15 Rules to Keep Your Animated Show From Breaking

I became “The Fixer” at DreamWorks Television when I was brought in to finish Dawn of the Croods and get it delivered to Netflix. Or, if it couldn’t be finished, to shut it down. Croods was incredibly far behind schedule, and internally, people didn’t like it. Thirteen episodes were due before Thanksgiving (it was already March), and after 52 iterations there wasn’t an approved pilot animatic and no completed episodes. No one had any idea what to do.

After reviewing all the materials — scripts, models, designs, bible — and watching the existing animatics, I could see why people didn’t like the show. But the scripts and characters were hilarious. Brendan Hay is a comedy genius, but his vision was only on the page, not on the screen.

The show could be fixed, but the intense time constraint meant telling the executives they couldn’t give any more notes. They just had to trust me.

The animatics weren’t connecting with the audience primarily because the comedy in the scripts wasn’t landing. Anyone who’s worked on such shows as The Simpsons or King of the Hill knows you can screw up a great joke for a lot of reasons: poor timing, wrong camera angles, too cutty, too much acting that’s distracting, the joke setup gets moved too far from the punchline because added visual “gags” or physical comedy have been jammed in by the board artists or directors, so by the time you get to the punchline, the setup has been forgotten.

Brendan was inexperienced and up against some strong personalities that saw comedy differently than him. He was right and they were wrong. Once we fixed that and made his and the other writers’ jokes land the way they needed to, the show started to sing. The animatics got funnier, more charming and delightful. As word got around, they slowly began trickling out to the rest of the company as employees snuck through servers to take a peek. Brendan and I knew we were on the right track when executives went from asking to have their names removed from the credits to demanding that they be added on.

Brendan and I fixed that show as a team, because Hollywoodland is collaborative. Seeing it as a “star” system is a common misunderstanding. Leave your ego behind and collaborate. Find people who are better than you at their jobs and set them free with guidance, not control. Don’t be a Lennie and crush the thing you love.

So, what “tricks” did I use to fix Croods, and the others that followed?

1. Start with a good script. Don’t begin the insane process of making a show with a weak script thinking you can fix it later. (“Fix it in post” is a thing no one in television production ever wants to hear.) Fixing it later is costly, time-intensive, exhausting to the crew and the No. 1 thing that will make your show late.
2. Learn to read a script. If you’re an executive on a show, a buyer or a producer, you must be able to get the comedy or drama from the words, not the animatic or rough cut.
3. Follow the basic rules of story if you want a large audience. People whine and complain about three–act structure, the five-minute rule and the hero’s journey, but those work for psychological reasons that are too complex to go into here. Reinvent the wheel on the personal, not the professional.
4. The Five-Minute Rule (I knew you’d ask). Capture your audience in the first few minutes. Give them clear goals, wants, needs and drives.
5. Capture your audience with heart, not kinetic action. No one has ever walked out of a movie saying, “Wow! I felt nothing. I didn’t connect with those characters at all … what a great film!”
6. Emotion, emotion, emotion. I’m amazed that I get pushback on this — the most important thing in entertainment. And emotion does not equal romance. It equals emotion. Pain, happiness, intensity, joy, vulnerability and so much more. Casablanca is an emotional whirlpool, and not just because of the Rick and Ilsa love story.
7. Create unique and memorable characters that are appealing, interesting and interact engagingly and entertainingly through conflict. Don’t give me jerks who have a “character arc” where they become better people. I don’t care. After you’ve spent five minutes at a party with a jerk, do you give a s— if they find happiness after you’ve gotten sick of them and walked away? Conflict does not mean you get to be horrible to people — not in real life, not on screen.

1. Design appealing characters and cast for skill and talent. Again, find people better than you at everything.
2. Hire people you like to work with, not legendary geniuses who are also legendary pains-in-the-ass. Toxic people create toxic problems. Ridding yourself of them is crucial to the well-being of your team. Your creation may not end up a “brilliant work of art that impresses your peers,” but it will get done, it will be great (I would argue better than with the pain) and you’ll enjoy the process — and life — much more.
3. Surprise people. With comedy. With drama. With character twists. With emotion.
4. Learn the nuts and bolts of every job on a show and understand what it takes to do it. You can’t give good guidance if you don’t understand the process. Greg Daniels knew visual storytelling and why a joke worked from one camera angle but not another, and I’d bet serious money he knows even more now. Never assume you know it all. Always be learning.
5. The most important note is the one you don’t give. If a show is 95% there, do you really need to spend hours tweaking that one scene into something that only you and your closest friends will ever care about? No. Your crew members have lives and families. Let them go home!
6. Demographics are critical. When you move beyond self-producing and want to sell something to a wider audience, it’s no longer about art — It’s about commerce. You want to make art? I applaud and encourage you. Luxuriate in it; feel proud; and create what moves you. But don’t come whining to me if you don’t make money off it.
7. Leave your audience happy. This is the most important rule of all and covers any kind of creativity. Whatever your audience is, leave them feeling satisfied about the time they gave you, that audience will become loyal, and your show will never be “broken.”
8. Be nice. There’s never a reason to be unkind.

Chuck Austen is a multi-talented artist, animator, writer, novelist, and comics creator who was most recently the executive producer of Dragons: The Nine Realms, She-Ra and the Princesses of Power and Dawn of the Croods and a producer on Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts and The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle.