JJ Villard is a recognisable name to those familiar with Adult Swim, having created the Emmy award-winning King Star King as well as the pilot Trap Universe in 2018. More recently the stylistic and edgy animator has returned to the director’s chair at Adult Swim to create JJ Villard’s Fairy Tales, his new animated retelling of the classic fairy tales that we all know and love whilst completely spinning and contorting them on their heads. 

Skwigly spoke with JJ to talk about his new series as well as his journey through the animation industry, how he came up with the concept of the show, his artistic approach and what it was like to work with Mike Lazzo.

From what I read you had these brilliant opportunities: Graduating from Cal Arts; starting your career at Dreamworks; winning an Emmy with King Star King; and being a guest director on Uncle Grandpa. I was curious how you felt your artistic style and approach to animation has evolved throughout your career and when you thought that moment was?

Oh shit! Well definitely after the fifth year after working at Dreamworks I realised that it wasn’t for me. It’s very corporate there. I mean, extremely corporate and it’s so strange to have artists at such a hardcore corporate facility. Some of the greatest artists in animation work there and do it, but I just had a difficult time.

Then I started pitching TV shows and I realised I felt good, even during the hardest times, I still think this is fun. I enjoyed it. And those times would get really hard, like, in between having TV shows and eating really shitty food, struggling to support yourself and your significant other or whatever. It’s still kind of worth it with TV, so my style has adapted through all those changes.

How did the fruition of JJ Villard’s Fairy Tales came to be and to twist the stories we traditionally know into something new?

What happened was Mike Lazzo ran Adult Swim (he created Adult Swim), he saw a sketchbook page of mine and he said “I want to make a show off this sketchbook page”. It had Snow White drawn on the page, just the font in kind of a cute, Disney style and it had like an evil rabbit jumping and a robot cat in the background. I said “Mike, do you want to do fairy tales?” and he said “Yes let’s do a fairy tale show.” So that’s how the show happened. It was just a strange thing. How often do you get an executive looking at your sketch book and wanting to make a TV show? It’s just what happened.

These stories have been told like a million times. I have a sense of humour that’s kind of dark and the writers I chose all had a similar sense of absurdity. When we all find ourselves laughing at a joke together and we pretty much know we have it. You can’t always say that because in the writers’ room you’ll be laughing at something and it just doesn’t turn out well in the cartoon. It’s really hard to keep that energy in the writer’s room through into the storyboards and then into the animatic and then hopefully by the time it gets to the animation it’s good.

I watched some episodes and I noticed that stylistically it had this interesting mix of cute and grotesque imagery meshing together. What was the reason to animate these stories in this way and what challenges did you face? 

When I did King Star King that was more of a raw, sketchbook style and that’s when I wanted to challenge it and make it a lot more charming and cute looking. I was drawing my characters cute a lot and it’s hard to develop the style of drawing cute characters that you think are appealing and fun to draw. That’s kind of why that charming style perked up.

I also looked at Little Golden Books which I think are one of the greatest reference materials that you can have for a charming, great look. I was looking through quite a lot of those. Mary Blair did quite a few of those and she’s a Disney artist that created It’s a Small World. So I stole from that and put it into the cartoon. As far as the animation style goes it’s a mix. Some of it is on one, some is on fours, some of it is on sixes. It’s just kind of a variety of animation.

Were there any particular influences or inspirations that you had in mind when approached to work on this series?

This has happened since being in college. All this stuff you’re looking at kind of always ends up in your art, especially in animation. I’m looking at a lot of animation I like from One Punch Man to Apple & Onion (shout out to George Gendi) and fucking South Park to Mr. Pickles and Ballmastrz on Adult Swim. I don’t watch a lot of cartoons, but I know when I like a cartoon and if I like it, I’m usually invested in it and sometimes it shows up in my work.

And with the fairy tales that were picked for the show, were there any that you really wanted to adapt that unfortunately got cut or you couldn’t do? 

It’s done, you know. We didn’t want to just stick with fairy tales. We wanted to do American folk lore to Aesop’s Fables and even some Bible shit. Just whatever tells these old classic stories that we can fuck with and modernise and try to make interesting again. So yeah, that’s it.

You worked on a pilot called Trap Universe in 2018 and I was wondering what did you take away from that project that you were able to put into this new series?

Trap Universe was like four different projects that pretty much moulded into one. It started off as a dinosaur action (like Akira) type of show. And then it went into a chase cartoon and then it turned into a family cartoon and then it ended up with what you saw. If you look at Trap Universe it kind of does look like double shows in one. I really loved making that show. I learned from it. You can see it gradually changing.

In King Star King I have outlines for the characters and then in Trap Universe I have outline for the characters, but they’re coloured. In Fairy Tales there’s no outlines for the characters, because I was always aiming for no outlines for the characters. But it creates a lot of issues with your art department because if your character is wearing green he blends into green backgrounds. It blends in and you can’t read it. There’s a lot of issues that come up with no outline for the characters. When I jumped into it , it really was not as hard as I was told it was going to be. It took a long time to get there with no outlines. It might sound fucking ridiculous, but it really is a big decision in the whole process because if you’re going to do a season of a cartoon with no outlines for the characters, that can create a lot of problems for the background painters, character designers, all the way to the storyboard artists, believe it or not.

Out of all the episodes produced for season one, which one was your favourite to work on and why?

Goldilocks was the first one and we learnt a lot. To me it’s like my Sigourney Weaver, Alien episode. It’s this girl that fucking takes on bears and kicks ass. So the story was kind of straight forward and we put her through some hardcore shit and she came out winning in the end, because there’s no true hero without the hero getting fucked with and she got fucked with a lot by the bears.

I think my favourite one was Boypunzel. It had all these elements: you care about the characters; it had the grimness of a fairy tale in there; it’s scary; it also has a moral at the end. It kind of has all the elements. It stars Finn Wolfhard from Stranger Things and Sheryl Lee from Twin Peaks. It also has Doug Bradley (Pinhead from Hellraiser) and Milly Shapiro from Hereditary. I don’t know if you saw that movie but it’s a scary fucking movie. All these actors just pulled it off and yeah, it was awesome.

What have you been doing to keep yourself occupied during the pandemic? 

I don’t know if this should be off the record or not but fuck it doesn’t matter. It’s already out in the public and people know. Right as Fairy Tales ended Netflix approached me to do a new show with them, so right away there was no in-between time. People say that if you’re that involved with a project for a year straight it’s good to take a couple of weeks off or something like that. Netflix wanted me right away. They were banging on my door, I kind of just moved right with Netflix.

I’m working with them on a new show and also I do a lot of freelance. You got to be careful with the freelance you pick. Fortunately I had Deathwish Skateboards to do skateboard designs with them and I really loved doing those. Those are so fucking fun to do because A. The street credit is awesome and B. Skateboarding is really raw and real and the whole culture is fucking badass. But I had to turn down a lot too because it just didn’t seem to work with me.

So that’s what I’m working on right now as well as a lot of the marketing material. I’m drawing a lot of the marketing material for Fairy Tales and coming up with a lot of concepts for merchandise that we’re going to have for the first season. It looks like we’re gonna have a skateboard deck, a t-shirt, some toys and hopefully some other things but they’re in the works.