
“The Cuphead Show” is filled with references and homages to classic Golden Age cartoons.
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So we basically had to figure out how to digitally pull that off.” “It’s real animation, the backgrounds are all hand-made watercolors. “That animation style is really no-holds barred,” Wasson says.
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The show was done on computers, via a process called Harmony Animation, but the entire series was handmade and drawn, and the drawing count was incredibly high in order to evoke the spirit and feel of traditional hand-and-paper animation. The shorts of “Cuphead” features a hybrid of the rubber hose style and more modern animation techniques, in order to pull off stories and shots that wouldn’t be possible otherwise. For “Cuphead,” he assembled a team of storyboarders and animators who were all fans of the game and fans of the era of animation it evoked.Īccording to Wasson, the rubber hose style of animation is defined by characters who lack shoulders and knees the style is called “rubber hose” because their limbs are essentially bouncy cylinders that don’t have to obey anatomical rules. Those shorts, like “Cuphead,” were deliberate throwbacks to the style of early Disney cartoons, and Wasson credits his experience on them for helping him hone his short-form storytelling and visual humor as an animator. But he also spent six years working as a writer and director for a series of Mickey Mouse shorts that ran on Disney Channel from 2013 to 2019. Prior to working on “The Cuphead Show!,” Wasson was best known for creating “Time Squad” for Cartoon Network. “We interviewed a lot of people, and Dave and Cosmo stood out as the perfect team, where it got to a point where we knew they knew how to roll with it without needing much input.” “We knew that was going to be the key, that we could find talented people that understood the same kind of language, talking about these early cartoons,” Chad Moldenhauer says. The brothers conducted extensive interviews to find a creative head for the show, but knew when they met Wasson that he and his co-executive producer Cosmo Segurson that they would be a perfect fit to translate their game to television. According to Chad, Netflix approached them about creating a “Cuphead” series shortly after the game launched, and while they initially assumed a deal would never come to fruition, their licensing company King Features and its president C.J Kettler worked to eventually make it a reality for them. The developers of the “Cuphead” game, brothers Chad and Jared Moldenhauer, serve as executive producers on the Netflix adaptation.
