Titmouse Studio Co-Founders Chris & Shannon Prynoski Share the Secrets of 25 Years of Success

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Like many successful ventures in animation, Titmouse’s very existence and its longevity are a result of focusing on one thing: making good cartoons.

“Our goals have never been profit-based,” says Chris Prynoski, who with his wife, Shannon, founded the studio 25 years ago. “It’s always quality-based.”

The studio’s list of credits backs that up, from its early days animating TV title sequences and the Adult Swim hit Metalocalypse to commercials, video games, indie features like 2016’s Nerdland, the trippy 2D sequence in DreamWorks’ Trolls Band Together, as well as hit cable and streaming shows such as The Venture Bros., Big Mouth, The Legend of Vox Machina and Star Trek: Lower Decks.

Busy Pipeline

Titmouse now employs more than 700 people and has studios in Burbank, Hollywood, New York and Vancouver. It has about 20 shows in production, not counting special projects, commercials and video game work, making it arguably one of animation’s most successful indie studios.

That Titmouse is here in the first place, let alone thriving 25 years later, is something Chris still finds unbelievable. “I never thought we would have an animation studio,” he says.

He started his career in the 1990s working on such now-legendary series as MTV’s Liquid Television and Beavis and Butt-Head. He met Shannon while working in New York, where the industry norm was to accept any and all offers of work. The couple started Titmouse in 2000 as a company that made and sold cool T-shirts, but it soon became a vehicle for Chris’ growing roster of freelance animation gigs.

“It’s kind of the reason why Titmouse exists — I was too dumb to turn down work,” Chris says.

Titmouse signed a deal in 2001 with Klasky Csupo for commercial representation, and soon, the company also broke into doing opening title sequences for TV shows such as The Osbournes and Nickelodeon’s Avatar: The Last Airbender.

“[Klasky] gave us a lot of trust,” Chris says. “It was cool, and we learned a lot from them because Klasky was at the time a pretty big indie studio, and it was another mom-and-pop shop. We saw how they did stuff, and it was a cool learning experience.”

 

“We’re gonna keep doing what we’re doing, right? That’s worked for us, chasing stuff that we just like doing rather than chasing profit, and it’s worked out as a business model for us.”

— Titmouse Founder & President Chris Prynoski

 

 

 

But the Prynoskis’ creativity and connections also helped them stand out. “I’d worked in New York, I’d worked in L.A., I’d worked at Disney and Nickelodeon, MTV, Cartoon Network, Fox, a bunch of places,” Chris says. “So when we started doing our indie studio, I think there was a good comfort level of, ‘Well, these aren’t just guys who know how Flash software operates. They know how to tell a story and how to make a cartoon.’”

Another of Titmouse’s advantages was its small size, which allowed it to quickly pivot from one project or technology to the next. It eventually moved locations, emigrating from a room in the Prynoskis’ home to a former TV repair shop.

“We’d do a lot of pilots for networks [but] we wouldn’t get the series because I think they’d come by, and they’d see we were working out of just this little, tiny storefront,” Chris says. “The entertainment industry is a lot about perception, and they’re like, ‘These guys don’t look like they can handle a series.’”

That prompted a move to a larger space in a building on Lexington Avenue in Hollywood, even though the Prynoskis weren’t sure they had enough work coming in to afford it. The Prynoskis’ connections helped land them Metalocalypse, the heavy metal-inspired Adult Swim series. “I knew both the creators, and the other director I knew really well,” Chris says. “Metalocalypse was the perfect first series for us.”

“I actually felt like maybe we can make a living off this,” Shannon says.

The Prynoskis got by in the early years by sharing a salary and minimizing expenses, which allowed them to funnel all their time and money into the work. “We were living at the time in a small apartment and no kids, no house, one income, so it was easy for us to put everything on screen,” Chris says. “We didn’t have a lot of overhead back then.”

Another advantage the studio had was flexibility. Coming at production from a purely creative angle meant everyone could and would pitch in to get things done. There were no corporate processes to navigate and, Shannon says, it was just plain fun.

“I would be the storyboard artist and sometimes the character designer, and sometimes the editor, and sometimes the compositor,” Chris says. “Those days are gone. I wish I could do it, you know, but there’s just no time.”

As Titmouse grew, Shannon stepped back a bit to start a family and handed off business responsibility to Ben Kalina, who came over from Warner Bros. and today is the studio’s chief operating officer. “There was a lot of opportunity here to do things differently,” Kalina says. “We usually have 20 different series [in production] — not including all the other things we do, like advertising and video games and all that — and every single one of them is completely different.”

“When we approach every job, it’s like, ‘What’s the best pipeline for this job?’ It’ll be much easier for our line producers if every show uses the same schedule, same pipeline, but it never does,” Chris says. “We don’t make it easy on ourselves, but I think it’s the thing that’s worked for us.”

That also means no two Titmouse shows look alike. “In recent years, a lot of people have been like, ‘Well, that looks like a Titmouse show,’” Kalina says. “And I say, ‘What about it looks like us?’ And they’re like, ‘It just it feels like it, but it doesn’t look the same,’ which is great.”

Titmouse moved into its current location in 2019. The building just off the freeway in Burbank previously was home to Entertainment Partners, the showbiz payroll company. In addition to allowing Titmouse to consolidate productions previously housed in scattershot facilities, the building has taken on the studio’s personality. Tricked-out vans in the lobby offer access to speakeasy-style meeting rooms, stairwells are covered in artists’ graffiti and Ghana movie posters line the corridors.

From the start, Titmouse has been kind of mobile. When Titmouse was in demand and the creators wanted to work out of New York, they started a studio there. The same happened in Vancouver when they discovered the town was full of animation talent the studio needed to make shows like Motorcity or Breadwinners.

“We staffed like 30 people in two weeks and built out most of the Breadwinners team,” Kalina says. “And I think it was by year two or three, we were like 100 people, and then we got up to like 300 people in under five years.”

The studio is also known as a fun place to work. Titmousers enjoy such unique events as Five-Second Day, where they take a day off from their regular duties to animate five seconds of anything they want. They also have published in-house minicomics and hosted a much-missed annual “smash party,” where attendees could take a sledgehammer to discarded TVs and other breakables.

“The Five-Second Day happened on Metalocalypse,” Shannon says. “It was a way for me to see what other artists did without having to draw what they’re supposed to draw.” Originally shown internally, it’s become a calling card of the studio and does a tour of theater showings.

There’s also the Titmouse Foundation, which allows Shannon to give scholarships to high school students interested in learning animation and coordinates a mentor program and a shorts program.

Flexible Future

With change and challenges like AI in the air for animation, Titmouse plans to adapt as the situation requires. “We just try to be flexible,” says Chris. Change isn’t always bad, he says, citing how shows on streaming services don’t need commercial breaks at specific times like broadcast and cable shows do.

“The other thing that was really interesting in the beginning of working on streaming shows was the lack of standards and practices that we had to do for TV,” he says. “I think Big Mouth really pushed that boundary without it becoming offensive, at least to most people. But even on the kids’ side, we were working on DreamWorks’ Turbo [F.A.S.T.], you know, and it’s like, ‘When are we gonna get our notes?’ And that doesn’t exist at Netflix. We had to kind of police ourselves.”

In the meantime, there’s an anniversary to celebrate. While the smash party’s been retired, look for Titmouse to celebrate its first quarter-century at industry events throughout the year.

And the plan for the future is the same as it’s always been. “We’re gonna keep doing what we’re doing, right?” Chris says. “That’s worked for us, chasing stuff that we just like doing rather than chasing profit, and it’s worked out as a business model for us.”

 

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Titmouse has kicked off its 25th anniversary celebrations with the launch of an innovative new merch and original animation subscription, Churp. Find out more about the studio and stay tuned for more announcements at titmouse.net. You can also watch 5 Second Day shorts on the company’s YouTube channel.