‘Bad Jubies’ happens to be a good fit
Guest animator Kirsten Lepore’s characters and sensibility matches ‘Adventure Time’s’ style.
With Kirsten Lepore’s “Bad Jubies,” Thursday night’s “Adventure Time” (Cartoon Network, 7:30 p.m.) continues an intermittent tradition of giving a guest animator an episode to write and direct and mold to their own vision; like the guest-animated couch gags on “The Simpsons” or when any big pop creation celebrates its own.
As she relates in the e-mail interview below, Lepore — who has animated for “Yo Gabba Gabba!,” Whole Foods and Google — was not previously acquainted with the series. But she proves a great fit.
Like “Adventure Time,” her own films, including “Move Mountain,” “Sweet Dreams” and “Bottle,” mix melancholy with delight, the familiar with the epic, and employ humble materials to huge ends. “Bad Jubies” — in which Finn, BMO and Lumpy Space Princess prepare to weather an impending “megadeadly thunderquake disasterstorm” with “stormnado winds” and “flurricanes possible,” while Jake goes off, strangely, to commune with the ether — catches the show’s combination of cosmic consciousness and domestic farce and takes it to some places you never knew you wanted it to go. It’s everything a special should be.
What first attracted you to stopmotion animation? Kirsten Lepore: I think I first became interested in stop-motion when I was around 5 and would watch those Jim Henson behindthe-scenes specials where you’d get a sneak peek into a creature fx shop. Everyone working there seemed like they had the coolest job on the planet, so that was always in the back of my head as an artsy kid who was constantly drawing and sculpting little creatures. It wasn’t until I got to college that I actually began experimenting with stop-motion, but I was pretty hooked after my first film. It seemed like the best way to combine all of my passions — sculpture, sound, storytelling — into one medium. You and “Adventure Time” creator Pendleton Ward were both profiled in a 2009 “Rising Stars” piece in Animation magazine. Were you aware of one another before then? (Or, for that matter, then?)
That’s so funny! I totally forgot that Pen was in there! I think that was right around when “Adventure Time” first got picked up and I actually visited Cartoon Network and got to meet him. He told me he was a fan of a film I did in undergrad with my friend Garrett Davis called “Story from North America” and my head nearly exploded when he told me that.
How did the project come about?
About a week after I released my grad thesis, “Move Mountain,” I got an email out of the blue from Adam Muto, the executive producer on “Adventure Time,” saying that they’d always wanted to do a stop-motion episode and after seeing my film (which was coincidentally also an 11-minute stopmotion short) they thought I would be a perfect fit to write and direct an episode of the show. I was bouncing off the walls with excitement, said yes of course, and started developing concepts right away.
Do you see any aesthetic, creative or philosophical similarities between your work and Pen’s? The creatures in “Move Mountain” could certainly be drawn as “Adventure Time” characters; “Sweet Dreams,” with its animated doughnuts and cupcakes is not far removed from “Adventure Time’s” Candy Kingdom.
It’s interesting — in that initial email from Adam, he thought that “Move Mountain” could have been an episode of “Adventure Time,” not only for the story and the length, but also because my sensibility about character design fit the show’s aesthetic really well. I do feel like there are unintentional similarities between “Adventure Time” and my work, but mainly because I love minimalist designs and stories that aren’t conventionally told in animation. And to be honest, I didn’t even watch “Adventure Time” before I got the directing gig. I did start watching right away for research purposes; however, research quickly turned into a total obsession with the show (because it’s an incredible show), and I think I watched every single episode. It’s now one of my all-time favorite shows. Anything you would like to say about “Adventure Time,” why you like it, what it does that other cartoons don’t? (Or does that other cartoons do.)
“Adventure Time” transcends being a cartoon. I think people have a tendency to write off a lot of cartoons as “cute” and fairly onedimensional in their stories and complexity. “Adventure Time” is so ahead of its time, though — it’s like the “Star Trek” of our time or something. It’s super cerebral, and I constantly forget that it’s supposed to be a kid’s show, because the concepts are so interesting and out there. I like to think it’s helping breed a generation of kids that will really think outside the box. It’s also just beautifully designed and colored, so it’s super visually appealing to boot.
What was it like working with fabricators instead of making everything by your own hand? Who were they and how did you guide the process?
It was amazing! We had an incredible fabrication team at Bix Pix where we did all the production. Our head of puppets was Barney Marquez, who totally hit it out of the park in terms of translating the characters into three dimensions, and our production designer was Jason Kolowski, who is also a master of his craft. I couldn’t have been more pleased with the way the puppets, sets and props turned out.
Did you have a bigger team of animators than usual?
Yes, because usually it’s only me, ha ha. We had four main animators on the episode, so we could have multiple stages running
How did the fact that you were working in stop-motion affect the choice of characters, of scene, of staging? Of story?
When writing for stop-motion you have to approach it in a similar way to writing live action with a budget in mind, because everything is physical and anything you write in needs to be built. This is one of the main reasons we limited ourselves to four main characters — all cast in silicone with complex internal armatures. I also tried to limit the amount of rigging by minimizing the amount of running/jumping/anything that would require a puppet to be suspended in the air — although I think I’m used to writing this way for my own films as well. I prefer subtlety in action as opposed to big cartoonish overacting. One thing I didn’t anticipate as being costly while writing was the number of shots I included. I feel like the piece is cut together with a quick, almost live-action pace, and with every new cut, the lighting for the stage has to be reset, which is time-consuming and labor-intensive. But at the end of the day, everything in stop-motion is hard, so it’s expected that some things will take longer than planned.
What was it like interpreting an already established world as opposed to creating your own?
It actually took some of the guesswork out, which was nice. Usually you’d have to make a million decisions down to “How should we design the trees?” But we had pre-existing 2-D model sheets from the show which made it so much easier. All of our designs were already there and established. For me it was really fun to work within someone else’s world but still get to put my own spin on it. I also feel like “Adventure Time’s” world is one that’s probably easier for me to work within, since we share similar aesthetics and a conceptual freedom.
How long did it take? The whole process took a little over a year from concept development and preproduction through the final post and sound. Actual production time was only around three months though.