During my recent visit to RTX 2017, Rooster Teeth's annual expo that celebrates all things TV, movies, games, and the Internet, I had a chance to sit down with some of the most talented, unique, and provocative indie animators working on YouTube today. These artists and their teams boast online communities of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of fans and their many videos have been viewed millions of times over the years. But while they're certainly enjoying their online celebrity status and fan support, they continue to reinvent themselves with the hope of reaching new audiences and improving their artistic range.
I would not be surprised if any of the artists in this spotlight found their way into mainstream popularity before long. The talent is certainly there, as is the awareness in online communities; all it takes is the right opportunity to take them from YouTube fame to household name. And all of them are poised to do just that. Here's a look at the folks I had the pleasure to chat with:
- ExplosmEntertainment - Dave McElfatrick, Kris Wilson and Rob DenBleyker, the minds behind Cyanide & Happiness, bring this popular guilty pleasure toon to nearly 7.4 million subscribers.
- TheOdd1sOut - Relative newcomer James Rallison uses his Oddlings to tell animated tales from his childhood and daily life experiences for more than 3.5 million subscribers.
- How It Should Have Ended - This self-explanatory video series from Daniel Baxter and Tina Alexander pokes fun at popular movies for their 7 million-plus subscribers.
- FlashGitz - Tom Hinchliffe and Don Greger provide their 1.6 million-plus subscribers with edgy, provocative, NSFW toons like "Racist Mario."
- OnlyLeigh - Leigh Lahav brings her 369,000+ subscribers unique takes on pop culture icons and has a secret passion for stop-motion animation.
Be sure to take a look at the interviews below. You might find your favorite artist or even discover a channel that becomes your new obsession!
Explosm, AKA Cyanide & Happiness
You probably recognize the work of Rob DenBleyker even if you don't know his name. The popular stick figure-styled drawings of Cyanide & Happiness have been delighting fans for more than a decade with their sharp wit, unapologetic humor, and sometimes downright weirdness. They've risen to massive success as their artistic team and creative vision have expanded, but they're always looking to get to the next level. I asked DenBleyker if the core team of creators ever stops to reflect on how they got to where they are.
DenBleyker: We do that a lot; it doesn’t make sense. It was such a gradual transition with lots of ups and downs along the way. It’s strange. It was a series of mistakes and not mistakes. We never had a plan, we just wanted to make the most of every step. Yeah, it’s been a really crazy ride. We started out making it just for fun in college, just as a hobby. Then one month, our revenue surpassed our server expenses, we were able to buy dinner for ourselves, and then a few months later it was rent, and now we’ve got an animation studio with 25 people making cartoons.
Many animators have a passion for cartoons from childhood; DenBleyker was slightly different:
DenBleyker: Not specifically animation but cartoons and comics in general. I grew up on newspaper comics like “Calvin and Hobbes” and “The Far Side.” Every morning, I would digest the funny pages from start to finish. Something that happened to start out as a comic, me and three other guys just making comic strips, it evolved into animation because all of us had past experience with animation and wanted to flex our abilities a bit.
Of course, a big part of creating animated works is the writing process. Explosm's sounds like a blast:
DenBleyker: Our writing room is so laid back. We spend the first half of our writing session not even trying to write, just goofing around. That’s where the best ideas come from, just trying to make each other laugh and telling stories about stuff that happened to us recently, talking about the news. The entire process, just watching it go from the stupidest idea to a fully fledged animation with music and action and voice-acting, everything along the way is a series of decisions and problem-solving. And we get to do it with this amazing team of people who, at each part of production, step it up and punch it up one level further. Like we have jokes being added at animation that we never even thought of because the animator will be like, “Hey, the facial expression could be this instead of that.”
A lot of the artists who work for us also write scripts occasionally, so a lot of them will get to animate their own project, some concept that they thought of and wrote out. I think you’ll see that in the final product. It’s not a very regimented, top-down control like you’d see at Disney where everything is controlled down to the bottom person. For us, we tend to put one animator, or at most two, onto each project so that even the animation itself has one vision behind it.
And a drink every now and then couldn't hurt, right?
DenBleyker: Drinking can help for writing. Some of our best ideas come from being drunk at Comic-Con and just hanging out. As long as you edit and revisit it when you’re sober, otherwise you get shorts that you might regret … like “Ow, My Dick” is one of those. You look at it again and go, “That’s not funny.”
It's not all fun and games and drinking, however. The Explosm team has committed themselves to delivering on a strict deadline:
DenBleyker: As of mid-August, we’ll have hit four years with these shorts without missing a week. We’ve uploaded them a couple hours late because we’ve noticed a mistake or what have you, but we’ve never missed an upload. [As compared to South Park’s record:] The thing about our show, it’s a little bit shorter length than South Park—we’re not making 22-minute episodes—but we also don’t have an off-season. So year-round, at any given time, we have 20 to 30 shorts in production all the way from scripts to post-production. We have a ton of stuff in development so that we never miss a week. Not having an off-season means there’s no summer vacation, there’s no sabbatical or hiatus, we’re just always writing.
With that schedule, it might be easy to fall into parodying or commenting on current events and politics:
DenBleyker: With the comics especially we try not to tackle current political events head on because we don’t want a comic to become irrelevant or dated. But sometimes we’ll comment on a news story kind of sideways and make a joke about it that lasts longer. So if you knew what happened on that day, you might read a comic on two different levels, but it’s not a specific commentary on, like, what Trump said yesterday. It’s like a little self-contained universe. We have characters that are based on real people, like Ted Bear is based on Bear Grylls. We adapt pop culture stuff into our cartoons. Sometimes characters who are the stupidest characters ever get trilogies, like Harry the Handsome Butcher was the stupidest short we’ve ever made, but it’s got a Part 2 and there’s a Part 3 coming … which nobody asked for, but we think it’s funny.
Another comic they revisited was "Lab Results" and I, for one, am glad they did:
DenBleyker: Yeah, it was 100% an Animaniacs tribute. That one’s actually based on a comic. The comic didn’t rhyme, it was just him listing off symptoms and ending by saying, “You’re deaf.” In the writing room, we asked, “Is there any way to take an old comic and turn it into a short by adding something new or taking it in a different direction?” And then Dave [McElfatrick] jumped in and said, “Hey why don’t we just make it a musical? Have the doctor jumping around and singing off symptoms?” We spent the next two weeks just hashing out lyrics. So much fun to write. We got Kevin Murphy from Mystery Science Theater 3000 [to sing it].
After improving their artistic style for their animation over the years, I was curious to know if they were interested in going full CG or 3D.
DenBleyker: We use it to support the animation. We’ve never really done a full 3D short. In fact, one of our shorts, “Kilgore”, is about a bull-rider who has to ride a bad CGI bull. The bull is poorly animated and it’s always spinning and contorting and twisting … it’s just a badly animated bull. That’s the only like self-aware CGI joke we’ve done.
DenBleyker's response about exploring another cutting-edge medium for a toon surprised me:
DenBleyker: I had one idea for a VR short that I want to make eventually where it’s a first-person perspective of being on a bad date and the short goes from there. So you can put on your VIVE or your Oculus Rift and be inside of a C&H short and have jokes going on to your left and right. That’s one idea I’ve filed away for some undetermined point in the future. It’s in its infancy, we haven’t really fleshed out the idea or decided who we want to work with, but it’s something I want to do eventually, especially as VR gets more and more mainstream.
Explosm will continue to explore new models to showcase their talent, like The Cyanide & Happiness Show:
DenBleyker: Season 3 just came out and we love it. Season 1 was very much a collection of sketch comedy; Season 2 (Too), every episode was a complete story; Season 3, the entire season is one story. It still kind of weaves and has a lot of unpredictable, crazy episodes, like one episode is just a musical that has nothing to do with any other episode. Season 3 is the first season of all of them that tells a complete story about the C&H universe itself and the fate of it. It’s fantastic. No word on Season 4 yet, but we’re hoping, fingers crossed.
Season 3, I don’t want to spoil it, but it ends in a place where anything can happen. I think we’d build off of that. There’s a lot of possibilities for the future.
But there's much more in store for fans of Explosm:
DenBleyker: Our first non-Cyanide & Happiness show is going to launch in the near future. I can’t formally announce what it is yet, but it’s going to be out. We’re teaming up with a streaming service called Blackpills to put out a really funny show. It’s not C&H, it’s full-body animation, it’s all voice-acted and written by us.
Not to mention their card game:
DenBleyker: Joking Hazard is in a state of constant development. We’re always writing new cards, we’re always testing them, we’re always categorizing them and picking out gems. At the moment, we have hundreds of cards being tested. Our approach for each expansion is to pick the best 100 we have right now. We hand-draw all the cards to start with, so all the card ideas … we have this big pile of blank cards and people just take a Sharpie and draw an idea on it, draw characters and throw it in the pile. Every couple of weeks, we just gather them all and we’ll sit around the table and just play a game. We have this system of stickers where if a card wins or it’s funny it gets a little green sticker. As time goes on, the funniest cards start getting tons and tons of stickers. It also feels good to get a sticker when you win.
We have another expansion pack coming out later in the year. “Deck Enhancement #1” is already out so it’ll be “Deck Enhancement #2” which adds even more cards. We another one called “Toking Hazard” that’s kind of a half-expansion; it’s 50 brand-new cards that are all drug-themed. We mostly thought the name “Toking Hazard” was funny and then created everything else afterwards.
We have thought about [other games] and I would keep an eye on our site in the near future because there may be something happening gamewise.
The Odd 1s Out
A relative newcomer on the YouTube animation scene is James Rallison of TheOdd1sOut. His work has a certain innocence and humor to it that are born of his inspirational material: stories from childhood and personal life experiences. If you're new to this series:
James Rallison: I would call it “Animated Storytime or Storytelling” because on YouTube there’s this sub-category called Storytime. They’re infamous for being over-dramatic and over-exaggerating the story, but for my kind of videos, I feel like we don’t really exaggerate it and we put effort into writing up scripts and drawing all the pictures for the stories. I would call it “Animated Storytime.”
The first eye-catching aspect of Rallison's work is his roly-poly characters who have a delightful, though unofficial name:
Rallison: It’s funny, I was saying, “It’s uncanon, but…” and then I said the name. My friends were like, “If you call it that, it’s canon.” But, unofficially, I call them Oddlings. I’ve never said that in a video or anything, I just tell people who ask: They’re called Oddlings.
All of the artists in this spotlight have distinct styles, so I was curious to know where Rallison's own particular look came from:
Rallison: I draw in a program called Paint Tools Sai. It’s not really for cartoons, it’s more for artsy painting and everything. How I came up with the design was, I started out with comics first. I wanted to have a comic with characters who had skin and hair, which was super weird, but then I was getting demotivated because no one was reading my stuff [even though] I was spending hours doing these crappy drawings. I was also not happy where I was art-wise, like, “I don’t know why this looks crappy and other people look good.” So I took a step back, very minimal, like a bubble person; no hair or skin or anything. That style grew. I was spending more time with those characters doing backgrounds and coloring. I stepped back to make a more simple design just because I was lazy, but as I grew as an artist I kept improving it. Now for videos I like to try and draw backgrounds, so that’s what I want to improve: more backgrounds, more color, more pleasing to the eye. Every video I want to take it a step further and make it better.
But without story inspiration, the best animators in the world won't have much to work with:
Rallison: When I was 16 and making comics, I was always in that, “What’s a good comic idea?” mode. Now, especially because it comes with practice, you just have to think back to your childhood or other experiences. What’s funny is that the stories that I tell, at the time they weren’t funny … some of them were actually pretty traumatic, but you can just tell them in a way that’s entertaining to the audience.
In kindergarten I had a pet moth that got eaten by a bird. I wasn’t laughing at that, I was traumatized by it, but then I was thinking back to it like, “Eh that’d be a good video, a random moth that got eaten by a bird.”
The video that I’m working on, I’m talking about this thing that we did at elementary school, so that’s pretty far in the past.
On his most popular cartoon to date:
Rallison: Probably my “Sooubway” videos; those are my most-viewed videos. They’re kind of what made me explode and have people watch my videos. I’ve had people tell me, “I call it ‘Sooubway’ now.” It’s great.
The future holds a lot of possibilities for Rallison, possibilities that may even include a book project, but for now:
Rallison: I’m still riding this wave, so I’ll keep making videos.
Fun fact: Rallison celebrates his YouTube subscriber milestones by smothering himself in a specific number of sprinkles. So far, he's done 100k, 700k, 1 million, 3 million sprinkles, with one planned for 10 million.
How It Should Have Ended
Easily the most descriptive moniker in the list is "How It Should Have Ended", a self-encapsulated title that tells viewers exactly what they're in for. I had a chance to talk with Tina Alexander before she and the HISHE (pronounced "hizzy") team premiered their “How Kong: Skull Island Should Have Ended” and two pre-viz scenes from their Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 episode for the fans at RTX.
But if you're new to the cartoon:
Tina Alexander: We animate alternate endings to popular movies with a focus on comic book, sci-fi and some fantasy movies. That wasn’t the intention when we started. We’ve done Jaws, and Top Gun, and Pulp Fiction, but as the MCU has grown [laughs] so has our Super Café and Villain Pub. It’s just sort of a natural thing; those tend to do the best. That’s been our focus. I like to tell people who aren’t familiar, we love film, so we may be poking at plot holes but we’re really trying to be funny and good-humored. Most of the time we really enjoy the film on some level, at least on an entertainment level.
Alexander mentioned that they're kind of forced to follow trends when it comes to commenting on pop culture film, turning their art into a bit of a numbers game:
Alexander: It has become that. It was not like that when we started because it really had started as a hobby. We weren’t doing this as a living until 2012 for Daniel [Baxter] and then just in the last two or three years for everybody else. Now, it is a numbers game because if we choose a movie that nobody saw, it doesn’t work when you’re parodying an ending. We look at the numbers and, at this point, we have to do anything superhero-related. That’s the demand.
And while they poke fun at films, Alexander makes it clear that it comes from a place of love:
Alexander: We like to think in a way that we’re not just negative, we’re kind of honoring and being silly. We hope the filmmakers know that they did it best, we’re just having some fun. I think the most challenging [film] to do is a comedy, because it’s already funny, so it’s really hard to come in and be funnier than the best. That’s the most challenging. I think it’s harder to do a movie that we loathe, solely because we have to watch it so many times and draw the characters and animate them. If we hated it, it’s no fun. So if you really liked the movie at least you’re enjoying the art and writing the characters and voicing them.
Alexander specifically called out writer/director James Gunn for his work on Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, the tight plotting of which made it rather difficult for the HISHE team to find something to comment on. Sometimes, however, their fans will help them create an episode:
Alexander: So we started it with the first Amazing Spider-Man. We had the fans write it and then it was so fun that we did it with the second one and then we did it last summer with [X-Men] Apocalypse. So, now that there’s another Spider-Man movie, we said, “Why don’t we let the fans do this one, too?” We have some ideas and we can kind of guide that, but they comment and … We actually learned that YouTube deletes comments when they’re overloading the system on one of these. We had 15,000 comments in 24 hours and we’re like, “Where are they?” We kind of jot down ideas when they’re coming in and who they’re from; we credit the fans if we use their idea.
Even with filmmakers making it easy on them by leaving a lot of plot holes or with fans providing some interesting ideas, the production schedule is still a brutal one:
Alexander: It’s usually one a month. There was a time where we were doing them every three weeks and dying. [laughs] It’s just myself, Daniel and one other animator, full-time. Otis Frampton has been our background artist since 2011. We’re tiny. We have some interns this summer who are helping but otherwise, it’s just us.
Otis has done some full characters. He did all the art for Kong: Skull Island and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and a few others. It’s well-received, though [his art] does look different from Daniel’s; he still does the little eyes like Daniel and I think that’s a big deal. It’s challenging to find an artist [who’s willing and able to match that style] because it’s a lot of work. He has his own popular comic book so he can’t be full-time for us.
Luckily, the calendar of popular movies leaves some room for the HISHE team's creative originality to shine through:
Alexander: There’s a busy season. The superheroes kind of start in March and run through September. Then it’s quiet and we can usually hit something older in the fall. January/February’s really slow, so we can usually do something in there. We look back at what was popular that we haven’t done yet.
Alexander's most fun video to work on:
Alexander: This past year, we have the Villain Pub series, which is where the villains hang out, and we did the Villain Pub Boss Battle where Batman discovered the Villain Pub and I think that was a lot of fun. Anytime we can be creative, almost veering into fan-fiction, it’s a lot of fun, a lot more creative liberty. In the same vein, we did a parody of “Bad Blood” but we called it “Bat Blood” in preparation for Batman v Superman. That was a lot of fun, too.
Kong: Skull Island was fun. We tried to kind of structure it, not quite as huge, but similar to Jurassic World. Kind of Rules of Engagement with giant monsters. It was fun because it wasn’t superhero and we were able to break it up. A lot of superhero actors in that movie, though.
And HISHE's most controversial video to date:
Alexander: That’s easy. It was Logan. We had this crazy idea to do a musical episode. The final scene with Logan, with him dying, was very, very similar to when he died in Les Miserables. So we took that and reworked all the characters and he goes into X-Men heaven and they’re all singing “Do You Hear the Wolverine?” It’s one of those, on a much smaller scale, a critical darling; there are a lot of people who loved it and it’s their favorite episode ever. But it’s the most disliked we’ve ever done. I’ve run into people who are like, “What the heck were you thinking with that musical episode?” But when you’ve been doing it for 12 years we wanted to do something totally different. In our own way we wanted to honor Hugh Jackman as Wolverine. If they stuck around, which a lot of them I don’t think did, Deadpool broke it up; he was all the dishonoring that they were crying about.
Their most-requested parody surprised me:
Alexander: Probably Zootopia. And we have a list of ideas and I don’t really have a reason why we didn’t do it, but maybe we’ll put Ruben [DeLuna] on that too.
Remember that name because he may be an integral part to HISHE's future plans. But in the meantime, they're attempting to leverage social media to improve outreach with their fan community:
Alexander: We just started talking with Twitch to get on there. We’re really excited. We think it’d be really cool to show the entire process of what we do. People can be a part of a live writing session, they can watch Daniel draw, all of that. If it grows a big enough audience, the Twitch fans can maybe write one scene in every HISHE (“hizzy”), who knows. It would be really fun, I’m really excited. I think it’s a good fit. It’s forcing yourself to make it part of your routine, but similarly, our personalities are never really seen because it’s animation. It’s so important to get to know our fans better.
While their "How It Should Have Ended" videos obviously get the most attention, I particularly liked the fact that HISHE tried to leverage their popularity to shine a spotlight on other animators they enjoyed in a segment called "HISHE Features." However...
Alexander: It was really not as well-received as we thought it would be, which is disappointing. As fans of animation on YouTube and, knowing that we had a leg up as far as the algorithm is concerned, we wanted to help other animators, I wish it had been better received because a lot of them we think are really great. We just put out one last week with OnlyLeigh. She does a series called “5 Stages” for our channel; she just did one called “5 Stages of a Spider-Man Reboot.” [We also show some] stop-motion LEGO because that was very well received. Those are the two big ones that are still running. There are others: ArtSpear, they do movie stuff. I would love to work with them.
We have a lot of fans who are young, so we try to keep it pretty clean on our channel. That’s sometimes challenging. But we’ve sort of established that and been honest about it with the fans, so sometimes that’s hard with cross-promotion. We definitely want to do more but we have to figure out what the fans will accept.
I think that there is a subset of very vocal fans who really want nothing but HISHE cartoons. We would like to do some movie reviews and some other content on our channel, movie-related, that we think fits with our brand but may not be a specific HISHE cartoon. I think it’s just a very vocal minority, honestly, Even the HISHE Features that didn’t do well still ranged in the 90%, so it’s not horrible. When our videos are usually 97-98%, it’s hard. And Daniel takes it extremely personally. I don’t think we’re going to give up on it. We’re just curating talent to see what we’re going to promote.
HISHE has other side series as well, including the family-friendly HISHE Kids and Fixed Fairy Tales:
Alexander: The real reason we brought four interns on this summer is that we’re developing more HISHE Kids content. We’re going to have a re-launch of HISHE Kids, ideally in November, but possibly in 2018. We want to build up a good bank of content and get that going again. It is really fun and a place where we can be creative and have some original stuff. We’re rebranding embracing your inner geek as a kid, having art and a sculpting show and some other stuff we’re developing.
And hopefully we can finance some more Fixed Fairy Tales. Those are a lot more expensive to produce, just the art and animation for it is more expensive than we can do in-house.
What's next for HISHE:
Alexander: A pretty full slate with Kong, and then Guardians of the Galaxy, and then Wonder Woman. Wonder Woman’s going to be challenging to write because I loved that movie and everybody else did too. It’s harder to write, but really fun to produce once we get a script. I’d love for that to magically just be done.
Ruben DeLuna did a lot of our Disney stuff this year; he did Beauty and the Beast, Moana, The Good Dinosaur. We’re hoping to get him on some older titles because he’s a full shop who can do art, animation, everything. If we can do that, then we can have more releases. We may look at some older titles that we think would be fun, that we haven’t done.
We’ve talked about going back. A lot of people discovered us with the Lord of the Rings HISHE and that was back in the day when we would draw on sketch paper and scan it in; if you pause, you can see the lines. Last year we re-did our Star Wars: A New Hope HISHE and added some new scenes to it. We’ve talked about maybe doing that with Lord of the Rings; new art, a re-mastered edition. That would be fun since it’s one of our most popular ones, to update it and add some more scenes.
We definitely want to hit some Netflix shows. We haven’t done a lot of TV shows. It’s tough because a movie’s two-and-a-half hours and we watch it three or four times, so if a show’s 12 hours … When we did LOST, we about died. There are so many great Netflix shows, there are so many great shows all around. We definitely want to do that. We’ll probably maybe do Stranger Things when that comes out in October. We’ll do Season 1 of Stranger Things when Season 2 comes out, that’s tentatively a plan. A lot of people want to see Daredevil in the Super Café.
FlashGitz
While some of the artists in this list push the envelope with just how raucous and wrong their humor gets, the FlashGitz team of Tom Hinchliffe and Don Greger pull no punches whatsoever when it comes to their creative vision. To get a sense of their style, all you have to do is check out "Racist Mario," though they originally built their community with a Total Warhammer web comic.
I love that their voice exists on YouTube since art exists to satisfy a wide range of tastes and experiences, but their mature humor has earned them the ire of YouTube's recent hammer drops known as the "ad-pocalypse", which they talk about at length. Their words offer some solid advice for fans who want to follow in their footsteps.
But if you're new to FlashGitz:
Tom Hinchliffe: Mature cartoon immaturity. That’s just a shitty tag we figured out for our website. I don’t know, just silly satire in the vein of South Park, Monty Python, stuff like that. We try to draw from a lot of the satirical comic works of … whenever.
Don Greger: To grow on YouTube, it was kind of necessitated to do stuff based on other IP. We pretty quickly found that we already had a voice for comedy. We did sort of original stuff in the beginning and we found that in the parodying and the satire you could still satire and parody that thing that would be appealing to the audience, but you could lay the jokes or social commentary you feel into that material. That’s made some really interesting projects for us. We’ve definitely been shameless sometimes, especially in the beginning, but since the “Racist Mario” days …
Speaking of "Racist Mario", it remains their most popular cartoon:
Greger: The meme became a meme. The thumbnail itself became this amazing thing. It’s really like the biggest piece of our growth. There was this meme about seeing “Racist Mario” as a suggested video everywhere, which apparently everyone could sympathize with: These images started coming out everywhere like the thumbnail photoshopped on a billboard.
Hinchliffe: Time Magazine. But that keeps things alive! But then YouTube demonetized it because there were boobs in the thumbnail. So we put Peach in a burqa. We avoided their censorship today.
Since the topic of the YouTube "ad-pocalypse" was broached, let's get into it:
Greger: Especially with the state of YouTube, none of these cartoons … The model has changed. But we love what we do, so …
Hinchliffe: They introduced these basic controls for advertisers now where the default is set to not advertise on adult stuff. One of the very specific criteria is that you can’t make mature situations out of family-friendly characters—Mario, Sonic, all these things that pull in views. The Ad-pocalypse is unfortunately here to stay for our channel, but we’re transitioning into more live-action stuff.
However, their animation work will still continue in the meantime. Here's how the FlashGitz operation works:
Greger: We contract voice actors, composing, and sound design after everything, but we write everything and we animate everything. It always starts with a really dumb idea and then we just kinda talk about that idea and explore it a bit. We develop a couple of key moments with that idea that you want to see happen, more or less. From there, at least with the shorts, we’ve found that that’s the best way to string things together and make some semblance of a narrative. At least that’s where we start.
Hinchliffe: You’re supposed to kind of capture these tent-pole moments of games or films like, “This is going to be really popular. We need to get a lot of eyeballs on it.” But before we even look at that, a lot of the time we’ll have an idea that we want to get across, like social commentary, and then we kind of see the lineup of the tent-pole franchises and see what would fit really well. It can go either way.
Greger: That was the business end of it, you know? We just wanted to make cartoons, but you have to get views because it’s like a three-month investment. So if there’s something coming up that’s really interesting to us, we sort of contrive what we find funny about that for that thing. So most of our cartoons we didn’t pull out of thin air and decide to make it then just because it was in line with something else. I think everything we’ve made a cartoon about we did find really interesting. It was just the right thing at the right time.
Speaking of timing, it isn't always that easy:
Hinchliffe: Often times we’ll be like, “Oh shit, this thing’s happening right now! We’ve got a 30-second idea, it’s gonna take like two weeks. Let’s do it!” And then like four months later, a four-minute cartoon, no one gives a shit anymore about whatever it was we were making. That happens sometimes, too.
Greger: That’s what happened with this Gears cartoon. We were really excited about the concept and everything. Game came out in like October and we had other stuff going on, so we were kind of making it toward the end of the relevance of that. And then, a whole bunch of other shit came up and we had to face the decision of either dropping it completely or contracting it to someone else. So we paid someone else to finish it, and then they ran out of time because they were doing other stuff, and it ended up just kind of halting for six months. For RTX, we really wanted to have something to show, so we wanted to revitalize it.
Hinchliffe: Gears has been out for like a year now. No one gives a shit.
Greger: Nobody’s gonna care, but so much is done already and we loved the concept we came up with. That’s an example of one we probably will finish just to finish because it’s something we want to see.
Hinchliffe: Yeah, we’re big fans of the sunk cost fallacy.
Regardless of the YouTube troubles and the complications of bringing mature animation to the platform, the FlashGitz pair is pushing forward with some new ideas, like Show Quest:
Hinchliffe: Our dream has always, always been to make our own show. YouTube has always been kind of a stepping stone to prove to people and producers and whoever else that we can make comedy and people like our comedy and they can trust us with managing their projects. The Ad-pocalypse has actually progressed our plans a little quicker than we were anticipating. We’ve already got a couple of show ideas but they’re kind of tied up with various parties and in negotiations. So we thought, how can we engage our fans and give them an insight into what we do? Because they mostly don’t know our faces, they know our cartoons. How do we get them to know us and invest in us as people? We thought, wouldn’t it be sick if we made a show idea with them? Show Quest is, basically, they get to see the whole process from start to finish of making and pitching a show, but they also get input by voting in polls, obviously they can comment and we can incorporate that stuff. It’s just this driving force to get people behind what we’re doing.
Greger: It’ll be on YouTube and it’ll hopefully be ad-safe, outside of the cartoons. We’ll continue to make these cartoons and they probably won’t make any money, but we’re so deep into them that we want to see them finished. Some people think that it’s gonna be kind of a mix, but we’re shifting our model to take those people with us to a higher platform. YouTube has kind of died for animation.
Hinchliffe: It’s a minefield, dude. For ShowQuest Episode 2, we put in the title like, “Tom Has a Brain Tumor.” Like classic clickbait. Who doesn’t love a good brain tumor click? And I think putting “tumor” in the title marked it for demonetization.
Greger: Episode 2, it’s like 40 or 50 hours of work just … gone.
Hinchliffe: $16, that’s how much it’s made so far.
Greger: The party is over with what’s happened to YouTube, even in the last few months, and the pressure is on to make something bigger at this point.
Hinchliffe: Even if the party wasn’t over and the ad dollars kept coming in, we would be so stupid and blind to carry on just making video game parodies forever.
OnlyLeigh
Another unique voice amidst the chaos that is YouTube is OnlyLeigh, the channel for artist and animator Leigh Lahav. Her work remains one of the previously mentioned HISHE Features and her style features a classic, clean design that's highly polished. Her animated stories take inspiration from relatable pop culture media that offer themselves up for clever commentary and humorous parody. There's also a dose of the weird behind the inspiration to her work, like the first cartoon that popped into her head when I prompted her: The 1938 Merrie Melodies short, "Have You Got Any Castles?"
If you're new to OnlyLeigh's work:
Leigh Lahav: I create all kinds of content that involves pop culture. Either parodies of pop culture, pop culture mash-ups, commentary, stuff like that, because that’s an area that I’ve always been interested in, not just as is, but also fans’ reactions to it and what that means. I really like inter-texuality and mash-ups when they’re done well because you can comment on both pieces, which makes for interesting parody.
Lahav has an interesting definition of parody that might make you reconsider how you view the approach:
Lahav: I view parody as comedy that comments on existing pop culture, especially if it’s dramatic, as a breaking of tension. You have Game of Thrones and you have those very, very intense, big, crazy characters and you have this tension between them that doesn’t really resolve because the show needs to go on, and then you have a parody on it and you have this sigh of relief when you see it. It’s not just funny, because, “Oh, I get this,” there are a few layers to it: The first one is, “I recognize this.” That’s the first thing. That’s why people think parody is this very self-congratulating and kind of cheap in that sense. I can understand why they say it, but it’s not just that. Recognizing something is something that happens when dealing with anything of familiarity: emotions, places you know … that’s the first layer.
And then you have, “What am I saying about this existing creation?” Or, “What am I saying about you watching this?” I’m very interested in breaking that tension and saying something new.
Like other artists on this list, Lahav has found that following the popular trends tends to equal more views, which of course equals more money and exposure:
Lahav: At the time, when Marvel really started, it was fun creating around that because it’s a very fleshy world, it’s a very fun world to mess around. I think I had the most fun creating stuff around the villains, like Loki who takes himself super seriously and it’s fun making fun of him. I think, in the movies, you kind of see that, too. That’s really fun.
Now, Marvel’s a bit much. There’s not one specific thing that I go back to right now. Generally it’s certain themes that I like going back to. I like seriousness of characters, I like characters who take themselves seriously. It’s not just easier to parody, it’s that each one takes them seriously in a different way. Like the Stranger Things video I did, the reason I like this mash-up so much and that it did so well was that both the Peanuts character and those kids from Stranger Things, I wouldn’t say take themselves seriously because that’s not how kids work, but there’s a very pure integrity to those characters. It’s fun not to make fun of that but to take a step to the side and take a look at that. I think this is why Peanuts did so well, too. They have this very heavy emotional depth and cleverness to them, almost adult, while they’re being kids. It’s a funny concept. Think of Lisa Simpsons; she’s a funny character.
On the other hand, I think a lot of adults could identify with it, too. A lot of adults are interested in pop culture and culture in general. I think we were kind of serious, serious kids, so we recognize that.
However, Lahav's personal style remains one of the unique aspects of her work. Here's how the look came about:
Lahav: I think it was kind of an evolution. I started out really liking manga and anime and the Japanese style. It went from there. There’s a certain simplicity of the character, an aesthetic, a clean style that I like very much. I kind of evolved from there. The tiny eyes I think are a product of necessity, “Okay, I’m making this animation and it’s going to take way too long. I’m going to do the eyes and find a way to make it very human anyway to insert soul into it.” It was a challenge with certain characters, I’m not gonna lie, but it was fun. This character is mostly defined by its eyes. Shit. What am I going to do?
Though not all characters are equal when it comes to degree of difficulty in design or animation:
Lahav: I did a Fantastic Beasts one. Eddie Redmayne, oh my God, he’s hard to design. That was insane. I had a friend who helped me and we just sent it back and forth. Each one of us kind of tweaked it a bit. He just has a very, very specific face that if you don’t do it exactly it’s fine, I guess you can understand it’s him, but it was important to catch that because it’s important to define.
To animate, I use Flash, or now it’s called Adobe Animate. Mostly characters with long hair [are difficult to animate.] Long hair’s horrible. I need to divide all the symbols. At first, when I just started, I did one instance for the hair. Then, there’s one character that has like 15 pieces, a lot of strands that hop like that.
Lahav finds inspiration both in work that's similar to her own and in some unexpected places:
Lahav: Specifically, I think I take a lot of inspiration from shows that do parodies, like The Simpsons in its first seasons. Shows like Robot Chicken. I love animation and I love parody when it’s mixed together. And I love stop-motion; I’m kind of sad I don’t get to do more of that. I adore stop-motion.
I like content from the 60s like Twilight Zone. It’s kind of odd to mix that together, but for two reasons it gives me a lot of inspiration: First of all, a lot of that content has been parodied a lot. Seeing the source material is very inspiring in kind of a weird way. Second reason, it tackles the pop culture and occurrences of its time in a very, very appealing way that I think at the time you could have recognized it, but also now, years afterwards, knowing what historically happened in America at that time, you observe it in a different way. It’s very inspiring to see what they did with what they had around them.
When it comes to Lahav's most popular cartoon and her most requested parodies:
Lahav: A lot of people ask me to continue certain videos; I don’t do that. I already did that. A lot of people ask me for another part of the “Frozen Is the New Black” one. I can see why, I know there’s a lot of content to continue from this, but I’m done. I think it’ll be redundant if I do that, it’ll seem kind of tired. The “Arrested Development” one, people have been asking for a sequel for a long time; they’re not stopping. It’s nice, I like that video, but no. Those two I get a lot of, “Please do more.” It’s a very specific, “When is Part 2 coming out?” They expect that. Like, this is something that will happen. No, guys. Nope.
A lot of people ask for “Homestuck.” It was called MS Paint Adventures. There’s nothing malicious in my refusal, in not creating anything around it, I just don’t know it. I like creating stuff that I’m familiar with that I have something to say about. People ask me, “Why don’t you create around that special episode of that show?” I won’t create around something that I don’t think I have anything to say about and that I don’t think there’s anything to add. Like, I’m either not familiar enough to form an opinion, or I don’t think there’s anything left to say, everything’s wrapped. I use the word “whole”, the piece is very whole. Whether I liked it or not, there’s nothing to add to it.
I was surprised to learn that Lahav also had a secret passion for stop-motion animation:
Lahav: When I studied animation I did some stop-motion. It was awesome. I did some storyboarding for it. There’s a brilliant YouTube series called “The Doctor Puppet.” It’s beautiful. This animator, Alisa Stern, she does short stop-motion in the style of Rankin-Bass. She does Doctor Who homages. She sculpted puppets of all the Doctors and created a show with the 11th Doctor as the main character. It’s beautiful. It’s a cool idea in general because it’s an homage, it’s not really parody, it’s not really fan art. It’s kind of taking the characters and doing something new with it, but also, it’s just charming and beautiful and very much in the style of that.
The reason I mentioned her is because I did a storyboard for one of the episodes. I love it. I think, at the time, there was a bit of a sense that stop-motion was dying, so no one really wanted to go into that. I had a choice: My heart is in stop-motion but I also really like 2D, so 2D is probably the thing that will bring me more work, I’ll go for that. Then, there’s been a revival in the last few years, so now a lot of people are getting back to learning stop-motion. It’s very exciting.
Also exciting for Lahav and fans of her work is what's possibly coming up next:
Lahav: I really want to have my own show, show-running. We are actually working on a series, and when I say “we” I mean me and my co-writer / husband. We’re developing some stuff now that I can’t talk about. We’re really excited about that.
Be sure to check out my previous write-ups out of RTX 2017 provided at the following links:
- ‘Castlevania’ Review: Netflix’s Video Game Adaptation Has Some Serious Bite
- ‘RWBY’: Why You Should Be Watching Rooster Teeth’s Hit Anime Sensation
- Don’t Sleep on ‘Day 5’, a Fresh, Thrilling Take on the Post-Apocalypse
- Animation Legend Fred Seibert on Success, Failure, and Staying Ahead of the Curve
- 6 Animation Studios That Are Pushing the Boundaries of the Industry
