title: This Animated Life
author: Imaginary Worlds
contenttype: podcast
publication: Imaginary Worlds
published: 2025-11-19T20:01:00
sourceurl: https://pdst.fm/e/pscrb.fm/rss/p/mgln.ai/e/433/claritaspod.com/measure/traffic.megaphone.fm/QCD9991440398.mp3?updated=1768847562
word_count: 7047
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Shop President's Day Savings can get up to 40% off plus free delivery on select appliances like LG at the Home Depot, free delivery on appliance purchases of $1,498 or more off a valid February 5th through the 25th US only can see store online for details. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Melinsky. One of the reasons I created the Patreon show between Imaginary Worlds is because there are so many ideas that I wanted to explore and people I wanted to talk with, but I knew that it just wouldn't fit the format of Imaginary Worlds. This way I can have longer, more casual conversations that allow me to get more personal and even joke around with people. I wanna play you sections from three different conversations I've had on between Imaginary Worlds. Because when put together, they form an arc which traces the history of animation in my lifetime, from an outside perspective to an inside one. Let's start with Judd Winnick. A lot of Gen Xers know him from the San Francisco cast of MTV's The Real World, which was my favorite cast. He is best known to comic book fans as the writer who brought Batman's second robin, Jason Todd, back from the dead and turned him into the vigilante superhero Red Hood. Judd is also known to a generation of children as the author of the Heelow books. I brought Judd on the Patreon show to talk about a new Batman animated series on Amazon, but I also knew that we share nostalgia for the weird and trippy world of children's television in the 1970s. At this point in the conversation, we were talking about Sid and Marty Croft, who had to explain for years afterwards that they were not 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-Vaudville 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 actually the early break was the Banana Splits. Approach them, Hannover Barra 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 to throw them on a set and rather doing 10 minutes of animation could do this. And I think they got the idea like, what we should do our own show, which gave birth to HR 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 gonna do a dragon, instead of Puff the Magic Dragon, it's gonna be Puff and Stuff, and then they just dug in. These cats weren't hippies per se, but they got really hippy-dippy in their approach. It was a weird, weird show. I mean, Eric, what do you possibly remember about it? Okay, so HR Puff and Stuff is a blur from 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 the, from the 60s, which had these very, very heavy knobs that as little kids we kept, it was actually like effort to turn those knobs. Right. It was like, and I remember being at my grandparents with my cousins watching Land of the Lost for the first time. And I had no memory of any of the humans. I knew they're regular humans, but of course, all I remember were the fantastical type of creatures. The bananas splits, I was obsessed with as a kid, because it creeped me out so much, and yet I couldn't stop watching it. And so here's 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, tripier stuff to it that was not appropriate for kids. And they were sort of taking 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 his aim for you, but there was something dark and creepy that I could never put my thumb on about that stuff. Of course, the stuff like bananas splits was late 60s. I didn't know that was just rerun in the 70s. They just rerun all the time in UHF. I had no idea it was an older show. Well, yeah, you're absolutely right. You have to acknowledge the culture at the time. Because the early 70s are still the 60s. And we're not even remotely out of it. And the Beatles broke up five minutes ago. And fashion is still bell bottoms. And our lead human in HR puffing stuff, he's wearing bell bottoms. He's got himself like this little shirt with a lace up shirt. And some point, somebody woke up to like, I don't know if this is for kids, meaning in general, that grim fairy tales, all children get eaten and murdered. That's how we roll. And what's appropriate for kids? Kids can handle this. Kids stuff is generally a cautionary tale. We tried 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. These were not Jim Henson Muppets. These are giant, I mean, larger than life puppets, who when they talk, their dialects clearly dubbed in, and they're just flapping their heads. And they move weird. Does everything about it's a little bit terrifying? The witch witchy poo is in so many ways. Equally as terrifying is 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 that there's a raggedy and an 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 DVDs 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 or 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 to the cobbler. Right, which was 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, what are the first senators of California. And, and Corny was an old, old hippie, who was also one of the original surfers. He knew the original Gidget because they called her, she was so short, they called her a girl, Midget. And he knew her. And he was like, man, I remember working for Richard Williams on that raggedy and movie. And I was like, that was real? Like, I remember like that really happened. And he was like, 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 a sticky, taffy, crazy ass thing and that he animated. And I was like, of course, who is you, Corny? Of course, it was you. Welcome to the taffy pitch. What sort of place is this? The taffy pitch is my domain. Well, he was in that weird sweet spot of like post, oh goodness, like so way post Disney feature animation that bled into feature animation from the 60s and 70s and who were these cats? Almost exclusively men. Almost exclusively men and all like, these were not guys like, like, these were not the guys who grew up and like we're gonna work at Pixar. They were, you know, they were, they were, they were hippie animators. They were guys like, this is a great gig. I sit around and draw all day. 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 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 I know someone who worked in animation during the 80s who 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, what about the younger guys? The younger guys didn't come back as the older guys didn't come back. They weren't big drinkers, like, no, they were mostly, well, it's the 80s, they were high on different things. 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 into the 80s? Like, you know, they were not doing their best. It took a while for, yeah, and I too forgot about the Raggedy End movie. And only because of the internet, people were like, hey, I've never seen that on television one day and sort of thinking, like, was it a Raggedy End thing? Dude, 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. Hilton, for this day. I mentioned that I studied animation at Cal Arts in Southern California. My friend Caleb Murer 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 wasn't usual 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 their 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 opposite day in bikini bottom. And SpongeBob and Patrick learn about the idea of opposite day for the first time and then 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 in the middle of the area and there were offices all around us. And my office was right across from several of the storyboard artists offices. And there were windows so you could see what was going on in there. And 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 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. Like they're searching for some solution to this, you know, the story 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 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 a 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 in high energy pitching. Other people are nervous racks and kind of struggle with it. But it's, you know, it's this kind of very fun meeting 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 would add things. There were little visual things 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 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 discovered 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 patty 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 there's one where he's like traveling like a worm through the patties and gobbling him up. And so that was one of my ideas. And there are a few others in there. At the end, Squidward locks himself in the patty 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 why now? And there's 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 with 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 it 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 about it right there. And they did a drawing. They did a thumbnail drawing. But the drawing was really strange. It was like his thighs actually weren't that big in the drawing. And just he had these big fat ankles. And so when that came to me to clean up, I thought, 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, because he has four legs, it all looks like he has two butts, like a butt on each side. And then his legs are not quite as fat. So he has this kind of big fat thighs. And I drew it with like a bunch of dimples and stuff. And that was one that 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 what discussions are had after it leaves my desk. But obviously they liked it enough to put it in. With where 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. What 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 cred 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 mean, that crowds wearing like a plaid shirt. It's funny how often, like I'll be watching a show, like feature rommers, 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, you like, 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, you know, 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. And you can look at, I mean, you're aware of this from the shows, I'm sure. Well, because I was ever created drawing on model too. And so I was always aware when my cartoon, when my episodes would come back, it was so obviously mine. And the other people who I knew were just as bad as I was at drawing on model, I could always tell their versions when the shows would come back who had drawn them for that same reason. Well, and if you work with other artists, and you recognize their drawings immediately, there's little subtle things that people who are drawing those characters every day and seeing all the other artists, you look at something immediately and like, oh, that's a Bill SpongeBob or that's a Sherman Patrick right there or that's a Walt Dorne 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 Sherman SpongeBob, this is a Paul SpongeBob. Yeah, by the way, there is a indirect connection between all of this and my podcast. One of the last jobs that I tried to get an animation before I eventually left animation was SpongeBob, do you remember this? Was it the movie? No, is it the show? I took a test where they give you a script and you have to draw it out. Okay. I sent it in, you showed it to Steve's 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 remember that you did a test, but I don't remember that. That was 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. So like, do I really want to stay in animation? Like, why did I end up here anyway? 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, you know, different psychology, right? Different, yeah. 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, you know, obviously the animation world, we were in a completely different universe 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 you mean by that. Like, how is a drawing sincere? And so you guys, he said, it took you guys a while you were going around a trial because you didn't have a clear idea in your mind, like not a verbal idea necessarily. And so you went around in circles for a little while and at the end of it, 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 I just, I tell my students about that too, just that idea 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? Hi, I'm Brian, your friend and jeweler at Shane Company and we've partnered with Cupid to bring you the best Valentine's Day gifts, even if you forgot. We won't tell. From heart necklaces with sparkling diamonds to stolly school hoops, every piece is made with love. Plus, there's still time to propose. We make it easy to create their dream engagement ring. We have meaningful gifts for every budget that'll look like you've been planning this for months. Come see us in store or at shanko.com, Shane Company, your friend and jeweler. 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, Nemona. Nemona is a comedy adventure that subverts traditional ideas about what makes a hero in a villain. Who are you? The name's Nemona. Your sidekick has arrived. I don't need a sidekick. Every villain needs a sidekick. I'm not a villain. A real villain is still out there and I do need help. And then? 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. Nemona was a hit when it was released on Netflix. It was actually celebrated because the movie almost didn't get made. Nemona 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 gonna finish it, but they didn't. There was a lot of speculation that Disney got cold feet because the creator of Nemona is transgender and there are queer themes in the story, which Blue Sky was not gonna shy away from. After Disney dropped Nemona, it was picked up by a studio called Anna Perna. Anna Perna did not have an in-house animation division like Disney. So they farmed the animation out to a studio in Montreal called Dineg. And that brings me to Aiden Sugano and Digny Jose Francois. They spent 18 months working on the film at Dineg in Montreal. Digny Jose was the digital effects supervisor. Aiden was the production designer. And you'll hear them mentioned 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 Nemona when he found out that Disney was gonna drop it. Like when they announced the news that Blue Sky was closing, we found out kind of a lot later. 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 find a vendor and someone to pick this up, we can 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 to find someone to pick this up and it landed with Anna Perna. And Anna Perna, at that point, then 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 that we'd already created, models, some of the tech that we had, we tried to get out some of the, all of the reference material that we had created from the videos I've looked at, just videos of people talking about how they made this specific thing for how the materials on a character look, but we had a very limited time. And so it was a crazy rush of people calling people, how can we pull this thing out of the render farm? 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, holding terabytes of servers and just being like, I think this works. Hopefully it's not totally corrupted and broken. And then, yeah, we passed all that over to Dean Hig. 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 arrives at Dean Hig, it was quite interesting. So first of all, a little bit of one to say is when we got the inkling that we were going to pick this up in a casual conversation with sheer 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, coming up? And I said, I didn't really know what I was going to be working on about momentals 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. There was a CD one product that Blue Sky made, said in New York about a taxi driver back in the early 90s, which I have, I'm trying to remember the name of it. On that CD, interactive CD, there was a little clip of 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 how, you know, when they said this is Blue Sky, I think coming up, I actually said, I actually said at the time, well, I don't know if I'd want to work on that. And they said, what'd 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 of you said, they said, yeah, we're putting you on the moon. So I was like, okay, I was terrified. I was like, oh my God, I'm not going to be able to do this. It's last, because it looked amazing. So what we got, we looked, everything that Edan just said looked amazing, all the test work that they'd done, all the setup work they'd done looked amazing. But as Edan 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. So which meant that any animation had been done couldn't be used because we didn't have rigs. Then there was the fact that there were multiple pipelines involved previously, which were all different from the DNA 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 storyboards, 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 the story hadn'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 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. And that's what 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, Aiden, when did you realize that you were going to continue to get to work on Nomona, but now Denegg? I got a call from one of the producers. And you know, it was basically, no, 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 were trying to figure out all of this. So it was a while, 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, 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 to months. And then I was back on. And it was sprint from that point on. It was dead sprint until the day that we said, OK, that's in the can. Wait, did you have a release date? Because I mean, Netflix kind of released it whenever they want. We had a delivery date. Because obviously, for our studio, we can't just work on something. And definitely we've got other projects on the card. I think I just want to add to what Edel is 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 say, no, no, no, it's OK, you go and do that. I think, like, everybody, 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 said. 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, there 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 being who you are and people accepting you for who you are. And that applies to everyone. And for me, that was quite important. And I just felt like this is a, it's different. It's not your typical buddy movie. 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 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 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 the moment that it seemed like it was going to happen, I knew that I just had to be on that thing. Not only for the fun of getting to play in Nate's world that he created, I mean, that's a fricking dream and it is this because you get robots and nights and super dark comedy and these shapeshifters and crazy. Like everything about it was just, it was one of those things where it's 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. Where it's 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 needing to be that life project or that the career, career project where it's like, yeah, you know, 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 pneumonia. 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. If you wanna hear between imaginary worlds, it comes included with the ad-free version of the show. If you pledge $10 a month on Patreon. If you pledge $5 a month, you can still listen to between imaginary worlds with a four-month delay. Right now, you'd have access to 22 of the 31 episodes of between imaginary worlds with new episodes released twice a month. Also, if you support the show on Patreon at different levels, you get free imaginary world stickers, a mug, or t-shirt, in a link to a Dropbox account, which is the full length interviews of every guest in every regular episode of imaginary worlds. Another way to support the show is to recommend it to a friend, post about it on social media, or leave a nice review wherever you get your podcasts. You can subscribe to the show's newsletter at imaginaryworldspodcast.org. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. Thank you for listening.