Drawn To Animation
- May 16
- 4 min read
I've been fortunate to have worked on and off in animation for the past two decades. I consider myself especially fortunate as someone who A) grew up without a TV in the house and B) has very little talent in the visual arts. Would I compare my animation career to the tenacity of Beethoven overcoming profound hearing loss to compose his most famous symphonies? Yes, he and I are basically the same.
My animation career arc is on my mind because Mating Season arrives on Netflix this Friday, May 22nd. I really like this show and have enjoyed working on it over the past...year and a half maybe? I truly don't remember when I started.
In addition to editing audio for half of the episodes, I also created the main title sequences (you'll have to tune in to see it) and episode 5 marks my debut as a voice actor. I play a porcupine with self esteem issues (typecasting!)
My second job ever in Los Angeles, and my first job in animation, was also an animated show focused on anthropomorphized animals called Creature Comforts America. To this day it's one of my favorite jobs I ever had and I loved the process of making it. That show started out with audio interviews with real people who had their very human voices and foibles transposed into animal characters. One of the very few documentary/animation hybrids, and certainly the only one ever on network television. It was based on a brilliant animated short called Creature Comforts by Aardman Animation founder Nick Park. Highly recommend if you haven't seen it. It was a very small team of us Americans on Creature Comforts as we would assemble the audio and storyboards then ship them off to Bristol, England where the incredible Aardman animators would bring the characters to life. One member of this very small team was an up and coming writer named June Diane Raphael who now happens to be the voice of Fawn on Mating Season. It feels very full circle. I'm remembering now that I also wrote a behind the scenes blog about making the show, along with Megan Marie Lynn who went on to become a big time TV writer and producer.
My voice also appeared in that show, as an off camera interviewer questioning a slug voiced by my little cousin Maya. Little cousin Maya is now an adult with a little one of her own, and doesn't have her adorable speech impediment anymore. I'm glad it was documented for posterity though, and in slug form.
If you'll induge me, I found some other gems in my CD-R archive of Creature Comforts materials including...these character stills. Such great, whimsical, tactile character designs and beautiful backgrounds.
And one of my favorite pieces to come out of the show was this behind the scenes look at the real human voices around the country who were then transformed into stop-motion animated animals:
Clearly I could talk about my love for Creature Comforts all day, but as I mentioned, that was only my first foray into working in animation. I followed that up with a gig as an editor on The Simpsons Movie, which is still wild to me. It was a very demanding job as the production schedule required 80 to 90 hour weeks at times, but I was in my early 30's back then so I could handle it. That movie was the tail end of the era of analog drawing at Film Roman (the animation company that produces the show) so I got to see artists at their desks drawing the iconic Simpsons characters with pencil on paper. Then a Production Assistant would fly to Seoul each week to hand off the paper drawings at the airport before flying right back home to LA. Clearly not the most efficient system compared to sending purely digital files, but I'm glad I got to see it happen. And I still have a poster and t-shirt from the movie at home signed and illustrated by many of the crew.
After working as one of many editors on The Simpsons Movie, I stayed at Film Roman to work on two different special projects for The Simpsons- The Simpsons Game and The Simpsons Ride. So I never actually worked on the show itself. The cut scenes in the video game were a lot of fun, and I recently came across a bunch of those exports on an old CD-R.
I also edited all of the pre-ride material for The Simpsons Ride (which aged better than the ride itself imho). It's fun to see it whenever we go to Universal Studios, although I don't think I've actually been on the ride since right after its debut.
After my work on Simpsons special projects in the mid-2000's I took a hard pivot to making activist political documentaries, and then mega viral videos at Buzzfeed. But after that, I returned to working in animation on Netflix's Big Mouth- to date the longest running scripted series in streaming history.
A lot of the Big Mouth crew is back together for Mating Season, and I'm feeling very grateful to have had a decade of working alongside them on some very raunchy but also surprisingly heartfelt cartoons for adults. I look forward to the world being able to watch it next weekend. And I really hope the world likes it because even with the good fortune of decades of animation work under my belt, I don't take it for granted and I hope to keep making more. With all due respect, Beethoven can eat my shorts.
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