Can you tell me more about your time as an undergraduate? Were you working on the side?
One of my favorite things about going to SVA was that it was in the city, and I would stay over the summer. My second summer, I just looked up animation studios in New York and cold-called every single one, and I eventually got a job at a small studio doing commercials, interstitials, slot-machine animation. I just wanted to do it, no matter what, and they were still working on paper, which was awesome. So I basically just was freelancing, interning, knocking on any door I could, taking every single opportunity that came across. Eventually I got into television animation, working at, it's a defunct studio now but they were called World Leaders Entertainment, they used to be called Noodlesoup, and they made the show The Venture Bros. I interned there and became the animation director on that show. I kept working there after college, and I heard about this show Adventure Time that was starting at Cartoon Network, which I thought was amazing. I remember showing the pilot to a bunch of people who I worked with and they were like, "What is this?" And I was like, "It's going to be the future, don't worry about it." And eventually I took a test to work for that show, to be a storyboard artist, and I moved out to Los Angeles. To a current student or someone just starting out in animation, a career like yours might seem unattainable. What do you say when an aspiring animator asks for your advice?
If you have an idea, just do your idea. Don't wait for someone to give you permission to make it. The people I see who actually succeed, they can't stop making things, they can't stop drawing. If you're the kind of person where an industry position is the end goal ... the people I see who are like that, when they get that job, the drive bottoms out. Even while I was at SVA, I was writing my own comics on the side, I was making short films, my friends and I were coming up with ideas and pitching them to each other. And we were doing this for the love of creating something. Every day as I'm making this show, I'm relying on knowledge that I got from making my own things by myself. A lot of the characters and stories and animation techniques that I use are things that I had experimented with on my own. Also, if an executive sits down with you and says, "Can you make a show?" You can just sit back in your chair and say, "Well, look at this. I've made so many things already. I know how to make stuff. I'm going to keep making things whether you give me the money to do it or not." That is so much more attractive than someone who's like, "Well, I've never made anything, this is my first idea and I don't know what I'm doing." [Laughs.] You want to be a person who knows what they’re doing. I'm so jealous of kids who are in elementary school and middle school and high school right now. Because when I was a kid, I didn't have Flash, I didn't have the ability to create animation on my desktop the way students do now. There's no excuse not to be making your own stuff.

The animator and show-runner talks about his original series and the magic of cartoons

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