Richard O’Connor opened Asterisk Animation a year and a half ago in New York’s Silicon Alley — a neighborhood in the West 20’s, home to numerous new media and graphic design firms. “Sometimes the client doesn’t have a lot of money, but if we like the project and we like the people, we can figure out a way to make it work,” he says. “One of the benefits of being independent is the ability to make that decision. We’re not going to make a lot of money on it, but we’re going to have fun doing it.

Pulling in the bucks is almost a secondary goal for O’Connor, quoting Citizen Kane‘s adage ‘it’s not hard to make a lot of money if all you want to do is make a lot of money.’ He shrugs off one of his shop’s early projects for which “I haven’t seen five cents yet, but I made sure all my artists were paid. If any money comes in, it’ll be a nice if unexpected treat.”

Aaron Augenblick’s self-named studio is located Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass, or as it’s otherwise known, Brooklyn’s waterfront DUMBO neighborhood. “We’re now in a larger space since the first tiny little hovel we had in 1999. Starting an independent business like this, you have a lot of struggle in the first few years,” he recalls. “Hopefully some of our early freelance work will never see the light of day again. But no matter how terrible it was, we were always able to do something with it in our own voice.

“It helped that from day one we were doing independent films alongside all our freelance work. As you do more work with a personal point of view people start to gravitate towards that. Now we’re beginning to sell projects we’re actually interested in working on versus scraping for anything that comes by, which we’ve done a lot of.”

New York-based Augenblick is in production on the second season of Comedy Central’s Shorties Watching Shorties. © Comedy Central.

Augenblick’s most seen work may be the animated stand-up riffs on Comedy Central’s Shorties Watching Shorties (a second season is in the works), followed by segments for the kids’ show send-up Wondershowzen on MTV2. “There used to be a small handful of really big studios which didn’t have a signature point of view, and fell by the wayside in favor of smaller shops,” he theorizes, perhaps referring to MTV’s animation division where his career started. “I think that’s a great thing. Now with technology and the industry running the way it is, there’s more of an opportunity for smaller studios to do things with a voice.”

Two New York animation companies have found success without turning to Madison Avenue or concocting Adult Swim-worthy satire, but by creating works for very young audiences.

To reach Michael Sporn’s basement studio, you have to descend a flight of stairs under a Greenwich Village storefront and traverse a narrow walkway between two buildings. It’s as if you’ve suddenly left New York for the back alleys of London or Prague, and it may be the perfect environment in which to create cartoons based on classic children’s literature.

Sporn jests that “doing kids’ films and adapting kids’ books is a large part of my very meager bread and butter. It’s more like bread and Parkay, actually.” A sardonic sensibility does little to disguise his passion and belief in his work. For 25 years his company has been creating animated gems brimming with heart and sincerity. Several of his films have been based on the works of children’s author and illustrator William Steig (Sporn had nothing to say about DreamWorks’ Hollywoodization of Steig’s Shrek), including his Oscar-nominated adaptation of Dr. DeSoto. (“I had no work for a year after the nomination except for one short, so that shows how helpful the award was.”)

A steady series of productions for HBO and Weston Woods, as well as specials for CBS and other outlets has kept his small studio plugging away. More recently, Sporn has provided art and animation for a series of Scholastic DVD programs, and segments for PBS’s Between the Lions.

While Sporn can jest about spending — and losing — $100,000 of his own money on an early production, he can turn around and just as easily describe the arcane details of financing his films and participating in their profits. He and his studio are currently in pre-production on their first animated feature, a biography of Edgar Allan Poe that Sporn hopes to produce over the next two-three years on a $500,000 budget. “A friend put in $200,000 to jumpstart work, but who knows how long it will take finish? We have to get the bread and Parkay jobs along the way.”