Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1521473
While the script is tight with clever jokes, visual details play an important part in setting the show's offbeat tone. Mr. Flesh may be an imaginary skeleton, but he always wears a scarf because he considers himself to be debonaire. Stylish Harmony's accessories include an ear tag, from her childhood in the woods with the bears. Then there is Stan, who wants to be much cooler than he is. So, he wears a cape—but is it a cape? The little tag in the corner gives it away as a bath towel. According to Gindin, these kinds of things come from "so many pitching in and making [the show] great." For as weird as Grimsburg wanted to get, there were some guardrails guiding its way. Gindin says the design style of the show took a lot of time to figure out. "They needed something that didn't look like anything else in the FOX Sunday night line-up, but at the same time it couldn't be too different." This was a big ask considering the line-up: The Simpsons, The Great North, Bob's Burgers, and Family Guy. Each of these iconic shows is unique in style, and yet they all feel like integral piece of a larger whole. In this way—among many—Grimsburg succeeds. Not only does it pave its own noirish, ribald way, but it also goes with the Sunday night flow. —Kim Fay meets Springfield, and everything bizarre about it can be pushed to the limit because the show is animated. "That was honestly the biggest draw of this," Gindin says. Sure, he's worked on a live-action show where a zombie wife eats people, but he says: "I got here and it was like, oh my God, you can do anything." Take Harmony and the raised-by-bears storyline. "If this was live action, you'd never see her parents," Gindin says. "It would be very difficult to do the slashes on her face. Just as an expense, you would have the makeup, the stunt people, the wrangler for bears. Those are all things that are expensive in live action, [and] that's just one tiny little piece of what this show is." Other pieces of the kooky Grimsburg puzzle include Detective Greg Summers, Flute's partner and a cyborg. Flute's son's imaginary friend is Mr. Flesh, a skeleton with flames for eyeballs. "You make a lot of compromises in live action to get things done," Gindin says. "In animation you can have an idea and execute it." That idea can even be a "trainsion"—in one episode a murder takes place on a train that is also a mansion. Gindin feels that one reason this kind of expansive creativity can happen is because in animation the whole team can be in on the solutions—in this case, it was the team at Bento Box. For example, a writer might write a funny scene, but then visual jokes will emerge and elevate the humor as the artists get to work. S T O R Y & V I S I O N SUMMER 2024 17