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Animated TV series don’t often receive lavish ‘art of’ book treatment, but Adventure Time is unlike your average TV show. Next Tuesday, October 14, Abrams will release the massive 352-page Adventure Time: The Art of Ooo, documenting the show’s visual and creative process. The book was authored and designed by Cartoon Brew’s very own Chris McDonnell, who is the editor of our popular Artist of the Day section. The following images represent a small sample of the 500-plus images that will be included in the book. Click to enlarge and read the captions. Pre-order Adventure Time: The Art of Ooo on Amazon for $24.92. (All images TM and © 2014 Cartoon Network.)

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There's a startling revelation in a new "Rolling Stone" piece about Cartoon Network's hit series "Adventure Time": creator Pen Ward hasn't been running his show since sometime during season 5.

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There’s too much post-apocalyptic fiction around, in books and movies, TV and games. I’d toss the lot into a dumpster now, except for "Adventure Time."

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Have you watched Adventure Time? Maybe you have seen the comic or the graphic novel or some of the merchandise. It's a phenomenon, not least because of the age range it seems to appeal to. It is a show on the Cartoon Network, which the network claims tops its ratings and is watched by 2 million 2–11 year old boys – but I know many older kids, including students, who watch it avidly too.



When I first saw it I must admit I was surprised that something as violent, surreal and bizarre – and sometimes with such horrific and sexual content – was being aired for young children. It has a PG rating but that does nothing to keep it from young children's impressionable brains.

Here's a list of extreme stuff you can find in it. It includes: "Lots of references to sex, ejaculation, viagra, sex-positions, sexual remarks and humor." And here's a spoof web page parodying the reaction of the Christian right.

Disney it is not.

I think it's brilliant (but then I have a degree in Dada and Surrealism), and its freshness is perhaps partly because it's not written in the conventional sense (by a writer or writer team) but produced by artists using storyboards that are then developed by a team, even going so far as deliberately to employ surrealist techniques such as the Exquisite Corpse game in order to come up with ideas. It's also hand-drawn, each 11 minute episode taking 8–9 months to make.

Now: "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?" This was the line that introduced the American radio show The Shadow in the 1930s (it later became a film, comic book series, etc etc). One answer is (besides the eponymous detective) – that children do. Children are far more preoccupied with questions about what adults call the dark side of human nature than many adults give them credit for. The best children's writers know this.

Adventure Time is therefore in the same ballpark as Where the Wild Things Are...


 ... the kind that were explored by Angela Carter in her novels about growing up such as the Magic Toyshop and the Company of Wolves...


...stories where grandmothers turning to carnivorous beasts, the bedroom is populated by monsters, and the house next door contains versions of your own parents but with buttons for eyes (thanks, Neil)...



But it's also in the same ballpark as beautiful wonder-filled Hayao Miyazaki films such as My Neighbour Totoro. 



There is a genuine sense of beauty, spirituality and awe in many of Adventure Time's episodes or scenes, that is also shared by children who are viewing the world for the first time. It's as if the creators have been able to access their own infantile selves to identify with the way that children see the world. 


My reference to The Shadow was chosen for another reason: the parts of the personality satisfied in its fans by Adventure Time and these other stories can be seen as parts of the 'shadow self', as described by the poet Robert Bly in his A Little Book on the Human Shadow.

The Jungian theory of the human shadow, itself part-derived from myths and old stories, is that babies and young children have what Bly calls a 360° personality. But much of this compass of human potential is socialised out of their behaviour during their upbringing. By the time they are around 20 years old just a slice remains. This is the socialised personality that becomes fixed as an adult.

The remaining portion is buried – the shadow – but it emerges in odd ways: our obsessions, the imaginary traits we project onto situations and other people, particularly our partners, the things we are frightened of, particularly in ourselves.

Bly says that after the age of 40 or so – the age of the midlife crisis – adults often start to unpack their shadow. Their reaction to this process determines the rest of the course of their lives. 

The shadow is not bad, nor evil. Those are labels that adults put onto things. The shadow contains just what was suppressed, punished or ignored during the socialisation or upbringing process, and depends on the values held by the parents and the culture they belong too. 

And this, I think, is why Adventure Time appeals to young adults as well as children. Young adults are struggling with those aspects of themselves which adults want to repress. In young adults there is a sense of nostalgia for their childhood self, that remains as a fading echo before the responsibilities of adulthood unkindly snuff it out altogether and they forget forever what being a child is like. They know this is going to happen, they regret it and they try to cling on to its last vestiges as long as possible.

The shadow is important, vital, necessary, and it is dangerous to repress it or ignore it. The makers of Adventure Time, and the Cartoon Network that commissions it, cannot be unaware of this. It is a liminal gate to the subconscious, the place where creativity thrives.


If I seem to be making rather grand claims for what is after all a children's cartoon I make no apologies. We all, as writers, are gatekeepers to this realm, aren't we? And each of us, in our own unique way, delves beyond the gate to do our work.

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How did Aymeric Kevin and his team manage to produce so many quality backgrounds on such a short schedule? Aymeric speaks to Cartoon Brew about the background art of "Ping Pong."

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The nominations for the 66th annual Primetime Emmy Awards were announced this morning, and the big animation news isn't who was nominated, but who wasn't: "The Simpsons"

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Next month, Boom offers a mini series called ADVENTURE TIME: BANANA GUARD ACADEMY, written by Kent Osborne, the head writer of the Adventure Time show, and drawn by Mad Rupert.

It turns out that there is a lot to being a Banana Guard—but being a Banana is not mandatory. This crazy adventure follows Root Beer Guy as he starts his search for new recruits among Ooo’s citizens. Only the best will do in his quest to protect the Candy Kingdom!

And of course there are some variant covers as well:

 Aimee Fleck (LUMBERJANES)

 Michele Petrucci,

And  retailer incentive cover by Natalie Hall

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Well, to be fair, the sixth season debuted last night, so a big media push is only natural. Emily Nussbaum did the honors for The New Yorker, citing “a hero who fights villains, with fun violence, the occasional fart joke, and a slight edge of Bushwick cool-kid hipness.” They even got creator Pendleton Ward to do an illo for the piece (left). Lev Grossman took it on for Time Magazine, but now Time is behind a paywall, so you’ll just have to imagine what it says.

Ben Towle did read the piece and found a passage to give pause:

From this week's TIME article on Adventure Time. As a cartoonist, I'm never sure how to take this kinda thing. pic.twitter.com/awA3ohbbpS

— Ben Towle (@ben_towle) April 20, 2014

Cartooning and tromboning — definitely a thing now.

Speaking of season six, here’s a preview of an episode directed by Masaaki Yuasa, a Japanese animator known for Mind Game, Kick-Heart, and the anime based on Taiyo Matsumoto’s Ping Pong.

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The most fascinating bit of news out of WonderCon last weekend? Japanese director Masaaki Yuasa ("Mind Game") has storyboarded and directed an upcoming episode of "Adventure Time."

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This week's issue of "The New Yorker" does something that they rarely ever do: review an animated TV series. The show they elected to discuss is "Adventure Time."

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The Academy of Television Arts & Sciences has announced the juried winners for the 65th Emmy Awards. Among the winners are six artists for Outstanding Individual Achievement In Animation. The Creative Arts Emmy Awards will be presented in a ceremony on Sunday, September 15, and the show will be televised on September 21st on FXX (a spinoff-network of FX). Congrats to the winners!

• Adventure Time “Puhoy”
  Cartoon Network/Cartoon Network Studios
  Andy Ristaino, Character Design

Disney Mickey Mouse “Croissant de Triomphe”
Disney.com/Disney Television Animation
Jenny Gase-Baker, Background Paint

Disney Mickey Mouse “Croissant de Triomphe”
Disney.com/Disney Television Animation
Joseph Holt, Art Direction

Disney TRON: Uprising “The Stranger”
Disney XD/Disney Television Animation
Alberto Mielgo, Art Direction

Dragons: Riders of Berk “We Are Family (Part 2)”
Cartoon Network/DreamWorks Animation
Andy Bialk, Character Design

The Simpsons “Treehouse Of Horror XXIII”
FOX/Gracie Films in association with 20th Century Fox Television
Paul Wee, Character Animation

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The Academy of Television Arts & Sciences has announced the juried winners for the 65th Emmy Awards. Among the winners are six artists for Outstanding Individual Achievement In Animation. The Creative Arts Emmy Awards will be presented in a ceremony on Sunday, September 15, and the show will be televised on September 21st on FXX (a spinoff-network of FX). Congrats to the winners!

• Adventure Time “Puhoy”
  Cartoon Network/Cartoon Network Studios
  Andy Ristaino, Character Design

Disney Mickey Mouse “Croissant de Triomphe”
Disney.com/Disney Television Animation
Jenny Gase-Baker, Background Paint

Disney Mickey Mouse “Croissant de Triomphe”
Disney.com/Disney Television Animation
Joseph Holt, Art Direction

Disney TRON: Uprising “The Stranger”
Disney XD/Disney Television Animation
Alberto Mielgo, Art Direction

Dragons: Riders of Berk “We Are Family (Part 2)”
Cartoon Network/DreamWorks Animation
Andy Bialk, Character Design

The Simpsons “Treehouse Of Horror XXIII”
FOX/Gracie Films in association with 20th Century Fox Television
Paul Wee, Character Animation

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Matthew Houston’s cartooning overflows with experimental and original ideas in form and content. Put another way, it overflows with personality.

Although he is based in Columbus, Ohio, the strength of his work has established a connection with Pen Ward’s Adventure Time staff, and Matthew has remotely contributed freelance designs during recent production of the show.

See more of Matthew’s work on his Tumblr, blog, portfolio and store.

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Matthew Houston’s cartooning overflows with experimental and original ideas in form and content. Put another way, it overflows with personality.

Although he is based in Columbus, Ohio, the strength of his work has established a connection with Pen Ward’s Adventure Time staff, and Matthew has remotely contributed freelance designs during recent production of the show.

See more of Matthew’s work on his Tumblr, blog, portfolio and store.

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Today, La Luz de Jesus Gallery (4633 Hollywood Blvd) will host the Adventure Time Super Event, celebrating the release of The Adventure Time Encyclopaedia.

Written by Martin Olson (the voice of Lord of Evil on the series), designed by Sean Tejaratchi, and featuring original illustrations from cartoonists Renee French, Tony Millionaire, Celeste Moreno, Aisleen Romano, and Mahendra Singh, the book is the definitive guide to the who’s who and what’s what in the Land of Ooo.

This afternoon (August 3rd), join show creator Pendleton Ward, as well as Martin and Olivia Olson, Tony Millionaire, and Tom Kenny for music and snacks from 3-10 PM. For more details, visit the La Luz de Jesus website.

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Just announced at San Diego Comic-Con: Finn and Jake will be featured on an Adventure Time float at this year’s Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Their helium-filled adventure will debut on Thursday, November 28th, 2013. Click on the image below to see a closer view of what it will look like:

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Emily Carroll graduated from Sheridan’s classical animation program before moving to Vancouver where she has since worked on animation productions and as a comic artist and illustrator.

Emily experiments with online comics storytelling such as Margot’s Room, an interactive clickable comic that requires the reader to explore panels to reveal the story.

Above is an alternate Adventure Time comic cover that Emily painted.

Emily also organizes the fan art she draws. Her Dune art is here and video game related pieces here.

Visit Emily’s portfolio and blog for more.

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Michelle Xin is an artist in Burbank who works as a character designer on Adventure Time.

Michelle creates all sorts of characters in her sketchbook and personal work, including this comic featuring Butt Cat.

See more of Michelle’s work on her blog.

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Charmaine Verhagen is into cartoons deep. For evidence, check her cartoon arm (in progress).

Recently, Charmaine successfully took a design test to be able to contribute work to her favorite Cartoon Network show. Below is one of her drawings from the test, and here is the post with more of her studies and preparation for it. After seeing those drawings, you’ll be able to guess which show if you haven’t already figured it out.

Below is Charmaine’s interpretation of the mutant Robin McConnell character that has become the mascot of the Inkstuds radio show/podcast, hosted by Robin McConnell. Click over there for an immense backlog of interviews with comics creators to keep you busy listening for weeks.

For more of Charmaine’s sketches and drawing work, visit her blog.

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Eleanor Davis is an artist in Georgia who creates comics and illustrations.

Above is an alternate cover that Eleanor illustrated for an Adventure Time comic book.

Eleanor has a portfolio, blog and a sketch blog which are full of funny, informal drawings, comics and observations.

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Rhizome.org published a great interview with David OReilly about his recent Adventure Time episode “A Glitch is a Glitch” and the challenges of making convincing styistic glitch:

“In general, doing stylistic glitch is easy compared to doing good character animation. Mixing the two gets very tricky though. One of the hardest things was corrupting the scene near the end of the entire broadcast so that the earlier clip is superimposed over Finn & Jake to give them an idea (i.e., using glitch as a kind of thought bubble). It was easy to storyboard that idea, but making it work properly took a lot of grind…It was all generated from ‘real’ glitches—but since everything is run through compositing software and sort of controlled you could also say it was all fake. The glitches needed to begin locally—inside objects—then spread out until they became part of the scene itself. The local stuff was done by generating a ton of sprites that had random pixels move outwardly to create the colorful flourishes we associate with video compression. These had a decent amount of control—a blob of glitchy stuff could move around a scene, for example. Once the scenes were fully animated and rendered the global full-frame glitches were done. There was some jpeg corruption added on top of the battle scene at the end.”

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Michael DeForge produces a lot of work. He contributes designs and storyboards to Adventure Time and produces comics and illustrations regularly. His comic Ant Comic is being collected and published by Drawn and Quarterly, and was recently reviewed on The Comics Journal.

Michael is largely a digital artist, drawing from sketch to final stages entirely on the computer. His letter forms and title designs are as unique and varied as the strange characters that inhabit his comics. He has a blog and Tumblr with lots of work to view.

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The Klik! Animation Festival begins tomorrow in Amsterdam and continues through the weekend.

The quirky animation gathering has grown quickly in its first five years of existence. This year’s Klik! includes a full slate of competition screenings, special screenings ranging William Kentridge to Adventure Time, and a focus on the theme of violence in animation. The latter thematic emphasis is particularly intriguing, with programs related to “cartoon violence,” “serious violence,” and “disturbing violence;” screenings of the features The Suicide Shop and Watership Down; and a half-day symposium on violence with a line-up of speakers that include filmmakers, scholars, and psychologists.

And if all that animation isn’t enough, the festival will take place in the impressively futuristic EYE Film Institute, which opened earlier this year. I visited the waterfront Institute last summer, and it’s a perfectly inspiring space to hold an animation festival.

Below is Klik’s 2012 festival leader, directed by Lukas Krepel, Patrick Schoenmaker, and Joost Lieuwma:

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The winners of the 2012 Ottawa International Animation Festival were announced earlier tonight at the National Arts Center in Ottawa. The top prize for short film went to Dutch filmmaker Hisko Hulsing for his short Junkyard. The animated feature prize went to the Spanish feature Arrugas (Wrinkles) directed by Ignacio Ferreras. It’s Such a Beautiful Day by Don Hertzfeldt picked up the audience prize.

I Am Tom Moody by Ainslie Henderson picked up two awards, including the grand prize for best student animation. Two films in this year’s Cartoon Brew Student Animation Festival were also recognized: Kyle Mowat’s Ballpit won best graduate animation and Noam Sussman’s Gum won the Canadian student animation award.

The complete list of winners is below:

Nelvana GRAND PRIZE for Best Independent Short Animation
Junkyard directed by Hisko Hulsing, Netherlands

GRAND PRIZE for Best Animated Feature
Arrugas (Wrinkles) directed by Ignacio Ferreras, Spain

Walt Disney GRAND PRIZE for Best Student Animation
I Am Tom Moody directed by Ainslie Henderson, Edinburgh College of Art, UK

GRAND PRIZE for Best Commissioned Animation
Primus “Lee Van Cleef” by Chris Smith, USA

Best Animation School Showreel
Supinfocom (France)

BEST Narrative Short
A Morning Stroll by Grant Orchard, STUDIO AKA, USA

BEST Experimental/Abstract Animation
Rivière au Tonnerre directed by Pierre Hébert, Canada

Adobe Prize for BEST High School Animation
The Bean by Hae Jin Jung, Gyeonggi Art High School, South Korea

Honourable Mention:
La Soif Du Monde (Thirsty Frog) by a Collective: 12 Children, Camera-etc, Belgium

BEST Undergraduate Animation
Reizwäsche by Jelena Walf & Viktor Stickel, Germany

BEST Graduate Animation
Ballpit directed by Kyle Mowat, Sheridan College, Canada

BEST Promotional Animation
Red Bull ‘Music Academy World Tour’ by Pete Candeland, Passion Pictures, UK

BEST Music Video
The First Time I Ran Away by Joel Trussell, USA

BEST Television Animation for Adults
Portlandia: “Zero Rats” by Rob Shaw, USA

BEST Short Animation Made for Children
Beethoven’s Wig directed by Alex Hawley & Denny Silverthorne, Canada

Honourable Mentions:
Au Coeur de L’Hiver directed by Isabelle Favez, Switzerland
Why do we Put up with Them? directed by David Chai, USA

BEST Television Animation Made for Children
Regular Show: “Eggscellent” by JC Quintel, Cartoon Network

Honourable Mention:
Adventure Time: “Jake vs. Me-Mow” by Pendleton Ward, Cartoon Network, USA

The National Film Board of Canada PUBLIC PRIZE
It’s Such a Beautiful Day directed by Don Hertzfeldt, USA

Canadian Film Institute Award for BEST Canadian Animation
Nightingales in December directed by Theodore Ushev, Canada

Honourable Mentions
Ballpit directed by Kyle Mowat, Sheridan College, Canada
MacPherson directed by Martine Chartrand, National Film Board of Canada, Canada

BEST Canadian Student Animation Award
Gum by Noam Sussman, Sheridan College, Canadaa

Honourable Mentions
Ballpit by Kyle Mowat, Sheridan College, Canada
Tengri by Alisi Telengut, Concordia University, Canada

The Ottawa Media Jury Award
For the best short competition film, as deemed by the local Ottawa Media, consisting of:

-Peter Simpson (Ottawa Citizen)
-Sandra Abma (CBC)
-Fateema Sayani (Ottawa Magazine)
-Denis Armstrong (Ottawa Sun)

I Am Tom Moody by Ainslie Henderson, Edinburgh College of Art, UK

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Kid President asks the tough questions that we all want to know.

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Cartoon Brew | Permalink | No comment | Post tags: Adventure Time, Kid President, Pen Ward, Pendleton Ward

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