‘Fionna and Cake’ EP Adam Muto Takes Us Beyond the Land of Ooo

This article originally appeared in the Sept./Oct. '23 issue of Animation Magazine (No. 333)

Fans of Pendleton Ward’s Adventure Time series, which aired on Cartoon Network for 10 seasons (2010-2018), have a lot to look forward to in Adventure Time: Fionna and Cake, a 2D spinoff series coming to Max with many of the same crew along for the new journey. The first season features 10 22-minute-long episodes, which allow for longer stories and are geared to a slightly older age group, also targeting kids who grew up with the original show.

Fionna and Cake, the two main characters of the new show, appeared in the original series about once a season after their Season Three debut. They were developed when character designers began experimenting with the main characters of the first series, Finn and Jake. They switched the genders of the originals and even the species of one. Jake, who started as a magical dog, became Cake, an ordinary house cat. And Fionna and Cake seemed like the right fit for a tween audience.

The creatives on the spinoff were excited to be working on a series aimed at a slightly older viewer than the original series, because it gave them more room to explore ideas. In the first Adventure Time, it was often necessary to be cautious about how certain themes were explored and they were writing two 11-minute stories per show. This series gives them more freedom, and they’re crafting a single 22-minute tale.

Exploring New Possibilities

“You get some pretty interesting, weird patches from working around things like that, but you feel like you’re tap dancing around something,” says executive producer Adam Muto. “I think we were looking for ways to explore stories and characters that can be pretty different than Finn. He started the [original] series very bombastic and completely selfless. We were looking for a way to tell stories about a character who’s in a completely different place and who is not quite as willing to be selfless, does not live in a magical world and is not a highly skilled fighter.”

The show creators wanted to center the show on a more normal character. “We also wanted to see where she’d go if she kind of knew about that magical world from the first series which had been denied her,” explains Muto. “I think that starting point for Fionna is so different from any episode that we have done before.”

‘We were looking for a way to tell stories about a character who’s in a completely different place and who is not quite as willing to be selfless, does not live in a magical world, and is not a highly skilled fighter.’

— Executive producer Adam Muto

The exec producer also points out that Jake was a kind of endlessly powerful magic dog that could stretch and do anything. Basically, he was mostly limited by his own laziness. “So, we took all of that potential and just turned Cake into a normal house cat and used that as the starting point,” he notes. “We also had one season to kind of plot where it could go because that’s Max’s approach, which was a lot different than how we designed the series on Cartoon Network.”

As with the first Adventure Time, Rough Draft Korea and Saerom Animation were the partner studios on the project. Both shops are based in South Korea and the episodes were split between them. Most of the Cartoon Network Studios team was based in California, but some animators were as far away as Russia and Japan. Approximately 50 crew members worked on the pre- and post-production side. Since production started in 2021, during the height of the pandemic, most of the work was done remotely until the studio reopened in 2022. At that point, most on-site work was limited to animatics, picture editing and post. About 90 percent of the work remained remote.

The show stars Madeleine Martin (Hemlock Grove, Californication) as Fionna and Roz Ryan (The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack, Disney’s Hercules) as Cake. Both actresses voiced the same characters for the first series. Supervising producer Sandra Lee was happy to bring back the original performers since it gave a sense of continuity to the spin off series. Viewers can also look forward to music and songs by Patrick McHale (Over the Garden Wall), Rebecca Sugar (Steven Universe) and Emmy-nominated composer Amanda Jones (Apple TV+’s Home, Adventure Time: Distant Lands).

Lee and Muto were also interested in having a sense of the individual animators in the work. They wanted their 2D series to look truly handcrafted. “I think in this show, in particular, we asked them to keep the animation close to the storyboard as opposed to just hooking it up to like the main model,” says Lee. “So, you know, each section they can actually see the different styles of artists as well. You can see characters like changing a little bit in style from one section to the next, but I think that’s one thing I loved about Adventure Time. That really kept the charm of it. I think that was a lot of fun, and I like that people can watch it and recognize who worked on one section.”

Muto adds, “Each episode is in a pretty different alternate universe. All of them called for their own sort of color palette and approach to the backgrounds. So, it was challenging because there wasn’t a ton of reuse. Each episode is basically its own new world, a new version and, once you get into it, almost every episode is in a different alternate universe.”

Making Magnificent Backgrounds

Compared to the original series, the backgrounds have become a lot more complex as well. Muto says they are so elaborate that you they needed of a lot of hands working on it. “We could do really hyper-saturated, simple grass fields … but it feels like it wouldn’t sort of work the same way,” he explains. “I think there is this level where we must make the backgrounds more sophisticated without it feeling like a completely different show. And that’s kind of a challenge that Sandra’s department has to handle.”

The two producers were thrilled to find so many great artists spread across the world to work on this new show. Working during the pandemic kept them in many remote situations and they’re looking forward to having audience feedback on the work they’ve been doing for the last few years.

“It’s hard to know how it’s going sometimes and how it goes over with the audience because we are somewhat removed from that, to a degree,” says Muto. “We get direct feedback at places like Comic-Con and people might have social media posts, but you’re generally not trying to engage that directly while you’re working on it. You keep it at arm’s length. I’m proud of what we’ve done cumulatively. It’s really hard to keep an episode or a show feeling like it’s the same project because you end up replacing so many people when you come back to something years later. It’s interesting to see what new people will bring. You try to hold on to as much of the old DNA as you can and build something new for audiences to discover and enjoy when they come back to it.”

Adventure Time: Fionna and Cake premieres on Max on Thursday, August 31.