It’s been over two and half years since we were first introduced to Triangle, Circle and Square, the delightful stop-motion stars of Apple TV+’s Emmy- and Annie Award-winning show Shape Island. This week, fans of the show are treated to the second season of this charming series, created by authors Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen and the wonderful team of animators at L.A.’s award-winning Bix Pix Entertainment (Tumble Leaf). The second season of the show (10 episodes), features the voices of Yvette Nicole Brown as the narrator, Harvey Guillen as Square, Scott Adsit as Triangle and Gideon Adlon as Circle. Kelli Bixler and Drew Hodges also serve as executive producers. Ryan Pequin is co-exec producer and head writer of the show.
The new season finds our trio of geometrical friends searching for answers and learning to live with each other’s differences and idiosyncrasies while enjoying life on their beautiful island. We had the great pleasure of chatting with Barnett and Klassen again, and here’s what they had to say about the second season of their show:
Animag: It’s great to have your wonderful show back! You must both be very happy that Apple TV+ is finally streaming the new episodes after many months.
Jon Klassen: Yes, it’s been fun to rediscover it in a way because it has been a minute. We made the first two seasons very close together. I think the line between the production of the first and second season was a bit blurry, although when we watch the second season we do see an evolution, where I think getting better. There’s a definite shift; you notice things that try in the second season that we didn’t in the first
Mac Barnett: We kicked off the writing for season one the same week that my newly born son came home from the hospital. So, you are talking about the story of this production who is already terrible with dates. So this I guess I can say that the second season started around the first time he got a cold!
Jon: Mac’s priorities were so backwards during that! It was if he couldn’t dedicate himself to the work nearly enough it! As if he was distracted by something.
Mac: Right, and I was like, “I just got to take care of my baby!” and John was like “Yeah…the show, right?” and I said, “No, my baby!” My son is actually four now. He’s the perfect audience for our show. Shape Island is the only show I let him watch!
Now you can spill the beans on the second season. What do you love about these new batch of ten episodes?
Mac: I hope that the second season feels as if you’re hanging out with old friends again. You get to see this very familiar crew that we’re very fond of. It’s all the stuff we love about them, but we’re also going to learn new things about them. There are episodes that I’m very proud of. We’re really growing this crew: They are such a well-defined set of personalities, and we’re putting them in even wilder situations this time around.
Jon: I think we were also able to pull some new tricks. It’s almost like Season One was sort of us learning how to ride a bike. I think a lot of our crew already knew how to ride a bike well, but Mac and I were certainly kind of learning it. Now, for Season 2, we know how to tricks on the bike. There are a couple of good jumps and flips off a hill. We landed one that’s really fun.
OK, now we need to more about those fun tricks!
Jon: I’m not sure where this started, but I like to think it started with me, well maybe it didn’t and maybe it did! The truth is that I’m a terrible animator. I took animation in school, but I was bad at it. I always hated actually animating. There was one kind of idea where you give yourself assignments as an animator that aren’t very hard. So we thought of this one thing especially with puppets in stop motion where what if the puppet couldn’t move? What if Triangle stood still for 11 minutes? The premise was that he makes a bet that he can stand still for 11 minutes
Mac: The episode is called “Triangle Stands Still!”
Jon: And we actually do that because technically it’s very funny for people in animation to do something where no one actually moves, but the storyline gave us permission to do that. We had to kind of reverse engineer standing still for 11 minutes.
Mac: We also have an episode where our narrator, Yvette Nicole Brown, who is really fantastic takes over. Watching her record John and I were truly amazed. Every single take sounded so natural, but each one was radically different. I’d never seen anything like that before. She told us when we first started out that she was so happy to be asked to be the narrator because as much work as she had done, she had never been the narrator of the show, and she always wanted to be a narrator.
There’s an episode that is just basically all Nicole narrating the story of this little bug. The main characters aren’t really up to anything in this episode, and the narrator is trying to make an episode out of something that’s not really working. So she just focuses on this little bug. The episode was a challenge our animators and puppet makers right because they had to make us fall in love with a brand new character that you’re only going to hang out with for 11 minutes . It was also an incredibly complex puppet to make too because this is a bug who transforms over the course of the episode.
For Yvette, it just grew out of a moment in season 1 where she just gave us sort of a wild take when the characters were moving from one side to the other side of the island. She said she wanted to give it a nature documentary take, and she did this sort of booming British voice-over But, it was just a terrible British accent. It was so bad that when she finished the take, we all lost our mind. We want our narrator to be one of the characters on the show, so having the narrator try to do this fake British accent like a nature documentarian was just a fun thing to do. So, now we have this whole episode where Nicole is in that mode!
Jon: Exactly. In the second season, we were finding out what our strengths are and using what we have in our toolbox. I think in the first season, we were just so amazed that we had a toolbox! We were just so excited that these things were at our disposal. Then, once the dust kind of settled, we were able to see things more clearly, like oh, Yvette really wants to do that or our animators are really strong at this…let’s play to those strengths. It’s like the mist has parted, and you’re able to make some interesting decisions.
Of course, you were working with the very gifted team at Bix Pix in Burbank, with Kelly Bixler and Drew Hodges.
Jon: We thought, in our naive way, that the puppet fabrication people were going to get this simple favor from us, because all they needed to do was to build a pyramid, sphere and a cube. We thought they were going to love it, but then they came to us just all bloody and tired. They said, “Those were the hardest puppets we’ve ever made!” That was also the case in Season 2. We were trying our best to them simple things that they would enjoy making and animating. Instead, we found out that we gave them the biggest knots to untangle, and they always pulled it off in such fine style. It would land and we would see the results and be like, “Well that wasn’t so hard, Was it?” And they would say, “Yeah, it was!” But honestly, we had tightest crew we could have ever asked for.
Mac: This is a character-driven show. That’s what the writing focuses on: We’re exploring these characters, and not so much about what happens, but how these three characters react to things that are happening. That is where we find the comedy and pathos. That’s the trick to the writing, and it is also why this show works visually. That’s why the work by the team at Bix Pix is so amazing: These puppets are so expressive.
It was so interesting to see how the animators found these connections with the puppets. When we’d get together, they would talk about specific moments, poses or double takes. Very often, it was the cast that they connected with one of these three shapes. That was how a lot of the kids and the adults who watch the show feel as well. Are you a triangle, square or a circle? The animators would find these moments in the performances that felt so spontaneous, but of course, were labored over. It was the most beautiful thing to watch, because this show only works if these characters are dialed in and authentic and expressing their particular point of view. That happened at every step from writing to animation, the voices, everything all the way up on the screen.
Do we know if our favorite shapes are getting new seasons? What are you working on now?
Jon: We don’t know Maybe if we win more awards. Once the 14 Emmys come back, maybe we’ll have a better idea what’s ahead! Mac and I continue to work on books. We always have three or four books on our desks at any given time. But I have to admit, this was a very addictive process. I started in animation, and Mac works a lot in film and TV too. There’ something very satisfying about seeing these characters walking around that is pretty satisfying, so we definitely have a taste for it.
Mac: By the way, I’ve been named the national ambassador for Young People’s Literature, so you’re talking to a dignitary right now! It’s sort of like being the poet laureate of children’s books, so I am traveling a lot this year and next, advocating for children’s books. But I don’t want to make this seem like it’s just about me. John is also a member of the Order of Canada which is which is basically a Canadian Knight: That’s in recognition of his contributions to children’s literature. I believe that we are the only cartoon ever created by an ambassador and a knight.
Jon: I’m very honored. However, I do think that Henry Kissinger did direct an episode of the Ninja Turtles.
Animag: That must have been the most boring episode of that show!
Final words: What do you hope the second season achieves?
Jon: What we’re hoping is that Shape Island maintains the audience’s enthusiasm for things that are handmade and tactile and full of happy accidents. We loved our crew that special spirit of it. Stop-motion people and all of us love that too. So, amongst all of the stuff that’s happening in the animation world, which seems to be hit by a tornado right now, we’re hoping that at least, there’s a spot on the shelf for shows that are made and feel like this one. It’s a wild time right now, but we’re going to keep hoping that good ideas and good execution win the day.
Mac: When it comes to children’s animation, the big question is what do you want your kids to watch and what kinds of stories do you want them to learn from? Don’t you want brilliant, passionate people who care about making the best possible shows and movies? You want people who are skilled and trained and put their hearts and backs into making the best possible thing to put on.
Watch an exclusive clip from the show below:
And here’s the trailer for Season 2!
All eight episodes of Shape Island’s Season 2 will premiere on Apple TV+ on Friday, Aug. 29.
