Annecy: Cartoon Network’s Iconic Creators Reflect on Studio’s Past and Present at Special 25th Anniversary Panel

Though it’s been a hard couple of years for Cartoon Network — between the continual culling of animation across Warner Brothers Discovery and last year’s shuttering of Cartoon Network Studios’s Burbank building — there was still plenty to celebrate at the 25th anniversary panel hosted in the Bonlieu for Annecy Festival. The talk included iconic show creators Genndy Tartakovsky (Samurai Jack), Craig McCracken (Powerpuff Girls),  JG Quintel (Regular Show, the upcoming Supermutant Magic Academy adaptation), Rebecca Sugar (Steven Universe), Pendleton Ward and Adam Muto (Adventure Time).

The panel began with just three figures — Tartakovsky, McCracken and their old producing partner  and former VP of Original Series Development Linda Simensky, who moderated. They shared stories both about the ideologies and creative ambitions which lead to the founding of the studio, as well as their own entangled careers together. Simensky lead with the statement that the studio was made because of the “belief that artists should be empowered to create,” and stressed that the studio was successful because of that artist driven philosophy and willingness to bet on some bold risk-taking.

A brief discussion of the landscape at the time – of the conflicting influences of Hanna Barbera and UPA against the work of Disney on the students at Cal Arts, lead into a talk about Tartakovsky and McCracken’s personal and professional history together. “There were no people our age running shows,” Tartakovsky reflects, “so there were no opportunities”. The Samurai Jack and Primal creator spoke on how he expected to only be directing by 50, the nature of the industry not really being one for young people, a change that Cartoon Network would later come to reflect. “‘Showrunner’ wasn’t really a job you could get”, McCracken affirmed.

The Powerpuff Girls creator spoke about his own beginnings, about how Paul Rudish (who worked on Tartakovsky’s shows and co-created Sym-Bionic Titan) brought them in to Hanna-Barbera Cartoons, and how his work “wouldn’t exist without him”. The two recalled the state of Hanna-Barbera when they joined: “everybody was beaten down, they were survivalists,” Tartakovsky said. While both artists spoke about how they chafed with the system there – department-based rather than unit-based (crew were just assigned based on what work needed to be done rather than specific projects) – they also said how vital the experience was. “At CalArts we learned the art of animation, at Hanna-Barbera we learned the business.”

Fun, Games and Creativity

The session continued with an appropriately mischievous tone, with plenty of anecdotes about how the two felt about the old systems. “I think some wanted us to be put into the system — you have to use this paper and you have to do it like this.” But the two also spoke about artists there who “saw the future” and embraced what they wanted to do differently, such as Robert Alvarez, who McCracken highlights as one of those in “the old guard” who did, and would later become a key figure on shows made at Cartoon Network.

One of those shows, Dexter’s Laboratory, was one of the focal points of the discussion. Tartakovsky spoke about overcoming some psychological hurdles during development. “I always thought directors were like Chuck Jones, the best drawer on the team,” he says, admitting that most of his team on Dexter drew the characters better than he did. But he also quipped about some of that same crew who would “go to the roof and get high and start the work at two in the afternoon”, as well as some of the general chaos of letting a lot of the team do their own thing, meaning a lot of re-doing layouts. The stress mounted as Tartakovsky was “scared of getting fired for anything” despite the studio’s strong support, this being a rare chance to lead on a show.

When asked about how conscious they were about making ‘A’, ‘B’ or C’ episodes, they also noted that things took a life of their own. “We made a show about a kid with a laboratory but everyone got stuck on ‘omelette du fromage’”, McCracken joked. Regardless it was still the genesis of the strong visual styles which would come to define the studio for a long time afterwards. McCracken attributes it to a joint desire to tell stories visually, citing screenings of films like The Hudsucker Proxy and even sequences from Army of Darkness as inspirations for how they’d pull back on dialogue and experiment.

Simensky said that it was specifically a storyboard from Dexter’s Lab which got Powerpuff Girls made, where Dexter fires DeeDee and has to hire a replacement. Simensky actually pushed McCracken to get made, he had abandoned the idea after a test screening went poorly.

“When I did the first Powerpuff short it tested terribly. A group of 11 year old boys said ‘this is the worst cartoon ever made, whoever made it should be fired. So I go back to the studio and redesign the characters, and give them noses and fingers because I thought I made them too weird.” McCracken continued to mention Mike Lazzo’s positive influence on his work, saying that he cared about the artform. While McCracken changed Powerpuff Girls in a panic after the test, he says “so Mike [Lazzo] calls and says ‘I hear you’re changing the Powerpuff Girls– don’t!’”

Going through their work together in order, they touched on some other beloved names like Samurai Jack (Simensky recalls trying to describe it as “it’s like… Kung Fu meets UPA?”), as well as the conception of shows like Foster’s Home For Imaginary Friends.

The talk then turned to the new guard, and the rest of the panel – Quintel, Sugar, Ward and Muto – joined to briefly discuss how they got into working in the industry. Many of them grew up on Tartakovsky and McCracken’s work (“Samurai Jack was the coolest s**t on TV”, Ward says). Quintel mentions getting his start by landing an internship out of CalArts (where he was rooming with Ward) to work on Tartakovsky’s Clone Wars. Sugar mentioned connecting with Tartakovsky when she was a storyboard artist on Hotel Transylvania, and eventually showing him an early version of Steven Universe, asking the director if he knew anyone who could do animation direction for the exposure sheets, and that he volunteered. “I was so shocked that as I was leaving Sony I crashed my car into a pole”, Sugar adds.

A Talent Incubator

The conversation moved onto a lynchpin of Cartoon Network’s 2010s: Adventure Time. Simensky calls it a talent incubator, and asking Ward on how he picked artists for the show, he responded “I was looking for people who wrote and drew, and that was in comics”. He went to indie comics expos, which is how he met Sugar, who would end up doing revisions on Adam Muto’s boards.

Of course with the new decade the atmosphere of the studio had changed. Muto calls it a transitional period where everything had to be a hit in the network’s eyes, recalling the pressure. Things like Regular Show felt like even more of a gamble, as “we were coming off a time when everyone was making cartoonier shows, and this was more conversational, like a sitcom” Quintel says. “I couldn’t animate like a Disney animator, but I could make people laugh with my storyboards.

After reflecting on the glorious past of the studio and the influences of the older and newer artists, the panelists talked briefly about where that ‘Cartoon Network spirit’ might go. “The future is partly independent”, Tartakovsky says. “That’s kind of the future with how the industry is now.” Quintel mentions that artists working in comics are also part of that future, a way to get new and boundary pushing work on screen, given his involvement in adapting Jillian Tamaki’s Supermutant Magic Academy for Cartoon Network.

But beyond the practicalities, McCracken brings back what ‘the spirit of Cartoon Network’ is: “It’s the people, it’s us.”