![]() That was always super important to all of us. And then that makes it really look like traditional 2D animation. But what you can do and this is very laborious and time consuming, but you fed hundreds of unique, original drawings to the animation of Harmony. This is a process known as Harmony animation, and pretty much what’s done is they take drawings and sort of build a two dimensional looking rig where it’s pretty much a puppet. The video game was all animated by hand and it just wouldn’t be physically possible to do that on a TV schedule. We knew in order to create as much volume of animation that we are going to need on the TV schedule that we would have to kind of embrace more modern tools. We knew we wanted that from the beginning and then we worked with, it was actually a studio called Lighthouse. Like you found it in a vault and it was in pretty pristine condition. It was in pretty good condition from the 1930s, if that makes sense. It was something that was newly made in the 1930s. We wanted to make it look like if you found this thing, it hadn’t been dropped on the floor. We added layers of film grain and a little bit of dirt. And then when it was lit with a real light, it would cast a little shadow on the background. And like you were saying, we came up with a process where we could put a drop shadow under the cell because often when they were shooting those cells on backgrounds, there’d be a tiny little space. Well, we knew pretty much the idea was we wanted to make this thing look like something that could have been produced in the 1930s. The look of this show is amazing because it’s computer animation but there are these touches which make it very 2D, like shadows that make it look like cels. There was no real connection between why is the world like this? What would it be like to walk from Cuphead’s house over to where Porkrind’s shop is set up? What does that actually feel like? So that was the stuff that we had all these, all this sort of visual, beautiful visual smorgasbord to kind of pick and choose from and play with. Because we had visually, we knew what they looked like and we knew what the world looked like, but they didn’t really have personalities. And that was the great joy of this job was to create the characters for this game. In terms of its visual look, we still had to come up with the great characters. I think it spared us from having to make a case for a lot of that stuff. And I think coming onto this show, I really wanted to embrace that and really build off what they already had in that game, but create real solid believable characters that were also funny. And that it was a real love letter to like the style of that time, that rubber hose animation. The Moldenhauers who created the game really did an amazing job of making that game feel so authentically 1930s. ![]() In “Cuphead,” I think we really did a deeper dive into 1930s cartoons. And even though I think that stylistically we touched on the thirties, obviously those character designs were invented back then, but there was sort of a splash of 1950s flare in those things as well.Ī hodgepodge neat styles lived in those things. I spent, I think it was five years doing that. And I have to say before “Cuphead,” that was probably one of the funnest gigs I ever had. Sometimes people say that and then they don’t really mean it, but these guys really did want us to make them funny and let us make them funny. Which was really a treat and they meant it. And actually we were really encouraged to make funny shorts on top of that. I think our sort of prime directive on the “Mickey” shorts was to take these characters that everybody knew and freshen them up. What was the progression of what you guys were trying to do with the “Mickey Mouse” shorts, and then what you’re doing here with “Cuphead?” ![]() ‘The Cuphead Show’ Trailer: Animated Adaptation of Popular Video Game Really Goes for It (Video) ![]()
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