The Man with Two Heads Shows
“Visually in pre-school there is a lot of interesting stuff going on; a lot more freedom and more diversity. And maybe that is because a lot of it begins with books, or like Rolie Polie Olie, children’s authors. So you just tend to get more variety in ideas and approaches. Where in the more typical shows you get pitches from guys who have studied this limited world of animation and all have similar influences — Hanna-Barbera, or Disney, or whatever. Hence everything sort of feels the same.”
Artistically, Bob also had two artistic styles to deal with. The most extreme might be Wubbzy’s world, which is full of angles. “It’s just sort of a style I developed while working on Fairly OddParents and Danny Phantom. I did a lot of drawing, sketching and exploring. I used the style when doing the first book. Actually, my wife is Japanese-American, and I’ve been exposed to a lot of Japanese culture. They have sort of a culture of cute there. It seems every company there has a mascot. I got to travel there a bit and collected a lot of toys.
"I think that is where I got the strong shapes and that kind of vinyl quality to the toys. The toys have really influenced my personal style and that of Wubbzy’s too. There’s a certain plastic or vinyl look to Wubbzy. The characters look like you could squeeze them and they would actually squeak. In fact, we actually use a lot of squeaky toy sounds in the show. If someone falls down, there’s a ‘fweep.’
“I wanted to try a unique look. For example, I wanted to keep the skies white, so the colors really can pop out. A lot of cartoons today are just filled with color. Nothing becomes important or reads really well. I thought, ‘start with white,’ and it will make everything sing and stand out that much better.”
Then there is Yin Yang Yo!, “which is the extreme opposite! We have black skies and fire red skies. There are a lot of similarities in the design styles [between Wubbzy and Yo], but tonally they are very different. They are literally night and day. Wubbzy is candy colors, while Yo is dark and mysterious.”
When it came to the characters, Bob also needed to think about the differences. “When I designed Wubbzy, he had those ‘dot’ eyes. I came from working Fairly OddParents where you had big, expressive eyes. And you do a lot of series. On Yin Yang Yo! we have the same sort of big eyes, which is a lot easier to get expression with. With Wubbzy, it wasn’t as hard as I thought, after all the early Mickey Mouse had dot eyes. I think it adds to the charming cuteness of Wubbzy in that it is very restrained.”
The one thing both series had in common was the use of Flash animation. “I met with some people who had done Flash shows before we committed to doing it that way. They immediately looked at my design style and said ‘that is perfect for Flash.’ The more I found out about it, Flash is like limited animation, very similar to the Hanna-Barbera style where they just have the feet moving. There are tricks and such to it that work with a stylized design. But we can do pretty much anything. At first, I thought we shouldn’t do ¾ walks up to the camera, but we’ve done that type of thing. And it looks really nice.
“There are definitely some shows where you say ‘that’s a Flash show’ and not in a good way [laughs]. But I think our design style hides the ‘Flashiness’ of it. Definitely on Yin Yang Yo! that was an issue with the network. They were concerned about it. They had just done another series in Flash, and that series ended up testing very young. The network worried that some of that may have been because it was in Flash. So we did a test and we did all these crazy dramatic angles and action scenes. The network folks said, ‘This is Flash?’ So we definitely had to overcome some resistance to the Flash process.”
What is Bob’s opinion of the Flash debate? “It’s really just a tool. It’s like a piano. You can have a piano and a good piano player and you’ll have good music. Or you can have a piano and a bad piano player and you’re going to get bad song. If you have good animators, they can do wonders with it. If you have bad ones you will get terrible stuff. It doesn’t matter if they are using a pencil or a computer program.”
When it came to using Flash, “it’s been great on both shows. It allows you more control for a longer period of time. On Yin Yang Yo! we change things up until the day of the mix. You know you always get that great idea for a joke right before you go to the mix. You say, ‘Oh, we should have done this!’ Now we can say what we should have done, and actually still do it. In a matter of hours, if it is not too complicated, we can change a little animation. On Yo we use it to punch up the humor a bit.
"On Wubbzy we’ve had a couple of shows that are 15 seconds short. You always wonder, ‘how did that happen?’ But we have all the assets, walk cycles, backgrounds, characters and such. We can put together some animation in just a few hours. We drive the line producers crazy, but we do have that freedom to keep it going.”
Now both shows are in post-production through the end of the year, so Bob can relax… a little. “I’ve got some ideas I want to pitch. But I do want to get through this first. I have another pre-school idea I would love to do. I think the pre-school shows are a blast. I think there is a lot unexplored. I can see where animation people could have more fun with pre-school and bring more entertainment value to it. One of the things about Wubbzy was that we wanted to make it a pre-school show that was more about the comedy and entertainment. We do teach lessons and have morals, but we wanted a show where kids would laugh.”
I got the impression that Bob was quite attached to Wubbzy. “Very much! He is pretty much me. I feel he is very alive and part of my world. I would love to see a Wubbzy’s Macy’s day balloon. I think it would look awesome, the tail waving in the wind. I really hope that Wubbzy can touch some people and become part of a kid’s consciousness, the way that a Dora or a SpongeBob do. Having a character last a long time would be great. And I think that with pre-school you can do that. Madeline, Curious George and such have been around forever.”
And he still has the future of Yin Yang Yo! to think about too. “We would like to expand the universe of the show. There’s a whole mythology built into that story that we would like to unravel as it goes along. I would like to see the story arcs grow, the characters get different powers, find out more about their past, etc. I actually would love to see that show have a spin-off that is an actual anime style. Taking those characters and having fun with them, pushing them into a new direction, maybe more action, maybe more serious.”
As I was leaving, I suddenly wondered what had happened to the Wubbzy book that he had written years ago. “That’s funny. Because the book deal with Fred is still ongoing, with nothing in sight yet. And I just got the first manuscript for a merchandised Wubbzy book that will be out before any of those first pitches!”
What more to say than to quote Wubbzy: “Wow! Wow!”
John Cawley is a producer of animation whose résumé includes Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, New World/Marvel, Film Roman and Sullivan-Bluth. Cawley, an author of several books on animation, has also written for comics and animation. He is a lecturer on animation production and an established mascot performer.
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