The outrageous, animation friendly humor is referred to as "Claytastic."

BD: And what about the stop-motion you utilize?

EF: Essentially it's the same technique that's been around since the '20s and '30s. But the materials are changing a little bit: we're using silicone and foam latex and resin to create the puppets. The mouth animation for our show is done digitally, so the puppets are actually shot mouthless and then there's a whole separate process, which we call the mouth animation.

BD: Is that proprietary or off-the-shelf?

EF: It's a little bit of both, actually. There's a program called Magpie, which is sort of like a voice recognition software that allows you to put in a recorded voice track and have a mouth do like a rough sink of mouth animation. It doesn't work great, so you always have to fine tune it.

BD: How large a staff does Cuppa Coffee have devoted to this?

EF: Quite large: there are over 100 artists and animators working on the show and we have roughly 30 stages going at any one time to do the actual animation. The studio is designed to breathe, so they have a certain capacity that they can handle and at this point they're at the maximum.

BD: So if Eisner's company is in L.A., where are you based?

EF: I knew you were going to ask that. I split my time pretty much 50/50 between L.A. and Toronto.

Glenn does the simple life in the episode "Amish Anguish."

BD: So, what's the biggest technical challenge of the show?

EF: The scope of the show because it's a show about a traveling family and it basically requires new characters and new environments for every single episode. I would say that is, perhaps, the most ambitious stop-motion TV series to date, just in terms of the scale. We try to be clever about it and try to reuse assets and repurpose puppets where ever we can. We'll pull the beards off the Amish people and you probably won't recognize them when they show up throughout the series. We play a little game of "Where's Waldo?" to spot the puppets.

BD: I see they wind up at the White House. What happens?

EF: We're in the Oval Office with Obama. Glenn Martin actually does an emergency dental repair on Obama. He's playing a game of basketball and gets elbowed in the mouth by a certain Secretary of State with only a hint of vindictiveness behind it.

BD: What was it like designing Obama?

EF: I personally do all of the designs of all the principals of the show, and that one was really fun for me. He's a little tough because he's such a handsome man. And so we really try and emphasize these sort of extreme caricatures on the show so for him it all came down to big ears for Obama. It all comes down to making faces that make laugh when I look at them.

Bill Desowitz is senior editor of AWN and VFXWorld.