In Sheep In The Big City, poor Sheep is always on the lam. All images courtesy of and © Cartoon Network.

For those of you not familiar with Cartoon Network's hit series Sheep In The Big City, some advice: Don't try to figure it out -- just enjoy the ride. This hilarious, unpredictable show stars a sheep that doesn't speak and may disappear from sight for most of an episode. "Sheep" is trying to avoid capture by an incompetent top-secret military organization, but incidental characters may commandeer the action in order to parody Russian playwrights, pitch ludicrous products, or simply demand attention. When the story resumes, the intrusive narrator or the main cast may turn it upside-down for the sake of a wild pun. Now...picture all this as interpreted through John Hubley by way of Picasso. Who's responsible for this stylish mayhem? It's Curious Pictures' director Mo Willems. In March of 2001, Mo talked with me about his career, his inspirations and a small sheep in a big city.

Dr. Toon: There have been many interests in your life that could have led to different careers; cartooning, screenwriting, performance art, sculpture -- even toymaking. What led you to decide on a career in animation, especially during the lean decade of the 1980s?

Mo Willems.

Mo Willems: It was a selfish decision, and what it came down to is, in animation you can do everything yourself; you don't have to depend on other people. When I was doing stage comedy I couldn't afford sets, props, things like that. So it was the ability to create your own world -- by yourself -- in motion that made animation appealing. Things evolve also. You end up animating because people ask you to animate, and that builds to a certain degree. My desire as a kid was to find a way to be funny and draw. Animation turned out to be the best way for me to do that.

Dr. T: Well, it certainly seems to be working. You were schooled at the Tisch NYU School of Arts -- that had to be a very exciting place with instructors like John Canemaker and Richard Protovin on hand.

MW: It was a very exciting time -- even though back then it made about as much sense to study animation as to take a couple hundred thousand dollars and burn it! We were a scraggly little group of guys and gals making our own films, and it was very fun. I was fortunate in that the other students were really good and very dedicated; one of my directors on Sheep is somebody I graduated with. And there was hope -- this was in the late Eighties, so MTV was getting big and we said to ourselves, "Hey, look at all these different styles folks are animating in, and somebody's making a living at it." We weren't overly pessimistic.

Dr. T: How did your training at NYU influence your later work?

MW: The best thing that NYU did for me was to give me a sense of animation history. They exposed me to all sorts of stuff. Zagreb films, Ubu Roi. I first saw Gerald McBoing Boing there. The Hubleys' films, Oskar Fischinger, etc. I discovered animation as an art form where abstract artists influenced people who were making cartoons at UPA. And then John Canemaker encouraged me to make my own films in my own voice, which I did.