Imaginary Worlds - This Animated Life

Episode Date: November 19, 2025

As longtime listeners know, I worked in the animation industry before switching careers and going into broadcasting. Today’s episode features a trio of conversations that trace the history of animation in my lifetime, and my life in animation. The interviews come from Between Imaginary Worlds, a chat show that’s available exclusively to listeners who pledge $5 a month or more on Patreon. Act I: I bond with comic book and children’s book author Judd Winick over the creepy world of 1970s children’s TV – which scared us as kids but makes us oddly nostalgic today. Act II: My friend Caleb Meurer and I reminisce about his experience working with the original crew of SpongeBob at Nickelodeon, and how the creator of SpongeBob indirectly told me I was in the wrong field.   Act III: Aidan Sugano and Denis-Jose Francois talk about the heartfelt effort it took for the animation studio DNEG to make the film Nimona after Disney dropped the project.  This week’s episode is sponsored by The Perfect Jean and Uncommon Goods. Get 15% off your order with the code IMAGINARY15 at theperfectjean.nyc  Get 15% off your order at uncommongoods.com/imaginary. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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stoned or high when they made their puppet shows. It was just the times, man. Sid and Marty Croft were brothers who originally they teamed up and did some marionettes for quasi-post-vodville early comedy club stuff. They were working in Vegas. They even did one which was for adults where literally they had marionettes who were kind of strippers. But they were puppeteers.

First and foremost, and somebody hired them to make puppets for them. I think, I think actually the early break was the banana splits. Approach them, Hannah-Barberra approached them to do some banana splits costumes because doing live action interstitials was cheaper than doing actual animation. So you hire a couple of chuckleheads to put on some costumes, you throw them on a set, and rather doing 10 minutes of animation, you could do this. And I think they got the idea like, well, we should do our own show, which gave birth to a...

H.R. Puff and Stuff, which is the first one, which if I'm getting the story right from one of the writers that I read, it was born out of kind of an homage to Puff the Magic Dragon, you know. Instead, we're going to do a dragon instead of Puff the Magic Dragon, it's going to be puffing stuff. And then they just dug in. These cats weren't hippies, per se, but they got really hippie-dippy in their approach. It was a weird, weird show. I mean, Eric, what do you possibly remember about it? Okay, so HR Popping Stuff is a blur for me. Land of the Lost, it's funny, I think I was telling you that I remember just as well Land of the Lost as I remember my grandparents' television set. And from the 60s, which had these very, very heavy knobs that as little kids, it was actually like effort to turn those knobs. Right.

It was like, chum, kajum, you know. And I remember being at my grandparents' house with my cousins watching Lend the Lod. for the first time. And I had no memory of any of the humans. I knew that they're regular humans, but of course, all I remember were the fantastical type of creatures. The banana splits I was obsessed with as a kid, but it creeped me out so much. And yet I was, I couldn't stop watching it. And so here's my, my theory. I feel like kids TV often tries to tap into the cultural zeitgeist of whatever's cool in the world. But from the late 60s until I think disco and Star Wars in the late 70s.

Hippie culture was cool, but hippie culture had a lot of darker, especially post-Manson, had a lot of darker, trippier stuff to it that was not appropriate for kids. And they were sort of taken the iconography of that. The electric company early years opening credits was an acid trip. And they were taking the iconography of that, like, this is what's cool and repackaging it for kids. And so there was this weird unsettling feeling watching this stuff where you knew was aimed for you, but there was something dark and creepy that I could never put my thumb on about the about that stuff. Of course, the stuff like Banana's supposed to was late 60s. I didn't know

that. It was just rerun in the 70s. They just reran all the time in UHF. I had no idea it was an older show. Well, yeah. You got it. You're absolutely right. You have to acknowledge the culture at the time. Yeah. Because the early 70s are still the 60s. And we're not even remotely out of it. And, you know, the Beatles broke up five minutes ago. And, you know, fashion is still bell bottoms. And our lead human in, uh, in, in, in HR puff and stuff, you know, he's wearing bell bottoms. He's got himself like this little shirt with a lace up shirt and, and, uh, some point, somebody

woke up to like, I don't know if this is for kids, meaning in general that, you know, grim fairy tales, all children get eaten and murdered, you know, that's how we roll. And, you know, what's appropriate for kids? kids can handle this. Kids stuff is generally a cautionary tale. We try to tell lessons. In this case, I think the two things met. Like, what's appropriate for kids?

Kids will love this. It's puppets. Why wouldn't they like it? Except the fact that the puppets were almost always kind of terrifying looking. They weren't, these were not Jim Henson Muppets. These are giant, I mean, larger than life puppets who when they talk, their, their dialogues clearly dubbed in and they're just flapping their heads. And they move weird.

Everything about it's a little bit terrifying. The witch, witchy-poo, is in so many ways, equally as terrifying as the wicked witch of the West from the Wizard of Oz. You know, she's freaky. Everything about it is absolutely freaky. So do you remember there's a Raggedy Ann and Andy animated movie in the 1970s? Yes, I do. I, for years, thought it was a dream or a nightmare.

Because, you know, again, before DVD, and VHS tapes and it wasn't it didn't have much pop culture resonance afterwards and I literally it is so trippy so so weird and trippy in a way that like people's bodies are like just everything is like

so weird I found out later it was animated by Richard Williams who famously was the guy he was he did Roger Rabbit but his whole thing I did a whole episode about this movie he tried to make all the thief in the cobbler which eventually got the cobbler right which was very very

very, very surreal and tragically didn't get finished. But I remember I was at Cal Arts when I was studying animation and we had this guy who was a teacher named Corny Cole who was descended from like one of the founding families of California like his ancestor was Cornelius

Cole, one of the first senators of California and Corny was an old, old hippie who was also one of the original surfers. He knew the original Gidgett because they called her, she was so short, they called her a girl midgett and he knew her. And he was like, man, I remember working for Richard Williams on that Raggedy Ann movie.

And I was like, that was real? Like that really happened? And he was like, oh, man. But he was complaining about like how many drawings they had to get done or how much they got paid. But I was like, of course you animated. I was like, what did you? And it was like this sticky taffy, crazy ass thing that he animated. And I was like, of course it was you, Corny.

Of course it was you. welcome for the taffy pit what sort of place is this the taffy pit is my my domain well he was in that weird sweet spot of like post oh goodness like so so way post Disney feature animation that bled into feature animation uh from the 60s and 70s and and who were these cats almost exclusively men almost exclusively men and all like these were not guys like like like These were not the guys who grew up and, like, we're going to work at Pixar. They were, you know, they were, they were hippie animators. They were guys like, this is a great gig. I sit around and draw all day. Yeah. And later that we're working for television, which they knew, like, we're doing garbage.

This is not, we're not doing good animation. But you know what I get to do? I get to draw all day. I'm out by five. On Friday, we get, we get paid at lunch and I don't come back. I know this And that was a weird cross-section We're getting off topic

But I have to tell it because it's funny I know someone who worked in animation During the 80s he said Yeah we made sure not on Fridays If we paid the animators Which were old guys and young guys We paid them If they got their paychecks on Friday at noon

They wouldn't come back from lunch Because they were drunk He says though the older guys Like what about the younger guys? Young guys didn't come back Because the older guys didn't come back They weren't big drinkers I was like, no, they were mostly, well, it's the 80s.

Like, they were high on different things. Right. I said, this is who, this is who was working for you. Like, yes, did it show? Do you look at the work that we did on television for like the late 70s and the 80s? Like, you know, they were not doing their best. It took a while for, yeah, and I, I too forgot about the Raggedy N movie. And only because the internet, people were like, hey, I remember seeing that on television one day and sort of thinking like, was it a Raggedy Ann thing?

It wasn't like it wasn't like it was on a lot because who would want to watch it? It wasn't like it was, you know, oh, no, we watched that. We could tell from the tracking that in the second hour, more kids stunk huck around than in the first hour. Like, no, you tapped out because it got creepy and weird and uncomfortable. Yeah. Fall hits different. Between the sudden drop and the temperature and the mega meals of the holidays with some family drama mixed in. You're going to need jeans that can handle it all and keep you looking good.

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Save today and stay perfect. I mentioned that I studied. animation at Cal Arts in Southern California. My friend Caleb Muir was in the program with me. After Cal Arts, he got hired to work on SpongeBob for the second and third seasons of the show. He also worked on the first SpongeBob movie. Caleb has always been an excellent draftsman. His first job on the TV show was cleaning up the drawings of storyboard artists, so the characters looked exactly the same from scene to scene. The term for that is, drawing on model, which is an expression that you'll hear us use.

I was working across town on other shows for Nickelodeon, and I used to visit the SpongeBob crew in Burbank pretty often because I knew Caleb and other people there. I also got to meet Steve Hillenberg, the creator of SpongeBob, who tragically passed away in 2018. Today, Caleb teaches animation in upstate New York, where he gets to tell his students about the early days of SpongeBob. before the show became a global phenomenon.

Yeah, it was unusual at the time. It's still unusual now. There are very few shows that are brave enough to do that. So the difference is that SpongeBob was not written from script. So they did have some writers on staff who would come up with premises. So they would kind of spitball ideas and they'd sit on some of the revision sessions to try to come up with jokes and things. But for the most part, the shows were written by the actual storyboard artists. And so they would be in a team.

They would get a new premise. And they would have, I think it was just a week to come up with their own version of the board. So they would give them a premise. It's, you know, it's opposite day in Bikini Bottom. And they'll, or SpongeBob and Patrick learn about the idea of opposite day for the first time. And then, you know, some hijinks ensues. they'll take that premise and they would have a week

to just sit down and thumbnail out the whole 11 minute episode story so they'd come up with the story they'd brainstorm and they'd work on it just the two of them for a week and then at the end of that week or maybe the beginning of the next week Steve Hillenberg and the creative director Derek Dryman

would come in and then the four of them so they'd pitch it to Steve and Derek and then the four of them would rewrite it for an entire week and that was really fun I was, the way that the cubicles were set up, I was sort of in a cubicle, the middle, in the middle of the area, and there were offices all around us. And my office was right across from several of the storyboard artist offices.

And there were windows, so you could see what was going on in there. And it was, they would always have the storyboards pinned up. And you could hear, sometimes it would be going great. And you'd hear all this energy and everybody's laughing and pitching jokes or acting things out. And it was really high energy. And if it was, if you knew it was a writing week and everything was quiet. in there. You look over and you'd see all four of them sitting writing. Usually that meant like, oh, it's not going well. They're searching for some solution to this, you know, the story that

they, that they're not happy with. And so really, it would start with the two artists on the storyboard team and they would do a pass and then the four of them would all work on it together. And then at the end of those two weeks, they would have what they considered the thumbnail board for the show. And so then that thumbnail board would be pinned up, uh, down in the conference room along the walls and the whole crew would come down. The two artists who did the first pass, they would pitch that version of the storyboard, the thumbnail board to the whole crew. And those are really fun sessions.

It's kind of the equivalent of like a table read like you would do with the script now. In this case, it would just be the two artists and they would do the voices and, you know, some people are really good and high energy pitching. Other people are nervous wrecks and kind of struggle with it. But it's, you know, it's this kind of a very fun meeting and, and it's just kind of the first audience reaction. So once you finally became a storyboard artist, the process had changed by that point. I mean, were you able to incorporate your own ideas into the scripts? Sometimes.

I mean, you know, I got a few jokes in for sure. And I, and I would add things. There were little visual things that that I would try. One of my favorite episodes is going to be just one bite. So that episode was written by. Jay Lender and I think it was Sam Henderson. And so

Jay would write and clean up but then his partner Sam Henderson who was a comic book artist a very funny, funny guy had a very strange sense of humor and they brought him in because they liked his comics. And so he would write the thumbnail board with Jay and then I would clean up for him

because he couldn't draw the characters on model. But so just one bite is a pretty famous episode where we discover that Squidward has never tasted a crabby patty. And so he finally tastes one and he discovers it's amazing, but he doesn't want to tell SpongeBob how much he likes crabby patties. And so there's a very fun sequence at the end where Squidward's going crazy in the paddy vault, like eating all these patties. And they had a few ideas for the things that he was going to do. But they said, if you have any other ideas,

put some more in. So I just came up with a whole bunch of ideas in that section. And, you know, there's one where he's like traveling like a worm through the patties and gobbling a up. And so that was one of my ideas. And there are a few others in there. At the end is Squidward locks himself in the paddy vault and SpongeBob's banging on the door like Squidward, be careful. You can't control yourself. And he says, what's going to happen? Am I going to explode? And Spongebob says, no, it'll go straight to your thighs. And then you wind now and there's this, this shot of Squidward's with these giant thighs. Wait, so I remember this. I actually remember now you telling me about this at the time. And you were telling me about that, that I think was Steve suggested that initially

you're going to explode was going to be the joke. And Steve, or you or somebody suggested the thigh part. Yes. So that came up in the pitch meeting, actually. So they pitched to the whole crew. And then somebody came up with the my thighs idea. You're absolutely right. And they were all just laughing and crying and crying about it right there. And they did a drawing. They did a thumbnail drawing but the drawing was really strange like it was like his his thighs actually weren't that big in the drawing it just he had these like big fat ankles and uh and so when that came to me to clean up i thought like i don't think this is the funniest way to draw this and so i kind of reversed the relationship and gave him like a big fat kind of like you know because he has four

legs it all looks like it has two butts like a butt on each side and then his his legs are not quite as fat. So he has this kind of big, big fat, you know, fat thighs. And I drew it with like a bunch of dimples and stuff. And, uh, and I, and that was one that I just, I just tried. I was just like, I think this can be funnier. I'm going to try something. So I tried it. And then it went through. So I don't know, you know, what discussions are had after it leaves my desk, but, but obviously they liked it enough to put it in. Whitwer, you can't eat all those patties at one time. What's going to happen? Am I going to blow up? No worse. It'll go right to your thighs.

My thighs? And then you blow up. All of my students have seen all those early seasons of SpongeBob. So just to be, I mean, there are tons of memes of drawings that I did. SpongeBob memes from episodes that I drew. Even people have tattoos. I have a whole folder on my computer of, photos of tattoos of my drawings that people have.

But that's fascinating and strange when I discovered that that was the case that there's so many people that have those, which is interesting. It gives me a lot of street credit with my students. Oh, I even, I actually appear on screen in an episode of SpongeBob. So the episode of band geeks where they go to the, they go like up, it's kind of a Super Bowl idea and they're in this big arena. There are certain cutaways to the audience where there's humans that are celebrating

and rocking back and forth with lighters. And I'm in that crowds, wearing like a plaid shirt. It's funny how often, like I'll be watching a show like feature rom or something like that. And there are people in the background who are way too specific to be generic background characters. Like, they're so obviously crew members.

100%. You know, actually, this might be an interesting topic that would be something that people might be interested in. So I mentioned that I was in charge of drawing SpongeBob on model and drawing him the way that Steve Hillenberg wanted him to. But there's a huge range of different ways to draw a character that are still considered on model. And I remember because I worked on everybody's storyboards as a revisionist, I got in tune with all the different ways that people drew SpongeBob.

Bob. And you can look at, I mean, you're aware of this from the shows, I'm sure. Well, because I was never great at drawing on model, too. And so, and I, and, and so I was always aware when my cartoon, when my episodes would come back, how it was so obviously mine. And the other people who I knew were just as bad as I was at drawing on model, I'd be, I could always tell their versions when the shows would come back, who had drawn them for that same reason. Well, and if you, if you work with other artists, you see, you, you recognize their drawings immediately. There's little subtle things that, that people who are drawing those characters every day, and seeing all the other artists, you look at something

and immediately are like, oh, that's a Bill SpongeBob, or that's a Sherm Patrick right there, or that's a Walt Dorn drawing for sure. Nobody else draws like that. And I remember drawing a little kind of a key of everybody's trying to draw everybody's SpongeBob, everybody's iconic, this is a Bill SpongeBob, this is a Sherm SpongeBob, this is a Paul SpongeBob.

Yeah, by the way, there is an indirect connection between all of this and my podcast. one of the last jobs that I tried to get in animation before I eventually left animation was SpongeBob. Do you remember this? Was it the movie? No, it was the show. I took a test, you know, where they

give you a script and you have to draw it out. Okay. I sent it in. You showed it to Steve Hillenberg. His response was this looks like SpongeBob but it doesn't feel like SpongeBob. I don't think this guy truly loves drawing cartoons.

I don't really. I remember that you did a test, but I don't remember that. You told me that was Steve Hillenberg's feedback and I was like, he's right. I mean, he saw through my line quality. He saw like that I was having this existential crisis of like, do I really want to stay in animation? Like, why did I end up here anyway? Yeah. That brings up a conversation. So I think I talked to you about this and you didn't actually remember the conversation, but we were talking about your brother. And there was always like he was in school for, for, you know, different psychology, right? Different Yeah, yeah. He had a business degree and then a psychology degree and he teaches business psychology.

Yeah. And so he was talking about psychology and he, uh, the, you know, obviously the animation world. We were in a completely different, different universe and, and, and, and just concerned with different things. And I remember you were talking to him about drawings and about drawings being sincere. And he had, he was like, you keep using that word sincere. And I don't know what I don't know what, I don't know what you mean by that. Like, how was a drawing sincere? And so you, you guys he said it took you guys a while you were going around uh try because you didn't have a clear idea in your mind uh like a not a verbal idea necessarily and so you went around in circles for a little while and and at the end of it he he was like so what you're telling me is that when

you look at a drawing you can tell if it's motivated internally as opposed to externally and you said yes and uh and i just i i i tell my students about that too uh that just that idea that That that's when you talk about, I mean, I love that you guys had to drill down together to figure out exactly, like, what do I mean by that? Even though it's been a long time since I was working in animation, I'm always interested in how the industry is changing and what's coming out. And I was really impressed with the 2023 film, Nimona. Nimona is a comedy adventure that subverts traditional ideas about what makes a hero and a villain. Who are you? The name's Nimona.

Your sidekick has arrived. I don't need a sidekick. Every villain needs a sidekick. I'm not a villain. The real villain is still out there and I do need help. I'm in. It takes place in a world that's medieval and futuristic at the same time. And the style of the movie looks like it was hand-drawn, even though it was computer animated.

Nomona was a hit when it was released on Netflix. It was actually celebrated because the movie almost didn't get made. Nomona began as a web comic by Nate Stevenson, who goes by N.D. Stevenson. He eventually turned it into a graphic novel, and it was optioned by an animation studio called Blue Sky. Blue Sky was owned by 20th Century Fox, and as you probably know, Fox was bought by Disney. So Disney inherited this film, which was still in production. They said they were going to finish it, but they didn't. There was a lot of speculation that Disney got cold feet,

because the creator of Namona is transgender, and there are queer themes in the story, which Blue Sky was not going to shy away from. After Disney dropped Namona, it was picked up by a studio called Annapurna. Anna Perna did not have an in-house animation division, like Disney, so they farmed the animation out to a studio in Montreal called Denegg. And that brings me to Aidan Sugano and Deney José Francois.

They spent 18 months working on the film at Deneg and Montreal. Deney Jose was the digital effects supervisor. Aiden was the production designer. And you'll hear them mention that tangled up web of studios and companies throughout the conversation. Aiden had been on the project from the start. He was at Blue Sky before Blue Sky got absorbed by Disney. And he was working on Namona when he found out that Disney was going to drop it. Like when they announced the news that Blue Sky was closing,

we found out kind of a lot later. You know, we still hadn't officially shuttered Blue Sky's doors yet. But we found out before that time that the executive leadership had actually managed to cut a deal. that says if you can if you can find a vendor and someone to pick this up we can we can you know take this movie out of disney and you guys can take it and you can finish it because of how far along it was how strong the story was at that point they were kind of just like you can take it if you can find someone and so they were pulling strings they were making phone calls you know to find someone to pick this up and it landed with Annapurna and Ana at that point then, you know, the deal was

okay, cool. You guys can bring any work that was pivotal and important to the film, which meant that any of the stuff they had already created models, some of the tech that we had, we tried to get out, some of the, you know, all of the reference material that we had created from the videos that looked at to, you know, videos of people talking about how. they made this specific thing for how the you know the materials on a character look but we had a very limited time and so it was a a crazy rush of people calling people you know how can we pull this thing out of this you know out of the render farm what can what pieces of these things can we take with us so that we can try to preserve you know five years of work that had been done on this thing a lot of us

were kind of just literally in the studio in the middle of the pandemic with masks on, you know, holding terabytes of servers and just being like, I think this works. Hopefully it's not totally corrupted and broken and and then yeah, we passed all that

all that over to Deneh. It was wild. It was absolutely wild. It was, yeah. It sounds incredibly stressful, but also really, you guys must have been on an emotional roller coaster. Yeah. I mean, you know, it was, it was wild because everyone cared so much about this thing

and they had put so much into this movie. I mean, you know, everyone didn't have a job. The entire studio was laid off and yet people were coming in and spending hours and hours of their time doing whatever they could to try to save this thing. So, yeah, so when it arrived at D-Nag,

it was quite interesting. So first of all, the little bit I want to say is when we got the inkling that we were going to pick this up in a casual conversation with cheer leadership, they said to me, so how would you feel about, you know, how do you feel about the projects going on at the moment in, you know, that coming up? And I said, I didn't really know what I was going to be working on at that moment, I was between shows. And for me, Blue Sky were the original CG house. I knew about Blue Sky before I knew about Pixar, right? And I had been very strongly influencing to getting into this business by a little movie clip that I'd found on, there was a CD-ROM product that Blue Sky made. in New York about a taxi driver back in the early 90s, which I had. I'm trying to remember the name of it.

On that CD, Interactive CD, there was a little clip of a, like, a trailer for something called Space Boying Sky High Scramble, and I must have watched that thing about 200 times. It was amazing to me. So when I ever think of Blue Sky, I think of that, I think about the early days of CG. So when they said to me, you know, when they said there's this Blue Sky, I think, coming up, I actually said, I actually said at the time, oh, I don't know if I'd want to work on that. And they said, what do you mean? And I was like, well, I wouldn't want to dishonor.

I mean, it's like working for your heroes, right? I was terrified of not being able to meet the standard, which I held them to myself. You know what I mean? And then a few weeks ago, they said, yeah, we're putting you on the moment. So I was like, okay, I was terrified. I was like, oh, my God, I'm not going to be able to do this. Because it looked amazing. So what we got, we looked, everything that Aiden just said looked amazing.

All the test work that they'd done, all the setup work they've done, looked amazing. But as Aiden told you, because of the kind of scramble at the end, there were certain issues. So, for instance, there were stuff that we got, but we didn't get the tech that was attached to it because it had been considered proprietary and wasn't allowed to be moved from the studio. So we didn't have any rigs. We didn't have any shaders. Which meant that any animation had been done couldn't be used because we didn't have the rigs. Then there was the fact that there were multiple pipelines involved previously, which were all different from the D-NEC pipeline.

So even when we did have a lot of stuff, we couldn't necessarily use it. We did have lots of geometry, lots of models, lots of textures. We had story boards. We had all of that stuff. So what we had to do was re-engineer and rebuild as much as we could, staying true to the original material and really to the spirit and the hard work that all the blue sky artists had done, right? And then there were entire parts of the film which hadn't actually been developed yet at all.

Some parts of story haven't been finalized. I wouldn't want to put a figure on it on how much was rebuilt or reused. What I'd like to say is that we used every single thing that we could in some form. Nothing went to waste. You know, you can almost look at it as starting a project with the best concept art and animatics you've ever had, you know, which is great. So, and that's where we, that's where we went from. And then I think, I don't know about on your side, Aiden, but it was like we kind of had to sort of reset. Everybody take a deep breath. We've got a couple of years, actually 18 months. Let's do this. Well, Aidan, when did you realize that you were going to

continue to get to work on pneumonia, but now DENeg. I got a call from one of the producers, and you know, it was, it basically, you know, she basically said, listen, we don't know if we can save this thing. We're trying really hard. We don't know if there's a position available. We want you to be involved, but we're trying to figure out all of this. So it was a wild two months because it went from, you know, everything's completely laid off. And, you know, I was even looking for other jobs at that point. And it got to the point where I was about to jump onto a different project. And I had to actually call them when I found that out and say, I'm so sorry, can you hold a week?

Because I, this thing's happening. And I need to know if that's for real. And they were amazing because they were like, Holy shit. Yeah, absolutely. You know what? We'll just sit. It's fine. Like, if that's actually the case, like, and that was just every step of the way, it was just kind of like everyone was so understanding of this thing. But, you know, it went from two weeks, two months. And then I was back on. And it was sprint. From that, from that point on, it was dead sprint until the day that we said, okay, that's in the can. Wait, did you have a release date? Because, I mean, Netflix can kind of release it whenever they want. We had a delivery date. Ah.

Because obviously, for our studio, we can't just work on something indefinitely. We've got other projects on the go. I think I just want to add to what Edel was just saying. I think that's a good example. Everybody really wanted this film to be made. Right? So everybody, even from the outside, like to them to say, no, no, no, it's okay. You go and do that.

I think, like, the everybody in, not everyone in the industry, but there were a lot of people who really wanted this film to be made. and we're happy that it was being made, and it had been so. Can you talk, can you both talk about why? Like, why this film was so important to the two of you individually and why it was so important to so many people? I mean, for me, like I said, like I mentioned before, it was like honoring Blue Sky, and they were always the best to me,

and I really, really wanted to see it done. Also, because I'm a huge comic book nerd, and I loved the original completely. It's an amazing story. I mean, it was so much of the story that we didn't even get to use. then there is the queer aspect of it the way it addresses that is very subtle it's very nice

it's not in your face it's not actually even the core of the story the story is about acceptance and about you know being who you are and people accepting for you for you are and that applies to everyone and for me that was quite important and I just felt like you know this is a it's different it's not your typical

buddy movie you know it's not like all the tropes that we see before a lot of animation is really just a rehashing certain story ideas. And this wasn't that. And I, you know, it was really like, no, we've got to make this. We've got to get this out. I feel like everyone who works in this industry, we all hope for one of those projects across your desk. That's the, the life project. I feel like you get probably like a handful of them in your life, maybe three if you're lucky. And this was definitely

one where, you know, the moment that it seemed like it was going to happen. I knew that I just had, I had to be on that thing, not only for the, the fun of getting to play in Nate's world that he created. I mean, that's a freaking dream it is this, because you get robots and knights and, you know, super dark comedy and, you know, these shapeshifters and crazy, like, everything about it was just, it was one of those things were just like, oh, my God, yes, I want to do that. And then also, like, yeah, like the queer piece of it was huge for me as well. We're just like that was the biggest part of this thing as that aspect and the othering aspect is like everyone has felt othered at some point in their life. I definitely have like, you know, and that was a place where it spoke very, it spoke very much to everything about that in regards to it needing to be that life project or that, you know, career, career project where it's like, yeah. This is one of the things that I'm most proud about in my career, having worked on, period. Me too. Me too, absolutely.

From there, we did a deep dive into the technical aspects of how they made Namona. One thing I realized in these conversations is how much animation is a pay-it-forward type of media. It's one of the first types of media that we watch as children. And everyone I know who worked in animation was directly inspired. by the children's shows that we watched when we were growing up. Even if those shows felt like an acid trip, they were the first moments in our lives when we learned the joy of suspending our disbelief.

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