Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1469966
CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT Like most animation pros, Carl Greenblatt loved watching car- toons as a kid. Among his favorites? The classic Hanna-Barbera shows. So it was a dream come true when "Warner Bros. basically came to me and said, 'We want you to develop something with the Hanna-Barbera library. Here's all these characters. Figure out what you want to do,'" he says. As the showrunner for the resulting series Jellystone, Greenblatt says his excitement was about more than "getting access to char- acters I grew up loving. [It was] having the freedom to interpret them in a way that felt personal and important to me." Jellystone is an ensemble show uniting numerous characters from the world of Hanna-Barbera. For some, like Yogi, Snagglepuss, and Huckleberry Hound, Greenblatt says it was "very clear on who they were and how they behaved." For others, there was room for development. This played into the overall challenge, Greenblatt explains: "What do you keep and what do you say, I'm not trying to replicate the exact elements of those shows, I'm trying to replicate the heart of the shows." Another important aspect, he says, is that "you have to decide what's funny to you now. What's interesting to you now? What works as a character now?" A lot of this has to do with the humor. In the original cartoons, Greenblatt says, the humor was simple and not especially character driven. "It's just situations, people running, silly things happen. To me a more modern version of that is to say, let's see funny interactions with other characters and relationships and friendships. That for me was the most appealing aspect of Jellystone. Seeing all these characters living and working together and playing off of each other. There's relationships and history and other things beyond Yogi's trying to steal a picnic basket." NEW OPPORTUNITIES With credits including Shrek 2, Madagascar, and Megamind, Production Designer Ruben Hickman came to The Bob's Burgers Movie a professed fan of the original TV series, but he was also a newbie to the franchise. "When they first approached me, I said, 'Are you sure you want me?'" he says. He had been doing CG for the past 16 years. He had done some 2D and tradition- al painting, but that was nearly two decades earlier. "But I have a deep love of 2D animation," he says, "so it kind of just pulled me in." With a 102-minute story to tell instead of the traditional 22 minutes of a TV series episode, Hickman sus- pected he would have some room to play around. He was right. Phil Hayes, Art Director for both the series and the film, made certain of that. "It was more about the whole world, the locations, and the cinematography even—how do you use the camera in a bigger way?" says Hickman. "All these things Phil had wanted to try but did not have time to F E AT U R E The Bob's Burger Movie images courtesy of 20th Century Studios. Jellystone image courtesy of Warner Bros. Animation. 30 KEYFRAME