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And Bob's working title was Alberto's Alfredo.

At that point, you have a script that is entirely too long for a 22-minute TV show. So another week gets spent getting it down to a reasonable size, and from there it goes to the network for notes, such as highlighting jokes they feel are too risque and suggesting that Bob's five-minute speech on the benefits of peeing in the shower be cut from the third act. Then the script gets read by the actors in front of the writers, animators, directors, and showrunners, all of whom give more notes. So, already a typical episode involves more notes than most of us took through our entire academic careers, although these notes actually get used for something.

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Then, finally, all the actors record their lines. Those lines get edited and cut into an audio play, basically like an episode of an old-timey radio program without any sound effects. Then the producers meet with the animators and decide how they want each scene to look. That leads to an animatic, which looks a little like a flipbook, only much more expensive:



Also known as the "Fuck it, have the intern do it" phase.

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Then, after yet another round of fucking notes, it's shipped off to Korea to get fully animated and colored. There, dozens of animators grind out tens of thousands of drawings. Other than the wages being roughly a third of what American animators make it's not nearly as sweatshoppy as it sounds (although we can't speak to the quality of the North Korean animation studios that helped bring you The Lion King).