Titmouse’s Chris Prynoski Discusses ‘Little Big Awesome’ And Why Working With Kittens Isn’t As Fun As It Looks

Chris Prynoski is an animator, producer, and director. His studio produced Little Big Awesome, my very favorite of the kid-friendly pilots that appeared on Amazon a few weeks ago. Prynoski’s career began at MTV in the 1990s—he worked on Daria and Beavis and Butt-head—and we talked about the history of animation and how the medium has evolved. We also chatted about unboxing videos, the failure of small children to get irony, and the difficulties of working with kitten actors.

DECIDER: My daughter and I watched the pilot of Little Big Awesome and we both liked it so much. It’s really great to find a show that my kid wants to watch that I don’t just find tolerable, but actually enjoyable. I find that, as a parent, I consume a lot of TV just passively that is extremely awful. Even if it’s just listening to the voice acting from another room, it can be kind of rough.

PRYNOSKI: I can dig it. I have a four-year-old kid, too, so same thing. I should establish that I’m just the guy who’s in charge of the studio. I wasn’t, like, on-the-ground on the making of the show. I was involved in meetings and stuff, and I would swing by, but largely it was the producers, Ben Gruber was executive producer on the show, and Sung Jin Ahn was the director. Those guys, really, were the guys that did all the heavy lifting. I get to take credit for the cool stuff, but I’m mostly the guy who gets called in if there’s a problem.

There were a lot of challenges, actually. The show’s creators had done a short that was done all in 3D animation made to look like 2D animation. One of the things we had to figure out was how we wanted to do this show. We were, like, doing different tests to see whether we should employ the same technique or use a different technique, and we ended up landing on this kind of hybrid. It’s traditional 2D animation, but with a lot of computer tricks. For the live action stuff, we ended up hiring a company to make the puppets based on our designs—they did a great job. We generally do animation, and when we do live action, we usually work with human actors. This is the first job that we’ve done that we’ve had to hire kitten actors. We had to hire a kitten wrangler, and, although on the show it all looks pretty chaotic, it was actually a lot of work to orchestrate the kitten action. And, you know, we had to make sure that the kittens were treated properly.
While watching Little Big Awesome I found myself wondering why more shows don’t have kittens and maybe now I know why.
[Laughter.] Exactly. There are rules for working with kittens.
My daughter and I both enjoyed the kittens a lot, so I’d say it was worth it.
Nice! I’m glad it was worth it.

You worked at MTV, right? On Daria and Beavis and Butt-head. What did you take away from that experience? What did you bring forward into the work you’re doing now?
Well, it was a great place to start out. The mid-’90s was a high point for animation—kind of like it is now. There was a lot of animation being produced, and they would hire any kid out of school—which is what I was. I got to jump right in and start working on shows like Beavis and Butt-head, doing storyboards and stuff. And they let me direct little sequences—which they shouldn’t have, because I had no idea what I was doing. But the one thing I learned after working on those shows and then coming out to LA to work in the so-called “real world” is that I was really lucky to be working on these shows that are super funny and super well-written and run by genius-level show creators.
Not every show is like that, which is a rude awakening when you’re, like, “Oh, here’s a script that’s not funny.” Later on in my career, I was like, “Now I have to figure out how to make this work,” as opposed to getting a track from Beavis and Butt-head that’s funny already without me having to do anything. So, what did I learn? I learned that that environment was great. The person who ran MTV’s animation studio really gave us a lot of freedom, and here at Titmouse we’ve tried to model what we do after the experience I had at MTV. One thing is that there wasn’t a big TV animation presence in New York before that. It wasn’t like a standard studio system. They pulled in people from all walks of life. A lot of people who worked on Beavis and Butt-head came from PBS, actually. They kind just of figured it out as they went.
Things are different in LA. I’ve worked at all the studios out here, too, so I learned that way, as well. When we were starting up Titmouse Studios, we tried to take a little bit of both. And now we have a second studio in New York. So, we took New York lessons to LA, and LA lessons to New York.

What are the LA lessons?
We’re getting up on a hundred years of the history of animation. Out here, these guys have been doing this their entire careers, so they’ve really honed it and gotten really good at it, and they’re using pipelines—systems for making animation—that have been in place forever. New York didn’t have any of that when I was starting out. In New York, just everybody had to figure everything out for themselves, because there wasn’t that long history.
It turns out that that experience was good, because of how frequently digital techniques are introduced and delivery systems are introduced. Animation isn’t just movies or TV shows now. Instead, it’s, like, “This is gonna be for an app on an iPad.” Or, “This is gonna be in virtual reality, but it’s also gotta work for Google Cardboard.” So, there’s a lot of stuff we have to figure out as we’re doing it. For example, virtual reality is a big thing—we’re doing a lot of VR—and nobody has pipelines for that. It’s all brand new. The good thing is that everybody in the community is talking to each other to figure out the best ways to do this stuff.
How is working for kids different from working for an adult audience. I mean, obviously, there are topics that are off limits, but how is the storytelling different and how is the creative angle different?
Your storytelling style’s gonna be a little different. With a kid, you’re relying less on their previous knowledge of things. You can’t make jokes with cultural references. You know what else doesn’t work as well for kids? Irony and sarcasm. They’re not impossible, but they’re harder to pull off with kids.
The younger the audience, the less that type of humor lands because, you know, they don’t have enough life experience to have developed a dry sense of humor. They take things more at face value, generally. I mean, we probably push the kids shows as far as anybody—and sometimes we push it a little too far. Sometimes, with our kids shows, we land a little north of the target. But that’s how we learn.
What did you watch when you were a kid?
I think I watched whatever. You know, it’s so different now—right?—because now kids can choose from a million different things on TV. And then they go YouTube and there are a million more things. You can watch things that you wouldn’t even think about as entertainment when I was a kid—like watching someone unwrap toys.

Unboxing videos! My daughter went through an unboxing phase.
My kid loves that stuff. I think psychologically—I’m gonna get back to your actual question eventually, by the way—but I was thinking, like, what is this? And I think it’s that my kid knows that I’m not gonna buy him a new toy every day, but yet he still gets to experience the joy of opening a toy through a proxy. He gets to see all this cool, new stuff. And, let’s face it, you know this because you’re a parent: A lot of times they’ll open a toy, play with it once, and it sits in a closet, you know? Not all toys are the favorite toy, so they probably get as much out of the unboxing videos as they do out of these toys that they open up and then forget about.
I totally think you’re onto something.
So, anyway, to get back to your actual question: When I was a kid, I watched whatever they put on TV. Cartoons, definitely. I was partial to cartoons. Saturday morning was a big deal for me. Cable was in its infancy. Cartoon Network didn’t exist. By the time Nickelodeon came along, I was trying to ride a skateboard and kiss a girl, so… It wasn’t for me. But when I was little, like I said: whatever was on. Scooby-Doo. A lot of weird reruns of anime shows that were dubbed, like Robotech and Starblazers. He-Man, GI Joe, Transformers, all that stuff…

I don’t want to trash-talk somebody else’s work… But my daughter and I watched the Sigmund and the Sea Monsters reboot, and as soon as the guy in the foam sea-monster costume shows up, she was out of there. She wanted nothing to do with that show. And I was all like, “Hey, we’ll watch the original. It’ll be awesome.” We didn’t make it five minutes into the episode before she was, like, “This is a hundred times worse!” And the thing is: She was right! I realized, at that moment, that I watched that show—and a lot of other shows—simply because that was what was on. But the world our kids are growing up in… There’s no reason to watch something crappy.
I remember Sigmund and the Sea Monsters, really, that how genre prompting a weird, kid depression in me, because when those shows came on, it meant that cartoons were almost over. Saturday morning started with the cartoons, and it ended with the live action shows. After that, it would be all golf or something. So, when those live-action shows came on, I was, like, “I’m hanging by a thread now!”
Are there any upcoming projects that you’re excited to be working on?
Well, I know I mentioned watching He-Man. Son of Zorn is a project we’re working on that’s going to be on Fox on Sunday nights in the fall. It’s about a He-Man-esque character in that live-action world, and I’m really stoked about how that one’s turning out. It’s going to be super, super funny.
The next thing we’re releasing is Brad Neely’s Harg Nallin’ Sclopio Peepio, and that’s our latest Adult Swim show. That’s got music and weird sketches and stuff, and that’s on now.

[Watch the Little Big Awesome pilot on Amazon Prime Video]
Jessica Jernigan is a writer, editor, and mom-about-town in a mid-sized Midwestern city. You can find her professional website here, but Instagram is where the cat photos are.