JS: This would be theatrical and not direct-to-video?

FS: Theatrical is the vision. My favorite working title so far is The Asshole Magnet, about the woman who always picks the wrong guy.

JS: You’ve made a distinction several times now between cartoons and animation. I sort of get the idea, but how would you define it?

FS: Animation is a production technique. It does not define creatively or emotionally anything. It defines a very wide range of things. Minority Report had animation in it, the Vin Diesel movies have animation in them, Star Wars has animation. What the hell is it — it’s a technique. It’s like saying ‘film.’

Cartoons define for me a couple of key things: they’re funny, they tend to be short, they tend to be character-driven, not story-driven; there’s a design factor to it. And to me, the most subtle, but maybe one of the most important is they use music as a character, rather than as a support mechanism.

I think you’ll agree when you hear a great cartoon score — and, by the way, I don’t just define [a score as being by] Carl Stalling, it can be Hoyt Curtin at Hanna-Barbera — you can actually read characters and action by just hearing the score. So score has a radically different role in cartoons than it does in almost any other kind of filmmaking.

I also define it as lots of physical humor. In my very narrow definition, the words fill in the gaps between the pictures rather than vice-versa; seven minutes long — that’s cartooning.

When I’m talking with my development group about these animation features I want to do, the family ones, and they walk in with the Sleeping Beautys of the world or some such — I say, ‘I don’t do that.’ My natural space in life is cartooning. The talent that I’ve developed over a 10-year period consists of cartoonists, not animators. I want creative projects that take advantage of where my natural understanding is, and where my talent goes.

By the way, there’s a big preschool project that’s on the table that I should tell you about. I’ve never done preschool before either. I’m attacking it in a very large and very real way like Oh Yeah! Cartoons. My partner in this is a woman named Susan Miller, who’s the producer of Ella Enchanted, Miramax’s first family movie. She is also a leading licensing/merchandising person — she used to work at Warner Bros., then went off to her own company.

In order to work with a system that I know, we’ve teamed with Brown Johnson at Nick Jr. I think Brown is one of the best executives in the industry, and she happens to be the first person I met in television 23 years ago.

We’re developing 50 projects again, but as books — as preschool children’s books. The secret of our books is that we’re developing them not with authors and illustrators, but with animation people. We will have a load of books created solely by animation people.

We haven’t officially announced the project yet. We’ll probably put out a press release sometime in the next month or two. But I’m very, very excited because the idea that I can make these 50 books with animation people means that I will have books for my network partner to scrutinize and be able to choose what they would like to go to series with.

It means that I will have characters actually designed to move in film rather than have to be reinterpreted for film. It means that the story was conceived by a commercially driven, character-driven creative work force who can move immediately into filmmaking when we go to series. And I really expect that we’ll have the same level of success that we’ve had before in What A Cartoon! and Oh Yeah! Cartoons.

JS: It also gives them pre-exposure so they’re not unknown quantities when they hit TV.

FS: Exactly.

JS: Are any particular names associated with the preschool project yet?

FS: No, it’s just starting up. I’m developing it with Eric Homan, someone I used to work with at Hanna-Barbera.

JS: Anything else you can tell me about the family or adult features?

FS: I think the family ones are going to end up being ‘funny animal’ movies. Part of the reason I’m going there is so many of my cartoonists come out of the funny animal school and the television marketplace isn’t particularly friendly to funny animals at this point. It’s so foolish, but let people do what they want. We’ve got at least five funny animal projects in the house.