Chowder, the star of the new Cartoon Network series bearing his name, may be the strangest kid hero yet: a lavender colored, raccoon-tailed naif who is actually voiced by a kid. All images © & ™ 2007 Cartoon Network.

These days kids' cartoons are more kid-centric than ever. Adult and even teen characters are falling by the wayside in favor of adolescent heroes who share the same age range as the six- to 11-year-old core audience. Chowder, the star of the new Cartoon Network series bearing his name, is likewise a youngster -- but he may be the strangest kid hero yet: a lavender colored, raccoon-tailed naïf who actually sounds like a little kid -- because he's actually voiced by one.

"He's a sweet guy with absolutely no impulse control," according to his creator Carl (C.H.) Greenblatt. "He wants to be a chef and touches everything in sight and causes trouble without meaning to. The character had been rolling around in my head for a long time. I wanted to do a story set in a really imaginative place about an innocent kid learning from an old master. There's a little bit of my childhood in there, but I pretty much threw into the kitchen sink what I wanted it to be."

Greenblatt may or may not have meant "kitchen sink" literally. Food is the driving force behind Chowder's premise, and "imaginative place" doesn't even begin to describe Marzipan City, the whimsical metropolis in which Chowder's adventures take place. Considering the amount of eye candy on display, the city couldn't have a better name. Minarets and domed buildings dot the skyline, outdoor bazaars and food stands fill the streets, and the population is a sauntering mix of humans and cartoon animals. Richly saturated background colors blur into one another and Chowder is as likely to be seen running through geometric, stained glass-like patterns as one of those streets.

"The last time you saw those designs was in The Thief and the Cobbler," says Greenblatt, referring to Richard Williams' lushly animated, but little-seen, feature. "We're all big fans of that kind of stuff. When we did the pilot I grabbed books on Morocco and India and pulled ideas from that. I'm not the strongest person when it comes to designing a city, but I had a definite idea of a Moroccan/Indian/Dr. Seuss-type world. I wanted it to feel urban but take you someplace else, someplace old with tons of detail, curving pathways, bridges and plants everywhere. It was important to me not to have big areas of flat colors. I wanted it to look like a show you could just touch and feel."

The young Chowder is apprentice to centuries-old chef Mung Daal, and if you've noticed a pattern here, you're not wrong. All its characters are named after comestibles, from Mung's assistant Shnitzel or rival Mrs. Endive, and Endive's own apprentice, the bunny-like, obsessed-with-Chowder Panini; Chowder is a show any young foodie fascinated with Rachel Ray might fall in love with. "Food is on everyone's radar," explains Cartoon Network programming VP Rico Hill. "Everyone's been looking for a cooking show for kids. I think we've accomplished that in a really silly, fantastical, cartoony way. It's a visually stimulating, messy show that deals with food. And we're not trying to teach recipes" -- unless kids try to recreate unlikely Marzipan delicacies like Froggy Apple Crumple Thumpkin or Balloon Animal Cookies.

Food is the driving force behind Chowder's premise, and "imaginative place" doesn't even begin to describe Marzipan City, the whimsical metropolis in which Chowder's adventures take place.

That delight in messiness permeates Chowder. Production-wise, it is a mixed-media profusion of 2D and stop-motion animation interspersed with filmed, prop recreations of those exotic dishes, and even puppet versions of Chowder and Mung over the closing credits. "I loved all that stuff," admits Greenblatt. "I watched Pinwheel on Nickelodeon in its infancy when I was young, also Sesame Street and a lot of those shows. I saw tons of international shorts and they influenced me to think of animation as more than drawing. When we started, we asked Cartoon Network if we could put all these different media in there. They were nice enough to say go for it. It's given the show a unique look that can surprise you. A lot of kids don't see much of that anymore."

One of the show's more subtle yet eye-catching visual devices is the texture pattern -- for Chowder's clothes or Shnitzel's rock-like body -- that remains stationary even as the character moves around the screen. "I was thinking back to old Tex Avery cartoons," Greenblatt says by way of explanation, "where you'd see a guy move over a pattern and it would blow your mind. If we could pull that off it would be amazing."

The solution was simple in the age of digital postproduction: creating a full-frame background pattern and an alpha channel hole in the character for the pattern to fill in. "It was hard at first to get the kinks out -- it took a little work to make sure it wasn't distracting. Once our studio [Hong Ying Studio in Nanjing, China] understood that the patterns didn't move with the characters, everything fell nicely into place. They're delivering beautiful, beautiful shows."