The Answer - Earliest concepts

We were sitting in the writers room breaking the story for The Answer. The story became more and more fairytale like, and I recall Rebecca coming up with the idea that the episode could look like a story book. I did these quick roughs in marker which eventually became the foundation for the look of “The Answer”. I did these on the spot while we were still figuring out the story, so the events in these drawings don’t specifically line up to anything in the final… but I guess some of the concepts ended up getting used.

After seeing them, Rebecca brought up the works of Lotte Reineger, the german animator. This fit perfectly, we had both studied The Adventures of Prince Achmed and her other films in college and Lotte Reineger is a huge inspiration. Not only are her films hauntingly beautiful, she created the first ever animated feature film and the first multi-plane camera way before Walt Disney did. She’s an unsung animation pioneer.

I originally thought the whole thing would be in silhouette but we allowed the main characters to have interior detail with limited palettes. I love limited palettes!!! Rebecca oversaw the resulting design process with our art director Jasmin Lai and I really think it came together great. In the final episode, the Shadow Puppet section is boarded by Lamar Abrams and he completely made the whole thing work which was not an easy feat. There’s some really inventive stuff in there.