Oct 5, 2020

How did the creators of Hulu's "Animaniacs" reboot subtly update the look of the series?

One of the most anticipated reboots of 2020 is Warner Bros. Animation's "Animaniacs," launching November 20 on Hulu.

The new series, which has been ordered for two seasons and a total of 26 episodes, has sparked much online debate among fans of the original 90s series as to how faithful it will be to the iconic original, an early 90s animated television classic. Last Friday, the public got their first look at the updated version during a panel discussion held by Warner Bros. Animation at the virtual edition of the Ottawa International Animation Festival. The answer is this: fans of the classic series will be very happy.

No footage was shown and there was little discussion of the new series' storyline, but executive producer Wellesley Wilde made it clear that he had tried to recreate a similar tone to the original series.

The panel also included co-executive producer Gabe Swarr ("El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera," "Penguins of Madagascar," "Kung Fu Panda"): character designer Genevieve Tsai, art director Roman Rainey Together with Swirl, who leads the artistic side of the show, and others, revealed much about the visual direction of the series. Swirl and the rest of the team talked about how they approached the design of the new series, which was a balancing act between maintaining the original look and updating it to remove some of the rough edges of the 90s work and make it more visually appealing and consistent

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The following information and images illustrate the approach they took in designing the upcoming show.

Before they settled on a final visual approach, Swarr said that executive in charge Audrey Diehl tasked him with "just coming up with a lot of different looks."

The idea during the design review phase was to see if there was a more appropriate style for the character than the existing shapes, but in the end it was decided to stick with the original design.

One thing Swirl noticed, however, was that there was no single look for the original "Animaniacs" series; the animation produced by the various service studios that worked on the series in the 90s had a great variety of There were so many different variations. We saw a lot of weird, out-of-control, really bloated animation," he says.

After a close study of the original episodes, the team chose an episode produced by Japan's TMS Entertainment (Tokyo Movie Shinsha) as the gold standard. Unlike some studios, which portrayed characters in a rounded form, "[TMS] understood that there were angles. TMS understood that there were angles." One of the things that was really obvious was that all the pieces fit together and that's where the angles came from."

This led to a deeper exploration of the TMS episode. Says Swirl: "(We) literally broke down what they were doing. They had a lot of really angular looks. They simplified the details, like a lot of the wrinkles are simplified. When a character smiles or frowns, they hug the outer shapes so that there are cool little [shapes] on the bottom." Another thing TMS did was to simplify the shapes by removing many anatomical structures from the original design; TMS's approach had the advantage of making the characters easier to see up close. This breakdown shows what the new staff liked about the old TMS approach to portraying characters:

Warner Bros. Animation artist who worked on the Netflix series "Green Eggs and Ham" on the same floor When Swirl was introduced to Genevieve Tsai, the updated look of the new episodes really worked. A fan of the original series since childhood, Tsai understood the careful balancing act of keeping the design familiar while contemporizing it for a modern production.

"My style has an angular feel to it, and I tried to reflect that in the characters. 'I kept what I liked about TMS's work, just streamlined it and pushed the expression out. I just incorporated a little bit of my aesthetic. But it all came together by combining what was already in TMS's work and what was cool in his original style that Chuck Jones had already established." (One of the keys to the production was to not only study "Animaniacs," but also the original "Animaniacs" staff-inspired films, like the theatrical short "Looney Tunes," which Chuck Jones directed.)

Swirl notes that while the new designs will feel instantly familiar to fans of the original series, there are also "significant changes" in the way the characters are drawn." It's more like the design you remember than what they actually look like."

"The original characters had shoulders and elbows that were sort of thin and thick from the actual thickness that normal human arms have. That's where I got the idea from."

Tsai elaborated further: "[TMS's] old shows went from thick to thin, thick at the shoulders and thin at the wrists. For example, the toes are shaped as one instead of one by one, the movement of the wacko sleeves is simplified, and the angle of the muzzle is maintained."

Making the character's eyes work consistently was one of the biggest challenges the staff encountered, according to Swirl. We had to look at every episode, sometimes with dot eyes, sometimes not. Genevieve came up with a great idea: let the pupils come and go, but don't go beyond that. That was cool. We had to make rules to tie everything together."

An important reason for trying to create consistent rules for how the characters are drawn is that there are a number of studios working on the animation for the new series. In addition to Warner Brothers Animation in Burbank, California, which handles all pre-production and post-production, at least seven different studios in three countries are working on the new show: Yowza Animation in Toronto, Tonic DNA in Montreal Tonic DNA in Toronto, Titmouse in Vancouver, Snipple Animation Studios in Manila, Philippines, and three studios in Seoul, Korea: Digital Emation, Tiger Animation and Saerom Animation.

While there was less discussion of overall art direction than characters at the Ottawa panel, art director Romain Rainey talked about the staff's subtle updates to the look of the background art. He said, "I think the original show had a sort of remnant of the '90s.

He explained that he tried to add more definition to the backgrounds to match the new stylization of the characters, while avoiding the "vestiges" of the 90s, such as banana bread, "curvy" backgrounds, and overreliance on airbrushing.

The following examples show how certain key backgrounds were updated in the "Animaniacs" and "Pinky & the Brain" segments: