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No matter how you cut it, winning an Emmy is impressive. However, winning an Emmy solely off of your show’s pilot is another feat entirely. That’s the position animation studio Titmouse found itself in this time last year when it took home the Emmy for Niko and the Sword of Light.
A play on the classic hero’s adventure series, the Amazon children’s show follows a 10-year-old boy who is destined to bring light back to his land. It’s an action-adventure epic that has enough heart and depth to watch like an Avatar: The Last Airbender for younger audiences — another show Titmouse worked on. However, what’s even more interesting than Amazon’s early and unexpected win is the animation studio behind this series. For years now, Titmouse has been quietly reshaping the animation landscape.
The animation studio has been involved with every network from Disney XD and Nickelodeon to MTV. However, the studio is likely best known for its Adult Swim shows, which include The Venture Bros., Superjail!, and the now-ended Metalocalypse. Decider spoke to Titmouse founder Chris Prynoski about what it was like winning an Emmy for a show before its first season, what went into that viral “Rick and Morty Exquisite Corpse” short, and the studio’s awesome passion project that may have escaped your radar.
“I totally didn’t expect it,” Prynoski said when asked about Niko’s win. “I was sitting there, and my producer Ben [Kalina] was like ‘You should write something down to say if we win’ because I was the guy who was supposed to talk if we won. And I was like ‘I don’t think we have to bother’ because we were up against a couple of DreamWorks shows and it seemed like really stiff competition.”
Thankfully, Prynoski’s producer texted him a list of people to thank, so when Niko did win the Daytime Emmy for Outstanding Children’s Animated Program, they weren’t taken completely off guard. “I’ve been nominated for a lot of Emmys but this is the first one that I’ve won, that my name was on it,” he said. “We’ve won some … for projects that are studio.”
Created by Bobby Chiu, Kei Acedera, Jim Bryson, and Adam Jeffcoat, Niko and the Sword of Light originally started as a motion comic that was backed by Kickstarter. The first episode of Niko was released in 2015 as part of Amazon’s Fall Pilot Program. “I think the motion comic caught the attention of the Amazon executives, and then they called us and said ‘Hey can you make this into a TV show?’” he said. “It always reminded me when we did the pilot, it kind of felt like … an older Don Bluth movie from the ‘80s or something also a little bit of adventure, anime-type influence to it.”
Though Niko is a scripted show, there’s still a good amount of collaboration. “The scripts are written before board, so a lot of the story is figured out, but there’s a lot — it’s an adventure series, so there’s a lot of action,” he said. “It’s a pretty collaborative experience where you kind of give upfront direction to your storyboard team but you also want them to bring ideas and try stuff out.”
According to Prynoski, most of the shows Titmouse works on are fairly collaborative. “The only exception is when we’re doing like service work,” he said. “In the Vancouver studio, we do some service work for other studios, so Dreamworks or Disney or Nickelodeon will send us the pre-production, which they’ve already figured out, and we do the animation production. In those cases there’s less back and forth on the creative because it’s already been approved.” However, even with these more cut-and-dry projects there is flexibility. Prynoski pointed to Nickelodeon’s Breadwinners and DreamWorks Animation’s Home: Adventures with Tip and Oh as examples of shows that encourage animators to throw in sight gags.
One of Titmouse’s most recent projects that’s gained a large amount of attention hasn’t been a series at all. Rather, it was a promotional video for Adult Swim’s Rick and Morty. Titmouse’s “Rick and Morty Exquisite Corpse” currently has over 3.7 million views on YouTube. “We do a lot of work for Adult Swim. We do a lot of their series work, but we also do a lot of work for their promos department,” Prynoski said.
The exquisite corpse blends animation from several different artists and styles centered around one theme. The resulting project is typically both a bit trippy and incredibly cool. Titmouse has done an exquisite corpse for another staple of Adult Swim — the channel’s beloved anime block, Toonami. The Rick and Morty exquisite corpse was directed by Matt Taylor and took about three months to produce. It also featured the work of 22 different artists.
“Because it’s such an unusual type of project, you can’t really direct it like you’d direct something else, right? Because it’s not your vision. It’s the vision of like 22 different people,” Prynoski said. There were two main challenges for this project — finding the artists and figuring out a way to cohesively connect each segment. “You need an image of the last frame,” he said. “You give that to the animator that’s doing the next sequence after theirs so that they have a jumping off point.”
Though both Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland approved of the project, neither were very involved. However, Roiland was involved in approving the storyboard, and he contributed the voices in the short. “The animators had tons of freedom,” Prynoski said. “There wasn’t really any restrictions other than general like what you can and can’t show on TV kind of stuff.”
Speaking of creative freedom, one of the most interesting projects Titmouse has been working on involves a reimagining of one of the most beloved kid’s franchises in modern TV history — Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Throughout the summer, the animation studio has been releasing new videos as part of its TMNT Summer Shorts series. “That one was more like a labor of love kind of thing. We had done some other Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles work, and some of them were more comedy, and some were more character-based,” he said. “This [Summer Shorts series] was going to sink or swim based on the animation production value.”
The two four to five-minute videos Titmouse produced for the project feature the TMNT crew off on another adventure in different animation styles. Watching a beloved franchise being professionally reinterpreted in so many ways is interesting. According to Prynoski, each video takes anywhere from 20 to 25 weeks to make. However, there are currently no plans to turn these shorts into a full series. “We could talk to Nickelodeon, I’m not sure what’s announced,” he said. “They’re not abandoning the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles property. There’s a lot of work you know in the future for that IP. But it won’t be — I think the style will be too difficult to execute on a regular basis as a series.”
“We just took this on because it looked cool and looked like a fun project, and you know, it’s not a project that we could make money on, but that’s OK,” Prynoski said. “Sometimes you just want to make something cool.”
Stream Niko and the Sword of Light on Prime Video
