Aug 4, 2023

"Praise Petey" character designer Annalise Hollosi speaks to us through an exclusive clip.

Praise Petey is Freeform's new animated comedy series, half a rom-com and half a cult documentary. The show fits nicely into the ever-growing adult animated landscape and is often away from a crowd that can feel full of copy cats.

The show was created by Anna Drezen, a former Saturday Night Live head writer, and featured Bandera Entertainment's Mike Judge, Greg Daniels, Dustin Davis, and animation-dealing shadow machine Alexander Drezen. He is an executive producer with Cy Barkley, Cory Campodonico and Monica Padric. It is a 20th century TV animation.

In the series, Petey is NYC's "It Girl" and thinks she understands everything. It all changes when her late father puts her in charge of the new utopia of his small-town cult. Cartoon Brew has been given exclusive access to clips from today's new episode "Not-Sad Adult Birthday" and attempts to meet men at Petey's bar have been thwarted.

Also joined by character designer Annalise Hollosy, who spoke to us through the clip and talked about her role on the show, the most fun part of the production done remotely, working from home, graduating from Savannah College of Art and Design, earning a bachelor's degree in animation and now living in Los Angeles. I live in a small business.

How did you get involved in this show and what was your role during the production-

Since I first joined the show, I had established all the protagonists and built the world. Before we started, there was really no pitch bible or anything, so there was a lot to understand. Our art director, Amanda Lake, is about getting everyone around and making sure we're all on the same page, so it took a lot of time and we were working remotely, but it was nice to get to know the crew. Every day, everyone started with a meeting to check in, and then we just got the right to work.

Praise Petey is a character-driven series and must be a dream for a character designer. In such a series, the whole story is driven by characters, not by settings or heavily structured stories-

Whether intended or not, I think how we approached it will certainly change. We were making a decision that we had to support the writer and director's vision for these characters. I was grateful to work on a show that allowed me to define how I wanted to tell a character's story from scratch. Our art director gave us some guidelines about the poses of the characters in general, but we were really given a kind of free rein, first, to experiment and do what we thought was good. I enjoyed it more than you would come to a show that starts with a very specific base. So that we can make the decisions that we believed were right.

It all sounds like a lot of fun, but the Bible and vague guidelines probably don't create any other challenges either. Where did you look for inspiration, and how did you find the aesthetics you ended up with -

Amanda had a kind of mood board of what they were looking for. When I came in, it was thrown at me as a rom-com cult documentary, so we asked "Where can we go with it-" so I think things really kind of tied up when we figured out the main cast. It was like, now we have a base to work from.

What was the most enjoyable thing about this show-

My favorite part is the special poses and expressions of the character, especially the weird angles that the model doesn't usually have, the best challenge is "What would it look like if this character was crying completely out of control-"

In the scene you shared with us today, Petey was the one who was the one who was the one who was the one who was the one who was the one who was the one who was the one who was the one who was the one who was the one who was the one who was the one who was the one who was the one who was the one who was the one who was the one who was the one who was the one who was the one who was the one who was the one who was the one who was the one who was the one who was the one who was the one who I see him interacting with some male characters. When designing these characters, how did you approach that task-

So, for this scene, we call it the Hank Bar, and some of the hunks out there were definitely inspired by people we know in real life or fit in a common trope that we all were familiar with. One of the characters is the "artistic mass" and most of us I went to art school think a lot of artists have this kind of encounter of a guy who is too pretentious for his own benefit. The other 1 is our wounded mass, which felt like a metaphor for such a CW character. We talked a lot about Dixie's mind when he foretold a lot of things and designed his appearance to speak from the side of his mouth.

I said earlier that the production was processed remotely in this show. How did you find the experience and how well do you think it worked-

Yeah, there were only line producers and production assistants in-house. Sometimes I missed seeing people in person, but it would have been good to get breakfast before work or something like that, but it gave us a lot of flexibility, working from home pretty great but it worked well in the long run. There were also artists who were not from Los Angeles. Working on the show allowed us to branch out and bring in people who could not otherwise work on the show.

If you have difficulties working from home - you have had to do something special to keep your work and home life separate-

It was difficult, yes. And I will not say that I became a master of it in any sense. But I tried to balance my computer and spending time away from my computer. I also tried to make time to work on my personal art, but again it was difficult at times as I was quickly returning to my computer. I found it really helpful to have a schedule. These morning meetings established a timeline for the day, but it was also important to take small breaks throughout the day, which I would not allow myself to be in the computer room. You might eat a snack or go outside for a while. It was hard at the beginning of production, but in the end I felt like I was caught up in the shaking of things.