of the fun in animation because you can create ideas about how that would happen. Rebuilding the city was also quite exciting because that’s another type of creation.”

Playing with Magical Realism

The filmmakers also wanted to embrace the full power of animation and to take advantage of all the unique things that were possible in the medium. Producer Aton Soumache (The Little Prince, Little Nicholas: Happy as Can Be) says he wanted to focus on a vision of the overall film and of Paris

itself that would set the project apart.

“We said to each other that we should make Paris magically realistic,” says Soumache. “And I think that’s something that sticks with us through the entire duration of production because Jeremy [Zag] immediately told us that we’re making an animated movie, not a live-action movie. Animation gives you this immense power of magic and wonder. We don’t want this to be just what you expect — the Eiffel Tower or something like that. I don’t want people to recognize Paris. I want people to be able to remember something very different, maybe even very different than what they remember if they’ve been to Paris. We all have a vision of Paris or an idea of the city. I want the movie to appeal to that idea in a very magical way in a way that is not quite realistic. It’s beyond what you might have in real life.”

Miraculous: Ladybug and Cat Noir, The Movie premieres on Netflix on July 28.

‘Some people probably think of Paris as not a place you would want to destroy, but that’s part of the fun in animation, because you can create ideas about how that would happen. Rebuilding the city was also quite exciting because that’s another type of creation.’

- Executive producer Emmanuel Jacomet

WINGS AND WHISKERS: After opening theatrically in France in early July, the new Ladybug & Cat Noir feature will debut on Netflix on July 28.

Monkeying Around with an Iconic Prankster

Producer Peilin Chou and director Anthony Stacchi give us the scoop on their wild Netflix Monkey King movie.

- By Ramin Zahed -

The beloved 16th century Chinese novel Journey to the West and its mischievous hero, the Monkey King (a.k.a. Sun Wukong) have inspired numerous live-action and animated adaptations through the years. This summer, thanks to the talented teams of artists at Netflix and ReelFX, a high-energy, new adaptation of the classic arrives on the scene which puts a fresh new take on the classic epic adventure.

Directed by Anthony Stacchi (The Boxtrolls, Open Season) and produced by Peilin Chou (Over the Moon, Abominable), The Monkey King tells the story of the rebellious Monkey (voiced by Jimmy O. Yang) and his magical Stick (Nan Li) as they embark on an epic quest to battle over 100 demons, an eccentric Dragon King (Bowen Yang) and Monkey’s worst enemy — his very own ego. Along the way, a young village girl named Lin (Jolie Hoang-Rappaport) teaches Monkey one of

the biggest lessons of his life. The film is executive produced by Stephen Chow (Kung Fu Hustle, Shaolin Soccer).

Interestingly enough, both the film’s producer and director had been wanting to make an animated movie featuring the simian hero for many years. Chou says she and her sister grew up with the original folk tales. “We used to have Monkey King sticks at home, and we fought each other with them,” she tells us. “So, I’d go to school and talk about it, but everyone would ask, “What are you talking about?’ The actual novel is very dense: It’s about a hundred chapters long, and our movie only tackles the first seven. It’s quite challenging to adapt. I actually worked on an adaptation when I was at Disney, and then again on another version when I was at Nickelodeon, but none of them got off the ground. This one is the lucky one that clicked!”

A Tough Tale to Tackle

Meanwhile, Stacchi had also been trying to mount an animated version of the property. “I remember pitching several ideas to Peilin at Pearl Studio, and I love Hong Kong cinema, so I had one or two Chinese-centric projects,” says the director. “During the interview, she asked me if I had heard of Journey to the West and the Monkey King, and at that moment, I thought, oh man, I had tried to develop the story for two different studios. When she asked if I would be interested in it, I was thrilled that somebody was going to make it, because every other time I had tried to develop it, people would not understand the story. I thought nobody has the courage to make it because it’s too weird and complicated!”

Not only did this new version of the classic have Netflix involved, but it also had a secret weapon: Hong Kong filmmaker and actor Stephen Chow, who had also played the Monkey

TIMELESS TRICKSTER:

on the famous 16th century Chinese

King in the 2013 movie Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons, was on board as producer.

“He’s such an amazing talent, who also happens to be a former Peking Opera performer, as well as a martial artist and 2D animator too!” says Stacchi. “He would give us some live-action reference for the fights, as well as some 2D animation and drawings along the way. Further along in production, he would offer feedback on the animation. He speaks no English, so our translators were quite busy on this movie, and we’d be on call sometimes at two in the morning because we were all in different time zones.”

According to Chou, one of the reasons the Monkey King has been so popular for several centuries is due to his unbreakable spirit and sense of determination. “He never gives up,” she points out. “He has a very unique narcissistic personality, but he uses it to comedic effect. We also knew that we had to bring this story to the world

in a relatable, tangible and comprehensible way, so that it was a nice balance for our audience.”

Stacchi agrees. “He’s an amazing character, even in the original folk tale. He is the original superhero in a way as he’s incredibly powerful and indestructible, but he’s also very modern in the way that he’s also such an antihero: He’s so egotistical and arrogant, but he also has mischievous and comedic ways. So, when you sit down to read the original story, you realize that it’s both entertaining and funny.”

The director also says one of the great aspects of the story is introducing the new character of Lin, a young girl who doesn’t totally understand what’s going on, so she helps the viewers discover this world through her eyes. “She’s this perfect character who wants to do something special with her life, and then she meets this arrogant jerk who never takes no for an answer,” says the director. “It’s the perfect

character dynamic. She’s so brave, resourceful and clever. When we set the final cut of the movie, someone asked Stephen [Chow] about his favorite character, and he said it was Lin. He said watching this everyday peasant girl traveling to such fantastic locations such as the Land of the Dead, and battling the gods was a very enjoyable part of the movie.”

Grumpy Old Stick

The film’s highly original anthropomorphized Monkey Stick is another appealing ingredient. “He has a big personality although he doesn’t speak in words,” says Chou. “The foundation of his voice was inspired by Mongolian throat singing. We went on a very long journey to figure out what it would sound like and worked with more traditional sound effects and sound designers along the way. We also worked with Li Nan and his group Voodoo Kungfu, whose music is fea-

‘It’s really about this notion that you have the ability to change the world and you can make an impact on other people’s lives. I also love that our little girl character is the one who really learns that and embodies this idea.’

- Producer Peilin Chou

Based

tale, Netflix’s new animated movie The Monkey King offers a clever new spin on the influential story.

tured in the film. But it was our composer Toby Chu who told me that he thinks the Stick’s voice should sound like a grumpy old Chinese man! We asked him to try to get certain emotions and expressions, and with the throat singing method, it just felt right and distinctive.”

Stacchi says one of the key challenges of the project was trying to stay true to the authenticity of the book’s spiritual journey. “Monkey has to confront the Jade Emperor, and the has to fight Buddha, so we really had to come up with the right visuals for the final battle between the Monkey King and his nemesis the Dragon King,” he notes. It was important for us to anchor the film on a normal world, so that the fantastic elements have something to bounce off. As my friend, the director Mike Mitchell [Kung Fu Panda 4, Trolls] says, ‘If everything’s weird, then nothing’s weird!’ We definitely wanted to work with a classical look for our Monkey, inspired by Peking Opera, but he’s walking around in the normal world.”

The production reached out to production designer Kyle McQueen (The Willoughbys, Sausage Party) to achieve a special look inspired by Chinese brush paintings on rice paper.

“One of the tricky parts of the project was that

there have been so many iterations and versions of Monkey done in every sort of media. A lot of the design for the character came from the writing, which told us that he was an anti-hero who was kind of gruff and arrogant, but loveable at the same time. We had to distill all those ideas into a visual look and then create a landscape for him that harmonized with all those ideas.”

McQueen looked at classic Chinese watercolor paintings as the starting point for his designs.

“Tony had done some initial research on what he liked to see, and they were these beautiful landscapes which have this beautiful and elegant feel to them. Then, I dug more into Chinese art. The look also came out of Chinese calligraphy and brushwork, and their elegance and gestural feel. A lot of the color palettes were taken from these more sort of subtle sort of subdued watercolor paintings. This allowed us to place our villains and extraordinary demons to exist in this earthly realm. We were able to have this back and forth and signal our villains’ moment with certain colors.”

McQueen, who is based in London, Ontario, Canada worked remotely with the team at ReelFX in Montreal. “We started working right

when the pandemic first hit, and all the different time zones were kind of a challenge, but the studio did a great job delivering what we were looking for. It wasn’t an easy project, but everyone really stepped up and pushed themselves, and I think the results are pretty excellent. Visually, we were going for something that had a bit more of a heightened feel and we had to the track the emotional scope of the color across the film.”

Chou and Stacchi are both hoping that the film will spark new interest in the classic text. Stacchi says, “We’d be thrilled if audiences around the world discover this really interesting character because of our movie.” Chou adds, “One of my favorite things about the film is that we came upon this idea of writing your own scroll, and that idea evolved through the years … It’s really about this notion that you have the ability to change the world, and you can make an impact on other people’s lives. I also love that Lin, our little girl character, is the one who really learns that and embodies this idea.” ◆

The Monkey King premieres on Netflix on August 18.

‘Monkey King is an amazing character, even in the original folk tale. He’s so egotistical and arrogant, but he also has mischievous and comedic ways.’

- Director Anthony Stacchi

STAR POWER:

Directed by Anthony Stacchi and produced by Peilin Chou, the terrific all-Asian voice cast includes Jimmy O. Yang, Bowen Yang, Jolie Hoang-Rappaport, Jo Koy, Ron Yuan, Hoon Lee, Stephanie Hsu, Andrew Pang, James Sie and BD Wong.

Hoop Dreams for the Underdogs

The First Slam Dunk producer Toshiyuki Matsui and creator-director Takehiko Inoue discuss the making of the beloved basketball movie.

- By Charles Solomon & Ken Endo -

e didn’t decide what ‘First’ meant in the title,” says The First Slam Dunk producer Toshiyuki Matsui. “We wanted each audience member to decide that on their own.” Based on Takehiko Inoue’s beloved basketball manga, which has sold over 170 million books worldwide, the film was one of the biggest anime hits of 2022, earning more than $262 million worldwide,

Toie Animation producer Matsui spent years persuading Inoue to revisit Slam Dunk after a long hiatus. The Slam Dunk TV series ran from 1993 to 1996; Howling Basketman Spirit!!, the last of four short features, was released in 1995. In an interview conducted via email, Matsui recalls, “We first approached Inoue-san about a film adaptation back in 2003; we made short presentation videos. In 2014 he gave us the greenlight after seeing the level of passion and technology we could offer.”

“WInoue was initially unsure what the focus of the new film’s story would be. Inspiration came from a title he saw in a bookstore about “the leader inside you.” “I didn’t read the book,” he noted in an interview published in Japan, “But the title awoke some dormant ideas: I wanted each character to advance and grow by persevering through hardship. I was able to draw on my own experiences of pain and hardship for the story. Reviewing the Slam Dunk manga, I realized there were ideas I hadn’t touched on. I wanted to shed light on characters who are weak but moving forward despite their weaknesses, surmounting the obstacles in their pain: It became the theme of the movie, which I had been unable to put into the previous work.”

Back to High School Games

Further inspiration came from watching an Okinawan high school basketball team composed of “shorter, more agile athletes.” As a boy in Okinawa, Inoue’s Ryota Miyagi learned bas-

ketball from his adored older brother. When his brother was killed in a boating accident, Miyagi worked to become a star point guard. But he struggled to overcome his troubled relationship with his mother, whom he believed preferred his brother — and his short stature. Miyagi is only 5’6’; the other starters on the team range from 6’ to 6’5”. Inoue recounts Miyagi’s journey in a series of flashbacks during the game between champion Sannoh High and the scrappy underdogs of Shohoku High that ends Slam Dunk

Inoue’s involvement in the earlier adaptations of his work was limited. He directed The First Slam Dunk, but cautions, “The extent of my position wasn’t clear when I agreed to work on the movie. I felt I had a responsibility to Slam Dunk and to its fans. I was involved in the writing process. I was there for the mocap, the voice recordings and the music. I have a bad habit of sticking my nose into everything. The position of director came to me much later in the process. When we were working on

the movie I was always called ‘producer’ out of convenience; even now, when people call me ‘director,’ I don’t realize they’re addressing me!”

Matsui adds, “Giving orders and feedback to the staff while trying to realize the images in his head was stressful for Inoue-san. I managed their work and created an environment in which they could communicate sufficiently with the director. I oversaw the whole crew while thinking about how the director wanted to proceed and how I could help to make it happen.”

Takahiko Inoue ranks among the most polished draftsmen working today in manga or animation. Few artists can match his ability to capture vivid expressions and dynamic poses in a few deft lines. Character designer Yasuyuki Ebara worked closely with Inoue on the models and to ensure every drawing was on model.

Matsui says, “It’s extremely hard to capture the essence of Inoue-san’s drawings and turn them into animated characters: Only a few people can do that in the animation industry. Ebara-san took a very important role, and director Inoue did some drawing as well. ‘Can we make Inoue-san’s manga move in animation?’ was our number one challenge.”

During production, Inoue made a key discovery: “The differences between manga and anime became clear to me. I can control how the audience reads a manga: The size of a panel will determine how long their eyes will stay on that panel. But I cannot stop time in a movie. My instinct is to draw every frame with as much detail and nuance as a manga page, but all that detail passes by in an instant.”

To ensure the characters moved believably, Matsui shot motion-capture footage of basketball players for the artists at Toei and Dandelion Animation Studio. Inoue says, “The need to animate realistic basketball movements was not a hope, but a duty I had to my audience. We shot mocap footage to get a realistic representation of basketball, then superimposed the character models onto the mocap figures.”

All the Right Moves

“Some movements needed to be exaggerated while others needed to be toned down,” Inoue continues. “Capturing the way the body balances and rights itself when a player lands from a jump, how the legs bend, when they start and stop moving all had to be accurately

represented. In terms of drawings, it’s millimeter increments; in terms of time, it’s fractions of a second. The sense of realness lives in the narrow boundaries of those millimeters and tenths of seconds.”

The First Slam Dunk was both a critical and box office success: It won the Japane Academy Prize for Animation of the Year and ranks as the fifth highest-grossing anime feature of all time. Reflecting on that success, Matsui comments, “I’m really happy the movie has been seen by people around the world. One thing that surprised me was how much of the audience hadn’t been born when the original series aired on TV. The film also had a big female audience, which the original series didn’t have.”

When questions arise about the possibility of a second Slam Dunk feature, he concludes, “We don’t have plans for one now. We did everything to make this movie enjoyable for both existing fans and first-time viewers. But I’m glad people are looking forward to a possible sequel: It’s a pure joy to hear that question.” ◆

GKIDS will release The First Slam Dunk in select theaters on July 28.

‘It’s extremely hard to capture the essence of Inouesan’s drawings and turn them into animated characters: Only a few people can do that in the animation industry.’

- Producer Toshiyuki Matsui

THE WINNING SEASON: Based on Takehiko Inoue’s acclaimed manga series, The First Slam Dunk has grossed over $262 million worldwide and received the Japan Academy Prize for Animation of the Year.

A Stylish Trilogy from DC

The team behind the new Justice League: Warworld movie shares their thoughts on the innovative summer home release.

- By Tom McLean -

If you ever needed proof that superheroes and animation are two great tastes that taste even better together, look no further than Justice League: Warworld

The new DC animated feature takes the publisher’s trinity of iconic heroes — Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman — and seamlessly inserts them into a trio of vastly different cinematic genres on the way to climactic showdown with the iconic comic-book villain Mongul.

Returning as DC’s trinity are Jensen Ackles as Batman, Darren Criss as Superman and Stana Katic as Wonder Woman. Joining them are Ike Amadi as Martian Manhunter, Troy Baker as Jonah Hex, Brett Dalton as Bat Lash, John DiMaggio as Lobo, Teddy Sears as Warlord and Robin Atkin Downes as Mongul.

Jeff Wamester directs Justice League: Warworld — his fourth DC animated feature — from a script by Jeremy Adams, Ernie Altbacker and Josie Campbell. Producing are Jim Krieg and Kimberly S. Moreau, with executive producer Michael Uslan and co-EPs Butch Lukic and

Sam Register. Animation on the feature was by Red Dog Culture House and Edge Animation Studio, both based in South Korea.

Playing with Different Genres

Even though the DC animated features are, well, features, Lukic describes the production process as more like a TV series than a feature, and

his role as basically the showrunner. He says he wanted to do stories in different genres and, after more than three decades in the animation, decided there was no better time than the present.

“I wanted to do a Western, and I also wanted to do a barbarian sword and sorcery scene, and then I also wanted to do a black-and-white sci-fi ‘50s thing — basically based on Invasion of the Body

Snatchers,” says Lukic.

Those genres also hit home with Wamester. “When I read the script, I was like: ‘Holy crap! I get to do The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, a film noir and a Conan story — all in one big story,” he says. “It was really exciting to have that opportunity.”

Having worked on a fair number of animated superhero-centric DC and Marvel projects, Wamester says it was nice to work in genres that used different storytelling techniques. “It’s the tone that separates each one,” he says.

The Western sequence features Wonder Woman as a lone rider who rides alone into a dusty town and gets caught up in a scheme with Jonah Hex. Lukic says the sequence required terse dialog, bright colors and lot of dust and haze.

“But generally I was going more for the feel and look of … the ’60s or ’70s type of spaghetti Western,” he says, citing High Plains Drifter as a specific example.

Animating people is hard enough — animating horses poses its own special problems. Picking the shots kept things manageable — avoiding low angles and cutting before the action moved in a direction that was going to pose problems, Lukic says.

The second sequence moves to Skartaris, the fantasy world setting of Mike Grell’s cult-fave 1970s comic-book series Warlord. Batman stars here, not knowing how he arrived in this world but teaming up with Warlord to journey through Skartaris to stop the plans of the evil Deimos (voiced by Damian O’Hare).

Inspired by such sword and sorcery movies as

Conan the Barbarian and Krull, the story is patterned after the original version of King Kong, with the group of characters falling one by one as they travel to a final confrontation, Lukic says.

The third sequence is set in the 1950s, evoking the tone of classic Twilight Zone episodes. The goal here was to create tension and suspense — most of which was achieved by careful storyboarding and editing. “It was just more about the right cutting between the characters,” he says.

Black and white animation is a rarity — and a chance to experiment with an iconic style. “I didn’t want the guys just paint it in color, and then we would lay a filter of black and white — that just doesn’t work,” Lukic says. “So, it was more about picking the right shades. And obviously, a lot of it had to do with shadowing.”

Further paying tribute to classic cinema is a transition to a final sequence in color, a filmmaking move made famous by The Wizard of Oz. The finale connects the sequences and dovetails nicely with the DC style of superheroics. It also features some fun cameo appearances by fan-favorite characters such as the space bounty hunter, Lobo.

Wamester says his job relates to how things move on screen. “I get to say, when a character comes on, how do they move?,” he says. “What is in character versus what’s out of character?”

The Western sequence required a lot of build-up of suspense; the Warlord sequence was more about extreme violence; and the noir story had to convey a sense of mystery. “It was really fun being able to play in all three

of those worlds, and then try to bring them together by the end,” Wamester says.

Suspenseful Sequences

In this case, each genre had its own demands. “The decisions you make on certain shots are very different, and the shot selection that you make,” he says. “How close? How far? Up shot? Down shot? How much [do] you reveal? What kind of moments are important versus others?”

That had to be communicated to the board artists, many of whom had to learn on the fly how to apply their skills to genres that don’t often come up in superhero animation.

“Shot selection has to be different. And you have to know how you go from here to there — it’s very important,” Wamester says

This is especially true in action sequences, Wamester says. “The moment before a shootout is going to be completely different from a sword fight,” he says. “Two guys with swords aren’t going to sit there staring at each other … They’re just gonna go at it. They’ll scream and go after each other. But when you have a situation with a gunfight, you’ll wait, and wait — you’re looking for that moment to beat everyone to it. So the tension that you build there is very different.” ◆

Justice League: Warworld will be available on July 25 to purchase digitally from Prime Video, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and more. 4K Ultra HD and Blu-ray discs will be available to purchase online and in store at major retailers.

‘When I read the script, I was like: “Holy crap! I get to do The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, a film noir, and a Conan story — all in one big story” … It was really exciting to have that opportunity.’

- Director Jeff Wamester

THREE AGAINST TYRANNY: Directed by DC veteran Jeff Wamester, Justice League: Warworld is set in an unending, brutal gladiator combat world, where Batman (Jensen Ackles), Superman (Darren Criss) and Wonder Woman (Stana Katic) must unite to lead an entire planet to freedom.

Look Who’s Been Defrosted Again!

Everyone’s favorite pizza delivery guy and his gang of misfits are back and ready for more Planet Express fun in the new season of Futurama on Hulu.

- By Ramin Zahed -

In a world where many of our favorite animated shows die sad, sudden deaths, it is great to know that Matt Groening and David X. Cohen’s much-loved Futurama has been given another lease on life on Hulu this summer! The hilarious sci-fi sitcom enjoyed its first run on FOX-TV from 1999 to 2003, had a healthy rerun period on Adult Swim from 2003 to 2007, returned with four direct-to-video movies and then began a new life on Comedy Central from 2010 to 2013.

This July, we are treated to the eighth season (10 episodes) of the six-time Emmy-winning show, and it looks like it will be another wild ride to 23rd century Earth and its neighboring galaxies! The voice cast — John DiMaggio, Billy West, Katey Sagal, Tress MacNeille, Maurice LaMarche, Lauren Tom, Phil LaMarr and David Herman — are all back for more madcap adventures, as are executive producers Groening, Cohen, Ken Keeler and Claudia Katz.

The return of Fry, Bender, Leela, Hermes, Amy, Zoidberg and the rest of the gang had been in the works for a few years. As longtime

series producer Katz, partner and senior VP at Rough Draft Studios, tells us, things started moving when she got a call from Groening. “I was driving, and when Matt told me the show was coming back, I had to pull over,” she recalls. “Marci Proietto and 20th Television played a big role in bringing it back, and Hulu was very supportive and excited by the prospect of promoting and marketing the show. So, coming back this time has been a lovely experience. We are always happy when it comes back! This time around, David [X. Cohen] and the writers have found a very elegant way for us to return after the last series’ finale that Peter [Avanzino] directed. So, now we’re doing two seasons with 10 episodes each.”

Katz and long-time supervising animation director Avanzino were kind enough to answer a few of our questions about the new season:

Animation Magazine: Congrats on this new incarnation of your show. So, how does it feel to have the show revived one more time? What’s

different this time around?

Peter Avanzino: Well, you know, the show is still hand-drawn, but we’re using Storyboard Pro and Cintiqs now. In the older seasons, we were still doing pencil cleanups and we were still getting paper storyboards. Everything is a lot more streamlined now — but then again, those pencil and paper storyboards had a lot of charm. These days there would be thousands of pages and if we had to print them, that would kill a lot of trees! But beyond that, everyone is still drawing by hand, and we have a lot of great new storyboard artists as well as bringing back some of the old ones. Thank God they kept the same supervising director — me!

Claudia Katz: We are producing these new episodes in 4K, so that’s different because it’s four times the resolution as HD. We have done our other show Disenchantment in 4K, so we’re pretty seasoned in the production flow. But this time around, we had to completely redo the title sequence, literally shot for shot, in 4K. The nice thing is that we were able to add some cool new elements, so it will be fun for

viewers to pause and figure them out. When David [X.Cohen] saw it, he said, “Wow, there are things here that you could never see before, because they weren’t crisp enough.” It really does hold up very well for something that’s is more than 20 years old!”

We know you are sworn to secrecy, but can you tell us about the new season in terms of plot points of special qualities that stand out?

Claudia: The writers were off for at least 10 years, and there’s such an embarrassment of riches for them to comment and poke fun at, and they’ve taken full advantage of that in the classic Futurama way. We do have some new additions this season, but I can’t talk about them. There’s a vaccine episode that’s really great. I think in 3023 we have finally conquered COVID-19. We also have a great Bitcoin episode. Th worms are back, which is a

throwback to an old episode that Peter directed. And Zapp Brannigan gets cancelled and he’s equally incapable of learning his lesson, as it has always been the case, which is sort of fantastic. I think we offer our classic blend of smart humor and heart.

Peter: We missed having an AI episode by four months, but we’ll get to that in the next batch.

Claudia: We have the great combination of Matt and David and some of the original writers, mixed in with some new writers, which brought in some fresh points of view. We were lucky enough to get some returning directors, as well as a lot of new artists. We also seemed to have a lot of bigger episodes. In the past, we had an ebb and flow, where there were some simpler episodes mixed in with more complex ones, but I feel we have like a lot of them tend to be on the bigger scale this season.

Peter: Yes, now I realize why I’m so tired! I re-

member working on Season Four’s “Parasites Lost” episode, which had the worms sword fighting inside Fry’s body. But we also had “Insane in the Mainframe," where Fry goes to the robot asylum, which was really nice and quiet and had three different lighting schemes. This season, it felt like the rollercoaster would go up and just stay there.

Why do you think the show has been so consistently loved by fans all over the world?

Claudia: We have never been able to outstay our welcome! We always kind of have these comebacks before anyone can get sick of us. But more than anything, it is because of the quality of the writing and the likeability of the characters. These are characters who really are there for each even though they’re sort of a very hodgepodge group. Even Bender has his moments of thoughtfulness. The show is

Claudia Katz Peter Avanzino

PLANET EXPRESS REVISITED: The new season of Futurama brings back many of our favorite characters, introduces some new ones and pokes fun at our crazy, troubled times.

not just a joke delivery system — you can really buy into these characters, and you’re invested in their relationships. The sci-fi aspect of the show also allows us to go anywhere. It lends itself to a very open sort of storytelling.

What do you love about working on Futurama?

Peter: I came up through storyboarding, so I enjoy getting a new script and enjoying all the funny character stuff as a supervising director. I love the challenges of things like a Murder-lator scene or streetcar racing or other things in the season, like wrapping my

head around a time freezing concept. Basically, it’s just always a new challenge every two weeks. There’s the challenge of juggling everything and getting the acting right. Sure, it’s a lot of work but it’s also a lot of fun — like making a robot who doesn’t even have eyebrows make you cry!

Claudia: We’re on this adventure with these familiar characters, and it’s fun to look at our crazy world through the lens of a thousand years in the future.

Peter: I hope our audience will enjoy the new season and that they’ll compare them favor-

ably to the past one. I’m on the Futurama fan group online and I swear there’s always that one person who says, “Oh, they’re going to ruin it.” That’s always in my head!

Claudia: Our goal was to make sure the new episodes look as good or better than the last batch of shows we did. So we really tried to deliver that. Ultimately, we just hope people love them and think that we’ve done justice to the show, and that they want more.

Futurama Season Eight will premiere on Hulu on July 24. New episodes will drop weekly.

CREATIVE HEADS: Futurama was created by Matt Groening and developed by Groening and David X. Cohen. Executive producers include Groening, Cohen, Ken Keeler and Claudia Katz.

Billy Goes Back to the Future

Actor Billy West is best known for voicing Fry, Professor Farnsworth, Dr. Zoidberg and Zapp Brannigan on Futurama as well as a long list of other beloved toon characters (including Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd, Popeye, Woody Woodpecker and the title characters in Doug and The Ren & Stimpy Show, for which he was nominated for an Annie Award). Since West is back delivering his unmistakable voices for the eighth season of Futurama, we thought it was a good time to catch up with the talented actor: Getting the News: When I got the phone call from Matt Groening telling me the great news that show was coming back, I told him I could still do the voices, and he said, “I know you can!” The great thing about the show is that the writers always have a trick or two up their sleeves, and that’s a good thing because our fans don’t let the show die. They lobby, and it ends up being effective. It’s like a zombie — it just feels like we never left.

Everything felt very natural. The only thing that was different this time was that a lot of us were working from home on Zoom, but eventually the studio started letting people come in. Then, I was back to working with one or two people, and eventually it became a bigger ensemble. I was thrilled about that because I hate working alone.

Secrets of Success: The show has been such a big success because there has been a concerted effort from everybody involved to make it all ring true. For my own performances, I try to think long and hard before I open my mouth to do any of those characters because we want them to ring true and be authentic. The audience is not stupid, and they can tell if a character is contrived, or if it resonates with them like someone they know in real life.

When I first read for the show, I auditioned for the Professor and for Zoidberg. Just for the heck of it, they asked me read for Fry, which had already been cast. So, I had to pull something out of my hat really fast. I tried to remember what I sounded like when I was 25, which was all whiny and needy, because I thought that’s what Fry would sound like.

Being a Journeyman Actor: In the past I’ve talked about stunt casting, but I wasn’t complaining because I have been working consistently. I have always been a journeyman actor. For me, everything has equal importance whether you are the voice of a talking armpit or if you’re doing a major character. Then, I noticed that film and TV stars were being cast as

cartoon characters. When they hire stars, that character is only going to be as good as these people are famous. What we used to have to do was create something that would outlive us all. We used a special alchemy to create that timeless magic. Stunt casting is like taking a bunch of highly skilled plumbers and sending them to Fenway Park to win the World Series.

Favorites: The episode that makes me cry is “Jurassic Bark,” the one with Fry’s dog. I weep every time I see it because I’m a big animal lover. Another favorite one is “The Devil’s Hands Are Idle Playthings,” in which Dan Castellaneta plays the Robot Devil. I think his performances are so sublime and exquisite. I also love the Season Three episode, “Roswell That Ends Well,” in which Fry goes back in time and convinces his great-grandfather to marry a local girl.

On Matt, David and the Fans: Our fans are such beautiful people. I look forward to going to Comic-Con again this year. I come from a place of great gratitude. I’m so thankful that this show means so much to people. Matt Groening and David X. Cohen are brilliant and energetic people. When people come up to me and tell me, “Wow, you do all the characters!” I tell them I didn’t create anything. I just create the voices: Matt is the one who has created a few thousand amazing characters. And David is such a funny bastard, too!

Billy West

GOLDEN VOICE: Popular actor Billy West is the talented man behind fan favorites such as Fry, Dr. Zoidberg and Prof. Farnsworth.

The Man of Steel Revisited

Soaring into the limelight once again, the Man of Steel is back with a freshly starched cape, trademark red trunks and unbridled optimism in Warner Bros. Animation and DC’s new animated series, My Adventures with Superman. The show premiered July 6 on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim, with a new episode each Thursday, streaming the following day on Max.

Jack Quaid of The Boys fame serves as the voice of Clark Kent/Superman, with Alice Lee voicing Lois Lane and Ishmel Sahid portraying young Jimmy Olsen. Sam Register (Teen Titans GO!) is aboard the heroic show as executive producer alongside co-executive producers Jake Wyatt (Invader Zim: Enter the Florpus) and

‘When

Princesses

Power).

Daily Planet Scoop!

My Adventures with Superman lifts off as a serialized coming-of-age story centered on 20-somethings Clark Kent, fledgling journalist Lois Lane and shutterbug intern Jimmy Olsen as they explore career opportunities as an investigative reporting team on the Daily Planet.

“It’s sort of an economic choice to put it on Adult Swim, but it was made for a wide audience in mind so we wanted to entertain young adults and parents and their children,” showrunner Jake Wyatt tells Animation Magazine. “The idea was to

Warner Bros. Animation introduces the shiny new superhero series

My Adventures with Superman.

- By Jeff Spry -

make a show that would introduce a new generation of kids to Superman, Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen and let them have fun.”

While stepping into Superman’s 85-year history in global pop culture, Wyatt and his creative crew hoped to inject their own stamp into the well-trodden material with a simple early pitch.

“The big difference between all the Clark Kents you know and our Clark, is that he doesn’t get a magic crystal that Jor-El pops out of and explains everything to him,” he explains. “This is a Clark who has to figure out who he is, and his friends Lois and Jimmy are instrumental in figuring that out. The basic setup is Lois and Jimmy are super hungry to find out who this Superman is, and Clark can’t not help them. They’re all interns. Lois

Superman was created it was not a superhero comic, it was science fiction. So, I set out to do future crazy sci-fi with Krypton and near-future, hard sci-fi on Earth, and try to make robots and spaceships feel real and tactile.'

— Showrunner Jake Wyatt

Brendan Clogher (Voltron: Legendary Defender) and co-producer Josie Campbell (She-Ra and the

of

isn’t a famous reporter. Clark is not yet the Man of Steel. And they kind of create each other as they move through this first season.”

Having worked in the comic-book world, Wyatt’s familiarity with the art form’s language and history helped construct a basic storyline that remained true to Superman’s iconic mythology.

“My first Superman experience was the Christopher Reeve movie, but in middle school I got put in suspension a lot and that library had a collection of the Superman newspaper strips going back forever in black-and-white,” say Wyatt. “So, I read all of these and had this strong sense of who Superman was and we all knew who the famous villains were. And we’d all watched the Bruce Timm cartoon, and we’d all read the major Superman comics like Kingdom Come, Birthrights, Man of Steel and Superman: For All Seasons.”

Wyatt and co-runner Brendan Clogher thought they wanted to add Lex Luthor, but executive producer Sam Register shot it down, knowing that character had been done to death. “When Josie [Campbell] came on board with the rest of the writers, she knew more about the DC universe than anyone I’ve ever met,” Wyatt says. “We threw it all on the table and genuinely picked the Season One villains in part by asking, ‘What are the best toys?’ and ‘What can hurt Superman?’ because you get that recurring criticism about Superman that everything’s too easy for him.”

South Korea-based Studio Mir, known for their solid work on The Legend of Korra and Voltron: Legendary Defender, provided the brightly-hued animation duties for the new Superman series.

“Brendan is a Voltron alumnus. He’s worked with Studio Mir and also did work for them on Korra. I had never worked for them, but I worked with Studio Maven, an offshoot of Mir, on Invader Zim. We’re familiar with the Korean animation process and actually hired a couple of designers who worked

on Voltron and had already worked with Studio Mir and knew the language. We were trying to make everything as Mir-friendly as we possibly could. Our art director created a set of brushes and tools and easy-to-follow style guides.”

Returning Superman to his science-fiction roots was foremost in Wyatt’s vision for the show. “I love robots,” he admits. “I designed the spider robot in the Spider-Verse movies. When Superman was created, it was not a superhero comic, it was science-fiction. So, I set out to do future crazy sci-fi with Krypton and near-future, hard sci-fi on Earth, and try to make robots and spaceships feel real and tactile.”

Industry veteran Dou Hong (Invincible, Young Justice) led the character design team crafting the shape languages, costumes and colors for the project.

“A lot of the shows I’ve worked on already have a creative reference library to look at, so it’s relatively easy to adapt to the style and vibe of the show they’re trying to make,” Hong explains. “The Lois Lanes we’ve seen before wore skirts and they have the heels, and are still ready to go and still get into the action. Our Lois is wearing clothes that a lot of us girls would probably wear if we were going to be out there trying to search for the story. So, she’s wearing pants and athletic shoes, but still has a business-centric crossover and a more modern, shorter hairstyle.”

In designing the specific look and costume for Superman, Hong honored previous adaptations of the Kryptonian savior, yet still allowed some personal touches to remain for the final concepts. “Especially for Superman and Batman and Wonder Woman, it’s hard to deviate from what people expect. Even with the controversy of Superman not having trunks, it already makes people very passionate. Because it’s an earlier incarnation, we were able to go back to the trunks. You can have the classic Superman outfit but

then when you see Clark in his civilian wear, it’s a modern business casual look. A lot of people don’t realize that Clark Kent is the alter ego of Superman, not the other way around.”

Jimmy Loves Aliens

One of the new changes made to original canon was to reimagine Jimmy Olsen as Black, aligning him with DC Comics’ recent iterations of the timeless character.

“Once you make a change like that, we stick to it and we just try to see how we can take that classic Jimmy persona and meld it to a more modern interpretation,” adds Hong. “Our Jimmy is very joyful and he’s basically the glue that keeps this trio of Jimmy, Lois and Clark together. He’s really into aliens and that helps because even though Clark looks human, he’s actually an alien himself trying to fit into the modern world.”

Regarding surprises fans can anticipate as the series progresses, Hong is tight-lipped but does offer a few clues without upsetting the spoiler applecart. “One lady in particular has electricity powers that a lot of people are going to enjoy,” she hints. “And there’s a cool character who comes from an alternative dimension. That one wears a very distinctive hat which I think fans are going to love. From the beginning, we have to have a pretty healthy respect for the property and try to make sure that we don’t stray away too much from what makes these character who they are.”

“Superman represents hope and change for the future,” she concludes. “A better world for tomorrow. As long as we keep that there, the world around him will change, but he’ll always stay the same.” ◆

My Adventures with Superman debuts new episodes every Thursday on Adult Swim, with encores Fridays at 7 p.m., streaming Fridays on Max.

FROM KRYPTON WITH LOVE: Warner Bros. Animation’s new series about DC's friendly alien/superhero offers a rom-com spin on the timeless character delivered through a soft, colorful anime filter.

'Superman represents hope and change for the future — a better world for tomorrow. As long as we keep that there, the world around him will change, but he’ll always stay the same.'

— Character designer Dou Hong

Voices of the Mother Continent

The glorious renaissance of African animation is on full display in the new Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire anthology.

Dichotomies define Africa and the perception of its people. In the realm of pop culture, the continent is in the middle of an entertainment renaissance. From the emergence of the Afrobeats genre in music to the Nigerian film empire of Nollywood, Africa is demanding a seat at the table of art and entertainment, and with their new anthology series, Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire, Disney+ is providing a host of African animators a firstclass invitation to the creativity banquet.

“I think the inspiration [for Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire] was really an awareness of the creative energy that’s been exploding in animation in Africa for the past few years,” says Peter Ramsey, the show’s executive producer, who is best known for directing the Oscar-winning Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and producing its sequel. “I was just blown away by the enthusiasm, energy and just the talent in that creative community.”

Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire is an action-packed anthology series that exists somewhere between cyberpunk and Afrofuturism. Throughout the series, it isn’t uncommon to see cultural aesthetics from across the continent presented through the lens of science-fiction. In the visually arresting world of Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire, elements like tribal facial scarring resemble cyborg circuitry.

A Bridge between the Past and Future

Although the tone and style of animation featured in the 10 short films vary between episodes, Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire boasts a thematic throughline related to the dichotomy of Africans finding a balance between honoring their history and constructing their future. “In most of those shorts, there’s this idea of linking back or somehow dealing with your past,” says Ramsey. “It just seems like something the continent is really trying to

grapple with as a whole. To kind of figure out what’s the best way to move forward.”

The progressive themes of Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire frequently stretch toward a distant future, but the creation of the project charts back to an era of our collective past before the 2020 COVID pandemic. Ramsey first became aware of the potential for an African animation anthology by visiting the Cape Town International Animation Festival in 2019. “I had been invited out the year before, but I couldn’t go because of Spider-Verse, and I said, ‘Well, I’ve never been to Africa, and I’d love to come,’” recounts Ramsey. “And I met a lot of the people who would end up being involved in Kizazi Moto back then.”

During his trip, Ramsey fostered relationships with several creatives from the South African animation studio Triggerfish, who initially conceived the idea for Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire. “If I remember right, it was several months after; it might have even been almost a year

'In most of those shorts, there’s this idea of linking back or somehow dealing with your past. It just seems like something the continent is really trying to grapple with as a whole.'

— Executive producer Peter Ramsey

after that festival, that Triggerfish got in touch with me and said, ‘Hey, we think that anthology idea we were talking about might be coming together with Disney+. Would you like to come on as an executive producer?’” says Ramsey. “And I was like, ‘Yes,’ because that energy that I felt there was really contagious, and I really loved all the filmmakers I met.”

Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire lives up to its namesake, as the series carries almost a Promethean quality for the emerging African animation scene. With the creators behind the series possessing an awareness of pop culture and contemporary perspectives that defies Africa’s perception as “underdeveloped” and “uncivilized,” Ramsey thinks audiences will be impressed by the universal themes found in each short. “You watch those [short] films, and you’re like, ‘Oh, there’s nothing really alien or foreign or behind the times, or anything like that,” says Ramsey. “They’re totally relatable.”

Worlds Within Worlds

One of the shorts that emphasize Kizazi Moto’s cross-cultural appeal is the surfing-centric, coming-of-age tale Surf Sangoma, which, barring the futuristic South African setting, feels reminiscent of classic films like Point Break and Surf’s Up. “South Africa, particularly Durban, has a rich surfing culture,” says Surf Sangoma co-director Catherine Green. “We tried as much as possible to tap into this localism through the aesthetic and soundscape of the animation, as well as drawing on iconic surfers like Rob Machado.”

Although Surf Sangoma has a deeply en-

trenched universality that permeates through the short, co-director Nthato Mokgata wanted to highlight the specificities of South Africa’s surf scene. “Our particular focus with our surfing film was township-raised surfers from Umlazi, which inspired our leading characters — people that fuse popular S.A. youth culture like GQOM and street fashion with the surfing,” says Mokgata. “Animation, in general, is quite a challenging field for the fact that we have to create entire worlds and decide on minutia and details — like how wet-looking the water is.”

Despite each short in Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire effortlessly exuding an air of relatability, the series never loses its distinct African flair. For Ramsey, Kizazi Moto’s unique perspective indicates a growing hunger in audiences for international content that challenges long-standing cultural biases. “There are so many different ways of looking at the world in a competition that it feels like people are like, ‘… How do we accept what is history that’s not going to tear us apart, that we can agree on, and deal with, and improve on things, and move forward,’” says Ramsey. “And a lot of African countries are doing it very honestly [by] grappling with Colonialism, grappling with things like the legacy of apartheid in South Africa. I think they’re doing that more honestly than we are in the United States a lot of the time.”

Facing The Truth

The short film Moremi: The Epic Battle by Nigerian director Shofela Coker perfectly exemplifies Kizazi Moto’s honest storytelling by

delivering a parable that speaks directly to the African diaspora. “I set out to explore the notion of longing for home — specifically how one might feel when displaced,” says Coker. “With this framework, I hoped to explore the relationship between my generation’s sense of Nigerian identity and the older generation’s — ultimately, how they can be bridged. Furthermore, that reconciliation might always be possible through compassion, understanding and love.”

Interestingly, the creation of Moremi helped Coker forge a deeper connection to his animation team and roots as a Nigerian. “The most fulfilling challenge was striving to provide everyone on our team with the right context, reference, and tools for understanding and translating Nigerian manner, culture, music and art pertinent to our short,” says Coker. “I hoped to convey the power that sounds, rhythms and natural landscapes one might experience in their formative years can act as a therapeutic North Star for the psyche.”

Ramsey posits that projects like Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire and the recent influx of fresh cultural perspectives in the entertainment industry explain the growing popularity of a new subgenre in science-fiction that he helped pioneer with Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. “I think that’s the reason we see so much multiverse stuff,” says Ramsey. “This idea that you can have so many points of view on something that seemed solid, like reality.” ◆

Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire is now streaming on Disney+.

'I hoped to explore the relationship between my generation’s sense of Nigerian identity and the older generation’s, and ultimately, how they can be bridged.'

— Moremi director Shofela Coker

AFRICAN ANIMATION

RENAISSANCE: From left, Surf SangomA , Moremi: The Epic Battle , Hatima 0 and You Give Me Heart are four of the 10 shorts featured in Disney+’s new African anthology series Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire

Giant Robots vs. Alien Monsters!

Polygon Pictures and Boom!’s new show Mech Cadets promises to take sci-fi animation to new heights this summer.

- By Ramin Zahed -

This summer, sci-fi and fantasy fans have a real treat in store for them in Mech Cadets, the new animated series based on the popular Boom! Studios comic series. Animated by top Japanese studio Polygon Pictures for Netflix, the 10-part CG show follows the adventures of teenager Stanford Yu (Brandon Soo Hoo) who works as a janitor at the Sky Corps Military Academy and dreams of piloting a giant robot. When he finally gets his shot, Stanford and his classmates must put aside all personal differences and work together as a team to defend humanity against a new alien invasion. Sounds like a great premise, right?

Executive producers Jack Liang and Stephen

Christy, supervising director Tohru Patrick Awa (The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Blade Runner: Black Lotus) and head writer/exec producer Aaron Lam (Ash vs. the Evil Dead) were kind enough to give us the scoop on their hot new show, which also features the voices of Daniel Dae Kim, Ming-Na Wen and Debra Wilson.

A Perfect Partnership

“We’ve known Stephen and Boom! Studios for a quite a while and have been big fans of each other for many years,” says Liang. “We always talked about collaborating on something. We both also had a relationship with Netflix, so when the idea of adapting Mech Cadet Yu into a possible animated series was brought up, we felt the chemistry and relationship that we all had with each other was serendipitous. Also, the vision and direction we wanted to take Mech Cadets was very aligned with one another.”

Christy agrees, “When Jane Lee [manager of original animation at Netflix] approached us about doing the show and told us that Polygon was interested, it was like a dream coming true. Thanks to the whole team and especially our

'Our mission statement is to do what no other has done, in unparalleled quality, for all the world to see and enjoy. We always want to try and reinvent ourselves and do something creatively and visually different if the opportunity arises.'

— Executive producer Jack Liang

chief creatives, director Patrick Awa and showrunner Aaron Lam, we’ve managed to build something that is a fusion of Japanese and American approaches that feels unlike anything I’ve seen on TV before. Mech Cadets was one where we all really bonded as a team, and everyone brought their best work to the table.”

He adds, “I love that the show is in the six to 11 demographic but aims at the upper age of that — we have some truly emotional moments in the series and I think managed to make the stakes for the characters feel real, and I think that’s rare in kids’ animation.”

Supervising director Awa says giant robots fighting alien monsters is a no-brainer for fun and that he was instantly captivated when he read the original comic by Greg Pak and Takeshi Miyazawa. “But Mech Cadets is also a sincere, coming-of-age drama with diverse characters," Awa notes. "They came from different cultural backgrounds, families and personal reasons to become pilots. Although the story is set in the future, the problems the characters face daily are similar to our teenage issues, struggling to learn how to fly to see the world from a different perspective, which is universally compelling.”

Liang says the team at Polygon Pictures were excited to bring their expertise in creating topnotch animation to the show. “Our mission statement is ‘to do what no other has done, in unparalleled quality, for all the world to see and enjoy,’” he explains. “We always want to try and reinvent

ourselves and do something creatively and visually different if the opportunity arises. Patrick was an instrumental key piece on the art direction of where this series should go visually. He and our brilliant artists and designers all came together with that same vision and direction, and we feel we created something very unique. We used a few in-house proprietary shaders to implement into the production of the series to be able to execute the art direction into the production.”

Most of the production was done at Polygon, including overseas studios Polygon Pictures Malaysia and Polygon Studios India. The production also employed many talented artists from around Europe, the Americas and Asia. “Polygon has always been a very open culture and wanting to learn and build friendships with many talented artists and this project was no different,” says Liang. “I think at a given time and during peak, we might have had over 120 artists working at a given time. Everybody was instrumental in the production from the writing team to the Netflix and the Boom! sides. We’re very fortunate that everyone that was involved was so passionately vested into our story. If you include everyone that was involved, not just the animation side, the team had over 170 people.”

Liang admits that one of the biggest challenges was that they had to begin production slowly during the pandemic. “There were many things we had to adjust based on our original

plans,” he says. “We planned on having some artists come to Japan to work directly with us for a bit, but due to challenges of traveling, this was all handled over Zoom. Since we had brilliant talent from Europe and the Americas, managing the time zones was a bit challenging since we are based in Japan. I think once we got used to the remote and video call meetings, things began to synch back into motion.”

Taking Robots to the Next Level

Awa says he’s proud of the international talent that came together to make the show a reality. “We leapt and flew the journey to its destination as the animated series with the dedication of many great talents from many countries,” he concludes. “Making an animated show is a group effort and takes a long time to create: It could feel like relocating a whole galaxy by moving each star one by one. Still, the essence remained the same from the original comic book, because we were all once teenagers"

The team is quite excited to deliver the show to giant robot and animation fans this summer. Supervising producer Lam says he knows the audience will be totally mesmerized by the beautiful imagery, the direction and the music. “What Polygon has crafted is out of this world!” he says. “I hope the audience will fall in love with the characters and that they’re entertained by the story. I hope they jump on this roller-coaster ride with us — to cheer together, to laugh together and to cry together. Ultimately, I hope the audience will see a piece of themselves in each of the characters. Finding that human connection within the artistry of the visuals, the realism of the character designs, the heart of the story … that’s the magic of animation!”

'Finding that human connection within the artistry of the visuals, the realism of the character designs, the heart of the story … that’s the magic of animation!'

— Head writer/executive producer Aaron Lam

Mech Cadets will premiere on Netflix on August 10.

Stephen Christy Tohru Patrick Awa

NOT ALL ROBOTS ARE EVIL! Mech Cadets follows the adventures of a young janitor at a military academy who ends up fighting giant aliens from outer space.

SIGGRAPH at 50

This year’s computer graphics confab in L.A. celebrates the early days of CG while offering a striking look at the best of today’s animation achievements.

- By Ellen Wolff -

The ACM SIGGRAPH conference for computer graphics has long prided itself as the place where CG aficionados flock each summer to glimpse the future of their evolving medium. As Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull once observed, “It’s a conference where people say ‘Wow’ a lot.”

Attendees at the 2023 conference in Los Angeles (August 6-10) will be looking for the kind of eye-catching innovations they’ve come to expect, but they’ll be looking backwards too, as SIGGRAPH celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. To commemorate the milestone, there will be two ‘Best Of’-styled screenings: the juried Electronic Theater showcasing new work (always the hottest ticket), and a Retrospective Reel featuring a half-century of SIGGRAPH breakthroughs.

Looking Back in Wonder

“We started by identifying over 300 works that pioneers in the field considered seminal,” says Kalina Borkiewicz, this year’s Electronic Theater Director. Of course, fitting 50 years of CG into a 90-minute retrospective session entailed making some difficult editing choices, she notes. “We’ve budgeted in some break

times, and there will be a discussion format where panelists can comment on the reel.”

This one-time, live event (it will not be streamed online) reveals how far the field has come — if measured only by the soft edges of early computer imagery that was preserved on film. Borkiewicz explains that some images in the show from 1974 are at 240p. “Some of it is abysmal. The challenge was to make a cohesive show out of pieces that range from 240p to 4K. That’s part of the magic.”

Notable among the famous work being celebrated at SIGGRAPH is the CG work created in the ’70s and ’80s by Dr. Jim Blinn, who animated the Voyager spacecraft fly-bys for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Blinn, a CG software legend who contributed to Carl Sagan’s famed Cosmos TV series, plans to participate in SIGGRAPH this year.

“What we could do back at that time was fairly crude and stylized,” says Blinn of the early work being celebrated at the confab this year. “We shot on 16mm film, and most people saw it on NTSC video. I was once asked to send someone a high-def version. But there is no high-def version! I’m trying to get the original films digitized so it’s of decent quality.”

Blinn, who’s attended SIGGRAPH since the beginning — and delivered the conference’s 25th Anniversary Keynote address — remembers the era before a polished Electronic Theater was even imaginable. With so little presentable CG being accomplished back then, he laughs, “It was more like Open Projector Night.”

But his JPL/Voyager animation, which Blinn calls “a harbinger,” captivated TV viewers by flying through Saturn’s rings, and it garnered valuable media exposure for the emerging field of computer animation. JPL’s locale at Caltech in Southern California also regularly attracted Hollywood filmmakers to see Blinn’s demos, fueling entertainment industry interest. And, Blinn kept delivering animated shorts to SIGGRAPH, using CG to explain complex scientific ideas in clear and often witty ways.

His belief that CG is a powerful educational tool has only grown, especially for a self-described YouTube addict like Blinn. When he attends the Electronic Theater at SIGGRAPH 2023, he’s keen to see the selections that represent the latest in scientific visualization. Three sci-viz selections were chosen for this year’s show, but unlike the vintage outer space animations shown at SIGGRAPH in

WIRED FOR TECHNOLOGY: The 50th Anniversary Edition of SIGGRAPH is expected to bring thousands of CG animation industry professionals to the Convention Center in downtown Los Angeles.

years past, these modern animations explore biological complexities that once were the domain of electron microscopes.

Scientific Wizardry

“This year’s scientific visualization pieces are all biomedical,” notes Borkiewicz, whose ‘day job’ happens to be director of the visualization program office at the National Center for Supercomputing at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Data-driven animation is her specialty, and her work has been seen in the IMAX film, A Beautiful Planet. (Her predecessor, Donna Cox, also collaborated with CG filmmakers back in the day, so she’s building on a significant history.)

“We saw a big spike in scientific visualization submissions this year,” says Borkiewicz.

“That was unexpected, and I was surprised.” She speculates that the increase might be driven by public interest in understanding the COVID virus, which was widely depicted in the media through CG animation. Whatever the impetus, Borkiewicz thinks the result has been a blurring of the line between scientific visualization and sophisticated cinematic simulations. Unlike the stripped-down CAD/CAM imagery of early Electronic Theater shows, today’s scientific visualizations boast a much more professional polish.

Borkiewicz credits the diversity of her Electronic Theater jury with the variety of the 22 pieces culled from over 300 submissions. “I did make an effort to have a jury representing different backgrounds,” she says of her nine-person panel. The jurors brought expertise from

distinct areas of CG — including digital visual effects (with jurists from ILM, Framestore and Wētā-Unity), computer-animated features (DreamWorks Animation), television animation (Deluxe), animated commercials (Buck Design and Hornet), game production (Blizzard Entertainment) and scientific visualization (NASA).

Their selections represent a thoroughly modern mix of high-end professional productions alongside an international array of student animated shorts. “The student work is out of this world,” raves Borkiewicz. “Nine of the 22 pieces in the Electronic Theater are by students, including a Best in Show.” The student selections reflect the sophisticated animation programs at France’s École MoPA, ESMA, Supinfocom and École des Nouvelles

‘We saw a big spike in scientific visualization submissions this year … That was unexpected, and I was surprised.’

- Kalina Borkiewicz, Electronic Theater director

Among the top animated projects showcased at SIGGRAPH this year are A Calling. From the Desert. To the Sea; Overwatch: Kiriko; Luna (VR); The Voice in the Hollow and The Diplomacy of the Eclipse

‘We’ve gotten to the point where the visuals — while not easy to do — are more available to more people. There are standardized tools that people can access. So, what’s more important now than ever, is coming up with an interesting story to tell.’

Images, as well as Germany’s Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg and Ringling College of Art and Design in Florida. Student short films have traditionally benefitted enormously from being screened in the Electronic Theater — and winning now qualifies a filmmaker to compete for an Academy Award. The level of quality among student films is more accomplished than ever, observes Borkiewicz. “It’s getting harder and harder to tell if something is student work.”

This year’s jury, in fact, faced a split decision in their votes for Best in Show, and one co-winner was the student graduation film La Diplomatie de l’Éclipse (The Diplomacy of the Eclipse) from MoPA students Clémence Bailly, Selim Lallaoui, César Luton, Axel Mechin and

Achille Pasquier. It tied with Voice in The Hollows, Miguel Ortega and Tran Ma’s striking African tale of betrayal, with voice actors speaking Swahili. The 10-minute drama, created by feature film VFX veterans who now teach at Gnomon School of Visual Effects in Los Angeles, was achieved with a small crew using Unreal Engine.

However, the fact that real-time tools are part of the contemporary animation toolkit is less striking than it might have seemed not long ago. As Borkiewicz remarks, “It’s now so normal that people are not pointing it out.” Whichever animation route filmmakers have followed to arrive on this year’s playlist, their work will be seen on the big screen in a better light than ever before. “This is the first

SIGGRAPH,” says Borkiewicz, “where the Electronic Theater will be projected in 4K.”

Watching from the audience, Blinn will undoubtedly appreciate how far the CG field has come since the era of “Open Projector Night.” “There’s so much incredibly good stuff in animated movies now,” says the man whose software ideas led directly to the surface textures in Pixar’s Toy Story. “We’ve gotten to the point where the visuals — while not easy to do — are more available to more people. There are standardized tools that people can access. So, what’s more important now than ever, is coming up with an interesting story to tell.”

For more information about the event, visit s2023.siggraph.org

- Jim Blinn, CG pioneer

SIGGRAPH spotlights some of the best CG-animated and VFX-driven achievements of the year, including from top left, James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water, DreamWorks’ Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, ESMA’s Swing to the Moon and Pixar’s Elemental

Saturn image (Cosmos TV series)

The Magic of Digitally De-Aging a Beloved Hero

ILM’s digital animator Matt Shumway tells us about his digital adventures on Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.

By Trevor Hogg

Much been written about Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny since the movie premiered at the Cannes Film Festival two months ago. In the fifth installment of the beloved film franchise, Harrison Ford puts on the fedora and lashes the bullwhip for the last time as the adventurous archaeology professor tries to stay one step ahead of the Nazis. Visual effects powerhouse Industrial Light & Magic has been along for the entire death-defying ride beginning with the Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981. While Henry ‘Indiana’ Jones, Jr. escapes danger haphazardly and with a mischievous grin, nothing was left to chance in the film’s dazzling visual effects work, thanks to the expertise of VFX supervisor Andrew Whitehurst (Ex Machina) and director James Mangold (Ford v Ferrari). The first 20 minutes of the film begins in a Scottish castle, transitions to a car chase and a battle onboard a speeding train, and ends with a bridge blowing up. The trick here is that the action-packed opening is supposed to appear as if it’s been assembled from lost footage shot during the making of Raiders of the Lost Ark

Actor’s Youth Recaptured

“Honestly, Harrison Ford still moves well for an 80-year old!” notes Matt Shumway, animation supervisor at ILM, whose credits include The Mandalorian, Life of Pi and The Revenant. “I hope we all can move like that when we’re 80. He still fit into his original costume. But Harrison is not 38 anymore, so you did have to reflect that in the motion. For the most part, you key off the takes that he has given, and we looked at his walks and runs. Harrison has such a distinctive run, which makes things easier because it’s not like a generic version of itself. It’s a mix of Jack Sparrow and Tom Cruise! He has a wonderful run from Raiders of the Lost Ark that we sourced when doing the younger stuff. It’s much wilder than you would expect.”

Each project that involves de-aging furthers the development of the process, from The Irishman to The Mandalorian to Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. “It wasn’t a one-button approach and we’re good for 20 minutes of the movie,” says Shumway. “We used ILM FaceSwap, which is our internal technology that is similar to deepfake, but not quite. Hours and hours of footage

that we had at Lucasfilm of Harrison at that age were sourced. Through machine learning and ILM FaceSwap, we were able to then source that footage and apply it to older Harrison Ford, which gets you to 80 percent quickly.”

He points out that to achieve the final 20 percent, which takes the visuals over the uncanny valley, is a lot of work. “It’s a mix of different techniques. We also had a fully CG-rendered version of Harrison at that age which would fill in the gaps that didn’t work so well with machine learning, or it would be 100 percent animated depending on the shot. We’re able to put all these pieces together so it feels like one performance (thanks to improvements in compositing and digital animation).”

The younger version of the actor did not require much modification. “It was definitely a concern because that was some of the feedback from The Irishman, which was they looked younger but still moved like older men,” remarks Shumway. “That’s a testament to James Mangold on what his choices were and how the shots were chosen to be de-aged; he was aware of that and didn’t want Harrison to move like

‘We used ILM FaceSwap which is our internal technology that’s similar to deep fake, but not quite. Through machine learning and ILM FaceSwap we were able to source that footage and apply it to older Harrison Ford.’

ILM animation supervisor Matthew Shumway

80-year-old Harrison — but like I said, Harrison still has a lot of pep in him. There was some digital double help for the more extreme actions and fighting, like on the back of the train. Other times he would be more hunched over, so we lifted him in the composite a little bit. But it was a lot more subtle approaches than we’ve had to do for de-aging in the past.”

No de-aging was required for Toby Jones (who plays fellow archaeologist and Indy ally Basil Shaw) reveals Shumway. “Toby Jones is playing his age for the most part in the movie and we don’t see him as an older man because he passes away before we see the older Indy.” However, this wasn’t the case for the Nazi antagonist played by Mads Mikkelsen. “We did do some de-aging on Mads as well,” says the ILM veteran. “He has a younger-looking face already, so his de-aging wasn’t as difficult as Harrison’s. Mads is a younger man than Harrison. James liked the de-aging we did because it didn’t look like a younger Mads, but a younger version of the character; that was cool and a different approach.”

Physics was creatively defied for the nerve-wracking rooftop train battle. “It’s definitely in favor of the story and what is most exciting as suppose to the real physics of what that would be,” says Shumway. “Indiana Jones certainly has a lot of experience being on top of trains, so we leaned into that. But you do want to make it feel like you’re on a train. Steven Spielberg is like that, too. It’s all about the excitement

and heightened reality of it. If it was real to life on the train physics, you’d be freaking about falling off the whole time! I would certainly be! Even the speed of the train at moments to make it more exciting is going faster than those steam engines can do.”

ILM was responsible for the previz for the third act and subsequently executing the work which features airplanes and a cloud portal. “It was fun because we got to develop and help guide where a lot of that stuff was going and a number of the shot designs that we came up were in the film,” remarks Shumway. “That started with some kickoffs from James as well as storyboards. We would immediately do rounds and rounds of ideas and shot designs. We would get notes back and forth and worked with editorial. Then we moved into animation once they started shooting.”

Some full digital shots were created for the exteriors of the military aircrafts. “Andrew was a stickler for everything feeling real for planes, and we heightened the reality in a lot of cases because it’s an adventure film, but it needed to move and have weight,” he notes. “We treated those planes like any other character because each one had to feel correct. The Nord that Ethann Isidore is flying is lighter and getting bounced around a lot more in the storm, as opposed to the Highball, which is heavier and filled with Harrison and a bunch of Nazis.”

Producing the Portal

Shots featuring the cloud portal that goes back in time were entirely digital. “Some of the last work we delivered was the plane going through the portal because there’s always the mandate to do something that we’ve never seen before,” remarks Shumway. “What does that mean? It means you have to keep trying things and see what James does and doesn’t take to. There was a specific shape that the clouds were making which James wanted for breaking through and feeling natural and not like a magical portal. We looked at a lot of weird cloud formations from volcanoes so we could have something from reality that we were basing it on. Then we took a lot of single frame approaches with our art department, like should the clouds be spiraling out or spin? They gave James a menu of different things and he would narrow it down. We would start doing the effects elements for it and see if we could get that same feel. It was a long process trying to get that.”

Shumway says he’s always game for crazy challenges such as opening Dial of Destiny with a de-aged Harrison Ford. “We at ILM love that stuff because it pushes us, and it gets us excited about things. When people get excited, they do good work.” ◆

Disney’s Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is currently playing in theaters all around the world.

—

TURNING BACK THE YEARS: Director James Mangold and his team at ILM used CGI to de-age Harrison Ford in the nostalgic flashback sequence of the movie.

Tech Reviews

- By Todd Sheridan Perry -

Wacom Cintiq Pro 27

Last year at SIGGRAPH, I was shown a sneak preview of the Wacom Cintiq Pro 27, and I’ve been looking forward to playing with it ever since. Finally, I had my chance to dig in last month. So, let’s take a look.

Right off the bat, the size of the tablet has the same footprint as the previous 24” Cintiq Pros, but a substantially smaller bezel makes for a significantly larger screen size and work area. The weight still has a lot of heft, but it is definitely lighter than the earlier models. It’s heavy enough that you will want to make sure you have a stand. My review model came with the standard stand (which is a bazillion pounds in itself, to ensure a stable counterweight). However, consider an Ergo Stand if you like to work with the tablet in your lap, or a Flex Arm if you are using the Cintiq for double duty as your drawing surface and a traditional monitor — so you can quickly reposition the tablet for the different purposes.

The new design is ergonomically pleasing, with the programmable express keys fitted into the “grips” on either side of the tablet. So, you can comfortably have your support hand on the modifier keys while your drawing hand is doing its thing. However, if you prefer to use the ExpressKey Remote, that hasn’t gone away: Just plug the Bluetooth transmitter into the USB port on the back of the tablet, and you’re in business.

The Pro Pen 3 had a new, modular design which allows you to customize not only the nibs (which has always been a thing), but also the grip and the height of the buttons. There is also a weight inside the pen to balance it to your specific preference. The interaction with the screen is excellent, with pressure sensitivity increased to 8,192 levels. The tilt recognition has also been improved to +/- 60 degrees. All of this makes for a smoother and more responsive experience when doing tasks like painting and sculpting, where even the slightest bit of lag can be felt.

The display is 4K, 10-bit color covering 99% Adobe RGB and 98% DCI-P3, and it supports HDR Gamma. The display’s brightness and intensity are striking in comparison to my other monitors (which aren’t too shabby). The picture is clear and contrasty, even in the bright light of my office with my blinds raised.

I won’t lie — the price tag is kind of steep. At $3,500 it might be out of range for some who just wants to play around. But if you are a professional artist, it’s not a bad investment. It’s not going to make you a better artist, but if you are a good artist, it’ll help make creating your art just that much more enjoyable.

Website: wacom.com

Price: $3,499

HP Z4 G5

The HP Z4 G5 is the most compact workstation in the latest Z series, which also includes the Z6, Z8, and the Z8 Fury. As small as the footprint is, the Z4 packs a lot of punch.

Like the rest of the G5 series, the workstation has been reconfigured with the Sapphire Rapids Intel processors, which is Intel’s response to the AMD Ryzen Threadripper. The Z4 has a single socket for the Xeon W-2400 Series processor which can have six to 24 cores. In addition, you can fit up to 512GB of DDR5 RAM.

Despite its size, there is enough room inside to fit two dual slot graphics cards up to the size of a NVidia RTX 6000 (x2). The interior cooling design of the HP box is such that heat is well dispersed. So, all that GPU heat isn’t going to be a problem. Even when simulations and renders are thrown at the GPUs and CPUs, the workstation stays really quiet.

There are plenty of USB 3.0 ports on the backside, but you also have two in the front, paired with another two USB-C ports and an SD Card reader. In addition, you can have up to 2 NVMe front-accessible bays for solid state drives. And as always, the toolless access is very handy for upgrading and swapping out components.

Despite not being the biggest workstation in the series, the power is still there. I’ve run Houdini simulations, V-Ray renders, Nuke comps, ZBrush sculpts, Premiere 4K edits and Resolve colors sessions. I have a 35” 4K monitor in conjunction with the Wacom Cintiq Pro 27, and I haven’t been waiting for anything.

If you are looking for a starter workstation and still need enough umph to do what you want, I can certainly recommend this. I’ve been using HP

workstations and mobile workstations for over 15 years, and they have always treated me well. I can’t see why this new line of workstations would be any different.

Website: hp.com/us-en/workstations/z4.html

Price: $2,319 and up

Dehancer OFX 7

Awhile back, I was looking into workflows to make digital footage feel like film. I know this is a thing that we’ve been trying to tackle for a while — at least the last 20 years since digital cameras became part of the landscape. But like everything, methods and approaches get better over time, and some take more time than others to get right. So, I asked the color artist on my last show if he had run across any off-the-shelf tools for film emulation. He has his own secret sauce for film emulation, but he pointed me in the direction of Dehancer, which I looked into — and have to say that I’m pretty impressed.

There is no way we can deep dive into all the sub-tools that make up Dehancer Pro. This could be because all of the variables that make up what is happening when film negative (or positive, or reversal stock) reacts to light and then is chemically processed, and then printed to either print or a positive film stock. (Well, all of those things can fill whole books — and they do!)

But let’s start with the base: The big brains at Dehancer have gone through the process of scanning and analyzing 63 film profiles as of this latest release to get an accurate baseline for how an image would look when shot on that film. Compounded with a multitude of camera input profiles, you get the control of whatever camera you were shooting with, getting color transformed to a standard color space, and then the film stock profile applied.

These profiles are not just sampled once — they are sampled three times. This is because film responds differently at different exposures. So, the films are sampled two stops above and two stops below. These are then controlled by the Push/Pull (Ev) parameter to move your imagery to emulate being under or over exposed.

The above example shows not only how much care the Dehancer team puts into the tool, but also their attention and consideration given to the analog process. Push/Pull are terms from traditional photography. This is the same for Film Developer where features like Contrast Boost, Gamma Correction, Color Separation and Color Boost — which

are variations you get when you alter the temperature and concentration of the developer chemistry.

All of that is for starters: We also have tools to control the Print Medium, CMY Color Heads, Film Grain, Halation, Bloom, Film Damage, Vignetting, Film Breathing, Gate Weave and False Colors. They all have the same care to reproduce what is happening in the camera, in the film

powerful if you dig in and understand what all the parameters do, and why they are doing it.

The largest selection of features is for Resolve, but the plug-in is also available for Premiere Pro, After Effects, Final Cut and Photoshop. Geometric processes like Grain, Halation, Bloom, Film Breath and Damage can also be purchased individually. In short, I’m a fan!

Price: Free trial download; $449 (lifetime), $299 (one year), $199 (six

Todd Sheridan Perry is an award-winning VFX supervisor and digital artist whose credits include and

. You can reach him

Running from September 20 to 24, 2023, this year’s festival features a major retrospective of Masaaki Yuasa and a look at the work of Xi Chen and Justin Tomchuk

One of the world's leading animation events providing screenings, talks, and entertainment since 1976

5:45 a.m. This is a pic of a very long video of my alarm clock, Oliver. He is a savvy street pup from West Hollywood who I found one night looking sad and dirty. I asked him if he’d like to live at my house and he said nothing, so I took that as a “maybe.” He hates everyone at first, but he eventually falls in love forever. You can see he’s still sleepy. Look at that droopy left eye. I highly recommend getting dark linen sheets if you have a short haired blonde dog who sheds constantly.

Actress, writer, director and showrunner Erin Gibson was nominated three times for an Emmy for her brilliant shortform series, Gay of Thrones. This year, she brings her wild sense of humor to Warner Bros. Animation’s much-anticipated Tiny Toons Looniversity, which premieres on Max and Cartoon Network in the fall. Needless to say, we were very excited when she agreed to give us a peek into her glamorous life: 2 1 4

6 a.m. During the plague we moved to Santa Fe, NM, to see how fun it would be to live without moisture. As a comedy writer, it’s important to go out and experience the entire world for story ideas. This is Oliver and me on the Dale Balls system of trails. I don’t know who Dale Balls is /was, but I am thankful he didn’t go to my high school with that last name. I love this trail cause of those floofy plants — they’re called Apache plume and make me sneeze so hard, so much. Great inspo for Lil Sneezer, am I right?

3

7 a.m. I own too many horse t-shirts for a person who does not have a horse, has never been on one and is frightened to be near one. But, I love any animal who can rock a side pony — and we all know in this Zoom world, the top half matters the most.

5 6 7

4 p.m. It’s the afternoon slump and Oliver is resting up for post-work squeak-o hide and seek that happens after I shut my laptop.

10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Zooms all day! One of the joys of working remotely is that I sit in a chair for hours at a time hoping that one of them ends early so I can pee. I love the people I work with so much. I started my career in live action and I can’t tell you what an incredible experience it’s been working with animation professionals. They’re sweet, talented artists with deep wells of knowledge about all kinds of things and sick senses of humor.

Noon. My husband is Italian and is in the Amalfi Coast with his extended family. He sends me pictures of the food he’s eating that I am missing out on during my lunch break. On this day I looked at pasta, but I ate half a turkey wrap and a couple of salt and vinegar potato chips.

7 p.m. The Zooms are  done. The scripts fixed, the voice records locked and the animation perfected. I wish I could show you how utterly awesome Tiny Toons is, thanks to our incredible writing staff and my co-producer Nate Cash and his art team, who are embarrassingly talented. You can see it this fall when it premieres. As the sun sets on another day in the high desert, I watch this spectacular light show and wonder if today is the day I finally nail “Glamorous Life”