Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1257506
"I think it's a really good time to be in animation," says Devin "DVO" Roth, Art Director on both Final Space and Hoops. "We can be grateful for what shows like The Simpsons, Family Guy and King of the Hill have done, but I don't think we need to be following those same structures. We need to be exploring new ideas, dynamic angles, interesting ways of cutting, design and color." "I'm hearing about people from the experimental animation world who are getting meetings in the world of TV to develop stuff, and I find that to be pretty promising," adds Jesse Moynihan, Art Director on The Midnight Gospel and a writer and storyboard artist on Ward's series, Adventure Time. "If Midnight Gospel does well and people like it, it's going to give people like myself the opportunity to keep developing more thematically dense and adult kinds of ideas in animation." THE FAMILY GOES NUCLEAR Traditionally, everything—live action or animated—started with mom, dad and the kids. A nuclear family—the more dysfunctional, the better—has been the basis of countless animated series. The Flintstones may have lived in Bedrock, but they never shared a bed. The world of the future envisioned by The Jetsons now comes across as anything but futuristic. As the 1980s came to a close, a quirkily-drawn family wandered out of The Tracey Ullman Show and into history, changing the game forever. It has now been more than 30 years since Homer, Lisa, Bart et al. planted their flag as an animated family sitcom populated with a tribe of anti-heroes that wasn't afraid to go to some dark places. A decade later, Seth McFarlane unleashed the raunchier and racier antics of the Griffin family of Family Guy. The Belchers of Bob's Burgers and the Hills (King of the Hill) inched ever edgier and by the time genius inventor Rick moved in and started taking over the education of his dim-bulb grandson Morty, nobody blinked. 22 KEYFRAME F E AT U R E Images courtesy of Netflix