Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1188718
When Theodor Seuss Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, beloved author of iconic children's books first set out to write Green Eggs and Ham, he did so on a dare from his editor—write a book using a vocabulary of only 50 words to tell a story. Not only did Dr. Seuss win the bet, but the book was a great success and went on to instill a love of reading in kids around the world. One of those kids was Jared Stern, creator and showrunner of Netflix's recently released Green Eggs and Ham series, who faced a similar but quite opposite challenge: Take a brilliantly simple book and stretch it out to fill 13 episodes of animation—an exciting yet daunting task. Stern had childhood memories of the book's bright orange cover and that it had appealed to him because it was subversive, whimsical, weird and fun. "The biggest challenge was how to expand something that is so perfectly simple, while retaining the soul of what made it great in the first place," he says. When he revisited the book it occurred to him that it's both an odd couple story—essentially about a grumpy guy who's closed off not only to green eggs and ham but to everything in life, and a silly guy who is open to trying things— and it's also a road trip defined by places where Guy Am I refuses to eat the eponymous dish—not in a car, train, boat, or HAND DRAWN HAM THE NEW GREEN EGGS AND HAM SHOW TRANSFORMS 50 WORDS INTO AN EPIC JOURNEY 24 KEYFRAME I N P R O D U C T I O N