Oct 26, 2017

Cartoon-S Cartoon: Phil Lamar and Carl Jones in the new series "Jelly" of adult swimming.

Among Boondocks, Samurai Jack and other popular series, producer Carl Jones and actor Phil LaMarr have helped bring the legendary animation to life for years. Do not call them legends.

"Every time anyone says a legend, I start checking my hips."Prolific Lamar, who is the voice of Samurai Jack himself, is the new series of Jellies, Adult Swim hip-hop artist Tyler The Creator's webcartoon

"The protagonist, Cornell, is now black," comic strip creator Aaron In McGruder and Woke newspaper comics, Boondocks, the acclaimed and controversial Peabody Award-winning Animesi "Original [Jelly], Cornell was white." And I'm not 100% sure why he was white in the first place.

Jones describes jelly as an overtly "comic comic" with a keen focus on rolling jokes rather than social commentary. A 15-minute, late-night comedy about a teenager voiced by lamarr in the wake of a crisis of identity after being adopted by an anthropomorphic jellyfish, Set

But the Jelly, which premiered last Sunday, created a program of every complexion without fear of complete erasure, as LaMarr pointed out. I talked to LaMarr and self-proclaimed Cartoon Brew fan Jones about the evolution of legendary and ephemeral comics and why animation is the most collaborative art form of entertainment, even when time and money are scarce.

Cartoon Brew: Curl, you're saying that creating an animation is like forcing a triangle into a circle.

Carl Jones: I have experience growing up with broke and trying to find ways to spend money that you don't have - and that's when you get the budget, you get the schedule, and neither of them agree with your vision for the show. So animation takes economic skills to get what you want on the screen with limited resources. True, this is probably true for any network, because animation is a tough medium. It has so many components. It starts with the idea that, once sent down the assembly line, you immediately realize you didn't have enough time or resources to fully deliver. This was the case for the show I worked on, including jelly.

Phil LaMarr: From a performance perspective, we're just 1 component of that pipeline and unfortunately we don't interact that much with other components. Sometimes you'll see storyboards and rough animations. But I come to record and after six months [re-record] comes back to the line [for re-shooting of the animation], so many things that need to go wrong and correct You can go back to the square one from any particular point.

But I also think animation is only the most collaborative part of show business, because there are so many people working together on it. Someone will dress up the set, and someone will create a wardrobe. But in the animation, there are people who are drawing walls, and people who are drawing heads. It sometimes takes hundreds of people to make every second and they all have to be good ones.

Jelly made by Augenblick Studios is being broadcast on Adult Swim, a network that has expanded the market for existing and new animations, especially mature cartoons...

Phil LaMarr: In terms of tone, Adult Swim is doing things that others don't touch. Animation can be very expensive, but you can still make a cartoon and afford it. As I said, animation takes hundreds of people to make every second; You may not be able to move a character without costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. It is always difficult to think creatively and practically at the same time. Adult swimming is really good at it.

Carl Jones: In addition to what Phil is saying, we try not to create or write in a vacuum. The best thing is to put everything in the writing room, put what you want to see in the script, and then scale back. It's like what we're doing. By the time the show reaches storyboard and design, it's still time to collaborate with the director to find more ways to serve comedy, because at the end of the day, that's really what it is. I'm a big fan of animation like everyone else, so visuals are very important, but you need to support comedy. That's what comes first. If we have to take a shortcut to ensure that what we see is what we want to say, that's what we have to do.

It's like the jelly case. It's a joke, come to you...

Carl Jones: It's a completely different world, other than the Boondocks, which were limited to some extent. We rooted the show in reality because many of the points we wanted to go home were not always interesting. Sometimes, they weren't designed to make you laugh, but to make you feel other emotions, you know what I mean - if we wanted to make a serious point, Boondocks' style helped viewers take it more seriously. But with jelly, we have a wider universe where anything is possible. Jelly is a cartoon cartoon. In terms of tone, it's a completely different baseball game.

The Jellies was a webcartoon for Tyler The Creator's Golf Media app, so how did you adapt it to adult swimming-

Carl Jones: Well, the main character Cornell is black now. In the original series, Cornell was white. And I'm not 100% sure why he was white in the first place.

Phil LaMarr: I think it's because his app was named Golf Media. [Laughter]

Carl Jones: Tyler is known for breaking stereotypes and boundaries, so that might be the case. For me, that was the most important difference. We wanted to have as many episodes as possible, so we added a lot of characters and put a little more population into the world. We wanted to set the stage. But the biggest difference is that the main character is black.

Thanks, Gentlemen, it is honored to talk to the legends of Boondocks, Samurai Jack, and more.

Phil LaMarr: Every time someone says a legend, I start checking my hips.

Carl Jones: I can't even accept it. I appreciate it, but there is so much great work done there. I grew up watching Warner Bros. And Rooney Tunes, Flintstones, Jetsons, all that classic stuff. I consider hanna-Barbera to be legendary. If I could say this, I just thought at the time with Boondocks we were doing nigga shit. [Laughs] We've never really seen Boondocks as anything other than the shit we thought was funny, but to this day I'm still amazed at how well it was received.

Phil LaMarr: It's the same here. I love that people are still watching my work, but you have to remember, Scott: I'm old, I'm old, I'm old, I'm old, I'm old, I'm old, I'm old, I'm old, I'm old, I'm old, I'm old, I'm old, I'm old, I'm old, I'm old, I'm old, I'm old, I'm old, I'm old, I'm old, I'm old, I'm old, I'm old, And when I was coming, legendary had another bar because there was no internet. Everything was not there and was available. If your stuff didn't get a big hit, it was erased. As they took the tape and put the magnet. (Laughter) If something was canceled, it was gone. But the works that followed, like the Looney Tunes and Hannah Barbera cartoons, were seen by hundreds of millions of people after school.

A lot of the work we've done is not a massive international hit and would have gone unnoticed in the old days. The fact is that today's stuff can stick around long enough to grow audiences. My 16-year-old has been binded to Boondocks this week. When I was 16, it would have been impossible. What I was going to do - ask someone to mail me a copy of the videotape of the show from when my father was a child - no.

Today's children do not know how lucky they have it.

Phil LaMarr: [laughs] What I really like is that they can't know when something was. They said, "You've done so many voices."Man, it has been for over 30 years. I have some downtime if you average it.

I'm working backwards from the future. Decades from now, despite the overexposure of the Internet, we're still talking about how Boondocks and Samurai Jack helped change the animation

Carl Jones: What you just said is great. I never really thought about it that way.

Phil LaMarr: (laughs) I'm looking forward to that story arc of the Confederacy when they're on the subway, but they're making Bundox.

Carl Jones: No comment. [Laughs]