Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1469966
D E PA R T M E N T 29 KEYFRAME GETTING FRESH Over at Netflix, in an even edgier and adult-ier world, the Lovebugs and Hormone Monsters who have stirred up such trouble among the adolescents of Big Mouth turn their attention in Human Resources to grown-up issues like birth, death, adult relationships and every- thing in between. In addition, when they were in Big Mouth, the creatures oper- ated in a human world focused on the Bridgeton Middle School kids. In Human Resources, the curtain is pulled back on the daily lives of the creatures, and we see these same characters on the job in their creature realm. This realm, seen only once in season five of Big Mouth, has weird-looking streets and office buildings that appear to be melting. For Human Resources, "I think we just left the door open for our artists to do whatever they want with neighbor- hoods and some of the apartments," says Knudsen. "They're pretty wild." "We always felt that Human Resources didn't feel like a spin-off. It felt like its own entity from the very beginning," says series co-creator Jennifer Flackett, speaking at an FYC event for both series. "I don't think we had any fears like, 'Oh no, what if we ruin Big Mouth?' I think we only felt like it will be so fun and interesting to delve into all the different parts of life. That was the nice thing about it. It was Big Mouth, but it also wasn't Big Mouth. So, we got to enjoy both things completely." In her preparation for joining the Human Resources team as an Assistant Director, Kelly Turnbull re-watched all the seasons of Big Mouth. In a career where she has worked on a number of first season shows, Turnbull found it both exciting and comforting to work on one with the "plug-and-play" of how style conventions are handled already in place. "I've worked on shows where you get three episodes into it and they're like, 'We want eyelids to work differently than the eyelids did before,' so everybody has to change all the eyelids in the last three episodes. There were little things like that that were kind of nice to have already taken care of," says Turnbull. "And some of my favorite things to draw are mon- sters and body horror, and with Human Resources there was plenty of that." SUMMER 2022 29