When asked if the overseas studio found Chowder and its bizarre sense of place hard to understand, Greenblatt replies, "It's not an American classroom with an American boy in it. It's in its own world, so they can connect a little bit more to it. Like any studio, the hardest thing for them is to get cartoony and loose -- they want to be on-model. People tend to clamp down because it's easier to work that way. We told them it's okay to be rougher in your drawings and looser in your expressions. It's a fine line, though. We don't want to go so far off that things look weird. Trying to know when it's okay to stretch or go crazy is a learning process for both sides.

Cartoon Network had been looking for a show to appeal to young foodies, and Chowder fit the bill in a silly, fantastical, cartoony way.

"I'd love to go over there, sit down and draw with them, but so far things are going so smoothly, we don't need to go and butt heads."

Comedy-wise, the show indulges in what might politely be described as effusive humor: the always-ravenous Chowder is capable of regurgitating mountains of food or sustaining a spit-take for 24 hours, and keeps a caged, floating (and noisy) fart as his pet. Sesame Street's influence on Chowder is evident, from its theme song sung by a chorus of enthusiastic kids to the title character himself. As noted above, Chowder is voiced by a child actor, 11-year-old Nick Jones. Greenblatt raves about Jones, who previously voiced Flower the skunk in Disney's DTV Bambi 2. "It was definitely a risk, but I was really adamant. In my head I saw Chowder as an innocent kid. For him to be annoying and chaotic, and yet still sympathetic, you had to have that sweetness that I don't think you can fake. I felt that what we might lose [in not casting a versatile adult voice actor] we'd gain in authenticity from having a certain quality of kid behind the microphone. In the end it paid off.

"When we did the pilot, Nicky was eight. At the time, we didn't know what range he would have, so we kept his dialog simple, but wrote it so Chowder was physically funny. Nicky's 11 now and we know he can do a lot of things for us. He can get in there and do accents, songs, he's amazing -- he's a ham, and he loves it."

With its youthful lead and Pinwheel influences, Chowder feels much younger than the typical Cartoon Network show. Greenblatt admits the network was "a little worried at first that the show was too young, too Sesame Street." Cartoon Network's Hill confirms this: "There were some concerns early on, but Chowder was just so darn cute. Our core demo is kids six through 11, and while it's not what we target, we're always happy to get the younger demo as well. There are visually stimulating things in there for them -- puppets, stop motion -- a lot of goodies. I think it's working for them."

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.

Greenblatt's life is going nicely too. Tiring of his life as an art director in the New York advertising rat race, he headed west to L.A. and broke into the animation industry as a storyboard revision artist on SpongeBob SquarePants. "I moved up to storyboard artist and began writing as well. SpongeBob is an outline-driven show. You're given a couple of pages, then you put all the dialog in. We worked in teams and it was a really good learning experience. I was lucky to have that as my first job."

Greenblatt spent the next four years at Cartoon Network Studios, working on the Network's ultra-warped Billy and Mandy show. "The show was a blast," Greenblatt recalls. "Maxwell Atoms [Billy and Mandy's creator] gave us free reign to go nuts -- it's kind of scary when a creator gives everyone that much freedom."

The stint on B&M gave the network a first-hand look at Greenblatt's talent and sensibility. "I was definitely a known quantity to them, they liked my work. It helped when it came time to pitch my show: 'we know and trust this guy and think his work is funny -- and here's an idea we like.' It gave me the chance to do the pilot."

If SpongeBob and Billy and Mandy are the opposite ends of a continuum, Chowder is its center. "SpongeBob is sweet and silly, while Billy and Mandy is sarcastic, darker and weirder. I have both sides to me and it was fun to stretch that muscle for a while. This almost borders between the two -- it's like going back [to SpongeBob], but not all the way back."

There's more than a little bit of the sponge in... in whatever beastie Chowder happens to be. (Greenblatt's blog describes Chowder as a combination cat, bear and rabbit). "We're not trying to emulate that show," Greenblatt explains, "but coming into SpongeBob I could connect with his sensibility. I felt comfortable with his genuine sweetness and silliness. You could say it's in here as well, but it's more my general taste, which happens to cross both shows. On SpongeBob I learned how to balance character and comedy and what I walked away with the most was the storytelling aspect: you focus on the character, then the comedy comes from that."