NOTE: This article features some minor spoilers for the very end of the \u201cJoey Waffles\u201d episode.<\/p>\n
On September 3, 2018, Cartoon Network\u2019s Adventure Time and the Land of Ooo called it quits after 10 seasons and almost 300 episodes. Of course, you can\u2019t keep the crazy down forever. Fans have gotten spin-offs like Adventure Time: Distant Lands and Adventure Time: Fionna and Cake, with more to come in Adventure Time: Bubblegum and Marceline. But now it\u2019s \u201cgo time,\u201d prequel style, for Finn (Sasha Knight), Jake the Dog (John DiMaggio), the Ice King (Tom Kenny), and the rest of the gang in Adventure Time: Side Quests, which premiered this week on Disney+ and Hulu in the U.S.<\/p>\n
Returning to the world is Adventure Time: Side Quests executive producer and showrunner Nate Cash (Over the Garden Wall), who worked as a storyboard artist during the original series\u2019 run. Joining him are art director Nick Cross (The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie) and supervising director Victor Courtright (ThunderCats Roar), who have all embraced a loose, experimental approach to this prequel series, taking viewers back to the days when Finn and Jake were young, fearless, and eager for adventure.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was really exciting to come up with the idea of returning Finn to a kid voice, and everything snowballed from that,\u201d Cash tells Cartoon Brew about where the series development took them. \u201cFinn when he was younger, brash and kind of dumb, that\u2019s fun and ripe for comedy. And then the relationship he has with Jake is so fun. For me, it was really cool to return to the unexpectedness of the early episodes where everything felt like it was just for that moment.\u201d<\/p>\n
Courtright agrees, saying the early seasons of Adventure Time had a variety they admired because the series was still finding its footing.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was still discovering itself and still discovering the lands around it with new characters,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
\u201cGoing back into that mentality with both people from the original show and new people who are fans of the original show adds to that variety of interests,\u201d he says of the standalone feel of Side Quests. \u201cThere\u2019s every kind of fan on this show. People are drawn to it for all sorts of different reasons. All the amazing artists, writers, board artists, and animators bring something different, and you get that variety. It just naturally comes out. So we go all over the place, and there are so many different wonderful tones and types of stories that we explore.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trying to align an older series with new creative goals is always a challenge when technology and production pipelines have changed so much. Cross says that was true here as well.<\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of it was, how do we make it more volumetric and painterly? From the very beginning, it was, \u2018How do we put a new spin on the show?’\u201d he says. \u201cWe wanted it to be Adventure Time, the original look of the show, so we didn\u2019t change the character designs or the background design. It\u2019s all the same. But how we rendered it was different.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cross continues, \u201cIt\u2019s a little bit like putting a different coat of paint on the original show in a lot of ways. But it\u2019s a very difficult thing to do. Anytime you try to do a really painterly style, that\u2019s not geared toward a series turnaround. We\u2019re lucky we brought back a lot of the original character designers from the show, so we had a really good team. I\u2019m most proud that we had a really good design team, and that made a challenging show much less challenging.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cJoey Waffles\u201d End Credits Feature \u2018Ballad of a Reformed Ice King\u2019<\/p>\n
Peppered throughout Adventure Time: Side Quests are plenty of examples of the animation team getting weird and creative whenever possible. Cash confirms there is an episode animated completely in-house by two artists.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat was an amazing experience, and the episode turned out so cool,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s just showing that you can still do hand-drawn animation locally, which is something the industry forgets about.\u201d<\/p>\n
There\u2019s also a lot to watch during the episode credits, especially after \u201cJoey Waffles,\u201d when a major character reveal is essentially explained through an original song, sung by the Ice King, that plays over crayon-drawn credits.<\/p>\n
Cash confirms the song was originally meant to appear during the episode itself, but the final edit was simply too tight.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf I\u2019m remembering correctly, we were like, \u2018We just can\u2019t fit the song in there.\u2019 And we made that decision before going into the record where Tom Kenny showed up to sing it.\u201d<\/p>\n
He says Courtright suggested moving it to the end credits, which ultimately saved the sequence.<\/p>\n
\u201cNow it\u2019s so good. It earned how we figured out how to do it,\u201d Cash says with a laugh.<\/p>\n
Keith Pakiz storyboarded the sequence and wrote the song. Courtright says the crayon look grew naturally from Pakiz\u2019s drawings.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe idea to do it with crayon is the obvious answer because the singer in question is in this very childish brain space and singing this very, very dumb song,\u201d he says with a laugh. \u201cThe drawings are so, so silly, so using a very basic drawing implement to do lovingly rendered versions of really stupid drawings created this magical space.\u201d<\/p>\n
Courtright confirms the drawings are all 100% crayon on paper.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut then I sort of comped everything digitally using After Effects. But not just digital animation,\u201d he clarifies. \u201cI literally made little paper cutouts and puppeted them around in front of the camera and used that like motion capture to get that natural organic quality of the motion. Joey Waffles walking around looks like he\u2019s on a popsicle stick because he literally was motion-captured from a popsicle stick.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NOTE: This article features some minor spoilers for the very end of the \u201cJoey Waffles\u201d episode. On September…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":519104,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[146,85,46,411],"class_list":["post-519103","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/519103","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=519103"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/519103\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/519104"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=519103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=519103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=519103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}