It’s a big week for Donick Cary as the first season of his animated series Lil’ Bush debuts on DVD and season two kicks off on Comedy Central. Having written for The Simpsons and The Late Show with David Letterman, Cary turned his attention to politics, portraying the Bush administration and other beltway insiders as precocious little kids. The mobile series took off and spawned a half-hour television series that sees new episodes taking aim at presidential hopefuls Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, as well as former runners John Edwards, Dennis Kucinich, Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson. And though poking fun at politicians is like shooting fish in a barrel these days, he’s managed to take his satirical eye off of Washington long enough to chat with us about the show, his career and other matters of state.
Animation Magazine Online: How did you get into the animation biz?
Donick Cary: The Simpsons was the first place I had really worked with animation at all. I had been at Letterman for six years and went to Simpsons for five seasons. I sort of learned how to be a writer at Letterman, where every day you’re cranking out material and burn through stuff so quickly. While th payoff was immediate and great, the stress level was very high. Suddenly I was at The Simpsons and it was like, ‘Oh, we can tweak this joke for nine months.’ It was great. After I left The Simpsons, I did a few sitcoms, which were sort of in between the two [modes of working], and I started to realize that you have so much more control with animation. You control the lighting, how the props are going to look and how the actors are going to deliver their lines, and you can step back and get the timing right on something. There’s nothing left to chance. I wanted to experiment with that more.
The way Lil’ Bush came about was I started doing some stuff outside the network arena, doing stuff on cell phones where they’re very much about ‘You make an idea, figure out how to get it made and we’ll help you pay for it.’ A good friend of mine from elementary school had been doing some software and web design in Bulgaria’he’s launched a couple of start-up companies there. We got talking about animation and he said, ‘Wow, I have a bunch of great designers and people who worked for me. If you ever want to try something over in Bulgaria, let’s just try to do it.’ Everything was lining up perfectly so I decided to try a cell phone show, very low-risk, and hired a team of Bulgarians, sort of cutting out the middle man in the process by going directly to an outsource studio [Sugar Shack Animation]. It worked out and when it went to Comedy Central it was like, ‘Wow, we’d better hire some more Bulgarians. We have about 110 over there now. It’s primarily done in Bulgaria, but now that we’ve been doing a full season we’ve hired a bare-bones team of board artists and Flash guys here to set things up and clean it up when it comes back.
AMO: Did the look of the animation change much from the cell phone series to the television show?
DC: A little bit. When we made it for cell phones, the idea was to do it as quick and as cheap as possible. You’re also delivering it for a small screen, so you want to be on tight shots of [the characters’] faces more so you can hear the jokes and do less big visuals. So there was a little bit of a change in expanding the show and making it for a bigger screen where you can have more acting and play out stuff in wide shots.
The first season at Comedy Central was also fast and cheap, but with a lot more animation. The idea was to convert to a completely Flash setup, where we could start building up the library as we made them and it would get easier and easier. What happened with the first six episodes, though, was there was no time to do that, so the bigger change, visually, comes between the first season and the second season. We had six weeks of down time to kind of reset, make a Flash asset library and build from there.
AMO: What will viewers notice that’s different in the second season?
DC: I think mostly animators will notice a little bit of this and that. It gets cleaner, the models are more consistent and the acting is a little better. I don’t think the home viewer who is watching South Park and then this show afterward is going to notice a huge difference in the animation subtleties. One thing we did that people are going to notice more is’in the first season we were doing two 10-minute episodes every half hour, and this season we’re doing full, half-hour episodes, all except one. The stories play out a little longer and, instead of just rushing through the story and hitting all the jokes, it gives us a little time to maybe follow a B story that can be a little sillier or do a flashback to something that may be a little odd. It’s a little less rushed and more in the pace of South Park or something.
AMO: Have you heard from anybody in the Bush camp about the show?
DC: There’s been an interesting sort of blackout from them’I haven’t heard anything. For our DVD commentary tracks, we booked some guest stars to watch the shows with us and comment on them, and one of the people we got to do what was [conservative pundit] Tucker Carlson. I was interested to know if it had made any ripples among conservatives, and he said, ‘Oh yeah, we know about the show,’ but no one’s ‘ I’m guessing that President Bush is a lost cause and they’re not going to waste any breath defending the guy. Time to move on and focus on McCain.
AMO: Speaking of McCain, this season on the this year’s crop of presidential hopefuls. Was it fairly easy to nail those personalities as cartoon characters?
DC: A lot of them have been around for a while. We’ve had years to look at Hillary and she was one of the easiest because we all have an idea who she is. It’s a little harder with Barack Obama, who the country’s just getting to know over the past four months. We’re writing these shows four months in advance, so we know a lot more about Barack now than we did when we were writing these episodes. Another thing that happens when there’s an election is the news changes every day and the characters you care about change every day, so we put a lot of effort into working in Fred Thompson, Rudy Giuliani and all of these guys already out of the race. They’re funny characters. Giuliani is hilarious. As we were developing we thought he’d be the best guy to get in the White House, for us. We could continue the show for four more years easy. We didn’t make any shows all about him, but we sprinkled him and Mit Romney in here and there as sort of funny side characters. We developed Lil’ John Kerry and Lil’ Al Gore last year, and they now feel like characters you want to chime in on stuff every week, even though they’re less involved in Washington politics. We know them and they’ve become little adversaries to these guys.
AMO: Do you have a favorite character? Is one more fun to poke fun at than the others?
DC: I have to say that the weirdest part of this whole experience has been personifying the President, who I certainly don’t agree with and had a lot of animosity toward, as a cartoon character with this crazy ego and crazy brain. You’re suddenly writing for somebody who can do anything at any time, and you start to root for him, like him and feel bad for him. I don’t know if I feel that way about the President yet. The fewer crazy adventures he gets into the better. I have a soft spot for Lil’ Cheney, whom I do the voice for. Getting to play the part of someone who’s just pure evil and base animal instincts is really fun.
AMO: Bush will still be in news for a while longer, but we’re going to have a new president soon enough. What do you think will happen to the show then? Will we see Lil’ Clinton, Lil’ Obama or Lil’ McCain?
DC: What really works about the show is that the Bush family is so dysfunctional and such a sit-com family at the core of this thing. If people are still watching and enjoying the show, we would absolutely try some new version. It could be just all about Washington. I could a version where it’s Barack moving into the White House but the Bushes refuse to leave, so they move into the basement and are still there giving him trouble. If the Clintons move in, they’re great, colorful characters and I’m sure we can do plenty with those guys.
AMO: That begs the question: Is there a candidate you want to win just for the comic implications?
DC: From a Lil’ Bush producer standpoint, the best version would have been Rudy Giuliani makes Dennis Kucinich his running mate and they get into the White House somehow. That would make for the funniest show ever. What’s best for the country and what’s best for the show is a hard thing for me to separate.
Cary is in the process of inking a deal to create several new series for a major cell phone/internet carrier, and wants to become a little studio unto himself, churning out new ideas and entertainment content with different business models. In the meantime, he hopes people tune in for season two of Lil’ Bush, which starts on Thursday, March 13 at 10:30 p.m. on Comedy Central.
