AUSTIN, Texas—Chris Prynoski remembers paper (and, no, that sentiment is not as absurd as it seems). The animation veteran has been in the field for more than two decades now with early stuff so beloved (he directed an episode of Daria and sequences of Beavis and Butthead Do America) that it now comes up in reboot conversation. "We usually get a call every couple years about a Daria reboot, and it never happens," Prynoski tells Ars offstage at the recent RTX Animation festival. "But this time they made an announcement, so perhaps it’s more serious."
Since then, however, both animation at large and Prynoski's role specifically have changed. He now leads perhaps the best studio in the business, Titmouse, which Prynoski also co-founded alongside his wife Shannon back in 2000. The company works on seemingly everything: kids' shows (Niko and the Sword of Light), cult classics (Metalocalypse), high-profile reboots (TMNT), video games, ads, virtual reality, music videos, movies, and generally just the hottest cartoons at any given moment (Netflix's Big Mouth anyone? Season two starts in October). No one working with him starts with paper these days.
"The fundamentals of animation haven't changed a lot. When I started, you were drawing on pieces of paper; people were using computers to scan but colored in ink and paint," Prynoski says. "Before my time, it was the big ol' Oxberry cameras. But it pretty quickly got taken over by computers. Now, hardly anybody uses pieces of paper... Anything we do starts on [Wacom] Cintiqs, which are basically big computer screens you can draw on. But the main thing is still that artistic skill you have to develop—whether it's on a piece of paper or computer screen—which has stayed pretty similar."
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