Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1542912
from top left: Taking the mushroom causes the disturbing appearance of alien-like creatures; Hely notes that Bennett's observational style brings a sense of the real world into the series; Bigger heads were a deliberate choice, Bennett says, because "if your facial expressions are huge, that will help guide the [humor]." Common Side Effects images courtesy of Adult Swim SPRING 2026 31 procedure. There's basically a special DEA court with a DEA administrator, and if it sounds like the drug is too beneficial, then they might declare it to be too dangerous, because people will be too addicted to it. It's just wild." Working in this realm of the strangely plausible, the team walked a tightrope in figuring out when to suspend disbelief in ways only anima- tion can accomplish. In hallucinatory sequences when someone eats a Blue Angel mushroom, small, alien-like baby creatures appear, and along with healing, the mushroom has the ability to resurrect a person. Bennett says they could get away with a lot as long as they anchored what was happening in the specificity of real life. As Strip Law and Common Side Effects play fast and loose with crime genres, Crawford says he feels like the time is right for such shows. While it was harder to get people to buy into experimental adult animation concepts in the 1990s, "we [now] have a generation of people who grew up on cartoons that aren't the Flintstones… We grew up with [adult animation] in our DNA, and we don't really see a difference between live action and animation if it's good writing or good directing." "You haven't seen anything like this in animation before," adds Bennett. "The subtlety and nuance that you see in live action, it's an exciting challenge to convey—to insert that as much as you can in the animated world. I think there's definitely a wave happening … We're in the nascent period with this medium, and it's really fun."