Pinky's more fluid and richer look has boosted the show's popularity.

Finished shots went into a queue for overnight rendering, followed by a morning screening of 'dailies.' Because the backgrounds in Pinky were for the most part two-dimensional artwork, computers that normally had to digest large amounts of geometry to create 3D images could render some shots in less than a second a frame.

"We shaved approximately three months off the production versus season one," Cranford boasts. "Cartoon Pizza had over 60 people working in Flash for three months longer than we were in production. We had a total of 30 people including management. Our overall budget was under $200,000 Canadian per episode. The Canadian dollar was 20% higher [than the U.S. dollar] at beginning of the deal. The week we started production it went 20 points below and didn't go back up until the week we finished -- it was like a bowl with us in the middle. We were never told the budget for season one but they had three months of additional labor to pay for." (Monier-Williams says the budgets for the two seasons were "almost the same. We had some greater efficiencies [in the second season] because the characters were already developed and the research already done, so there wasn't as much upfront investment in the second season.")

"This hadn't been done before, it was certainly something different," Cranford sums up. "The beauty of this is this is our pipeline. We can do other 2D series with it and it will work just as fine. They may not all fit in as easily as Pinky Dinky Doo did, but doing 2D like this is certainly the way to go."

Joe Strike is a regular contributor to AWN. His animation articles also appear in the NY Daily News and the New York Press.