‘Adventure Time’: The Trippiest Show on Television
But in the end, isolation usually wins out. “It’s just general depression, probably,” he concedes, looking uncomfortably around the office, every nook and cranny of which is filled with images and products from a fantasy world that has turned into a multimillion-dollar business. “That’s what that is. I don’t know, everyone battles that same thing.”
The 32-year-old ward has never quite felt like he fit in. Growing up in San Antonio, the youngest of three brothers, he was an outcast even among the outcasts in his peer group. “As a kid I was very conscious of trying to be functional and not be too odd,” he recalls. “I liked figuring out how people worked. I had a notebook, and I’d take notes about people. It was mostly about figuring out how to make girls . . .” He trails off, then corrects himself. “What’s this girl like and why do I like girls?”
As a child, Ward never met his father. He was raised by his mother, Bettie, the daughter of a Texas rancher and oilman. She had been a groupie for the Steve Miller Band, sung with Joe Ely and performed in off-Broadway rock musicals before making a living as a visual artist. She encouraged Ward’s creativity, and by the time he was in first grade, he was making flip books from his mom’s Post-it notes.
If the Ice King is Ward’s dark side, then Finn, the show’s 16-year-old protagonist, is his light side. What makes Finn such a compelling character is that he is innocent and good-hearted, always willing to help out a friend or rescue a princess. Even his mistakes come from an ultimately pure and well-intentioned place.
“I was a sensitive kid,” Ward recalls, describing a child who sounds not coincidentally like Finn. “I remember being really loving – and putting my head on people’s shoulders when I was little until people started telling me I was weird.”
In addition to being into Dungeons & Dragons games and The Simpsons – two of the biggest influences on Adventure Time – Ward was also obsessed with being a good person. When his friends or brothers cursed, he’d tattle on them. As he grew older, he tried to raise money to save the rainforests, dreaming of being, as he puts it, “a Greenpeace hero.”
“I was fat and I had a bowl cut and I had rollerblades,” he continues. “I would put my Magic cards in a backpack and skate down to the comic shop. Just superawkward.”
Eventually, Ward found a place where a superawkward kid could fit in if he was talented: the California Institute of the Arts, better known as CalArts. There, Ward met a coterie of artists and animators who shared his obsession with cartoons and comics. “Even back then, his films were the funniest ones being made,” recalls Adam Muto, the classmate of Ward’s who turned him on to alternative comics. Later, Ward would bring Muto on as a storyboard artist and, after quitting Adventure Time, train him to take his place as showrunner.
“I like to just listen to nerds arguing about nerd stuff to relax”
When one of Ward’s films was accepted into a year-end show at CalArts, a producer at Frederator, an independent animation studio, saw it and was impressed. Soon Ward was working on shorts for Frederator’s Random! Cartoons show on Nickelodeon, bringing along his CalArts friends. One of those shows was a seven-minute short called Adventure Time, which racked up over 3 million views on YouTube within a year of its release in 2007. Nickelodeon rejected Ward’s pitch to turn the short into a series. So through another friend from CalArts, Ward was hired to work on Cartoon Network’s Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack, where he eventually got the green light for Adventure Time in 2008, though he had to make a few changes to please executives there, such as giving Finn and Jake a home instead of making them wanderers living in tents as he’d originally intended.
“If the show hadn’t been picked up, I would have moved to the Midwest and gotten a cheap apartment,” Ward says. “I would have been that guy with a telescope watching my neighbors, getting pizza and putting a sign on the door that says ‘Leave the pizza outside.’ But I was forced into a situation where I had to maintain my social dignity.”
The success of the show, however, has barely changed Ward’s student lifestyle. Until last year, he continued to live in Burbank with four roommates. To meet his deadlines, he goes to coffee shops because, since he doesn’t like making eye contact with people, he’s forced to look down at his work. At meals and social events, he prefers to sketch rather than make conversation, describing drawing as “my baby blanket that I take with me everywhere.” And where many in L.A. meditate or do yoga, he says, “I go to comic shops because I like to just listen to nerds arguing about nerd stuff to relax.”
With his obligations to Adventure Time now reduced, Ward is looking for his next creative challenge. He wants to write an Adventure Time movie and create an original video game. But he’s in no rush.
“Whatever the next thing is, I just want my brain to be happy doing it,” he says. “My state of mind is superimportant. I’m so fried, so I have to sort of work within the confines of what my brain can handle.”
As an example of what he can handle, Ward shows me several sketchy black-and-white shorts he made with a friend called Animation Pals. “I love this stuff,” Ward says after playing an enjoyably quirky episode. “This is the most rewarding thing I’ve done in a long time because I made my half of it with my own hands.”
He sighs and looks down at his stomach. “It’s nice to just be sleepy and make stuff,” he says. “That’s the root of what I like doing. Make stuff on my own and fall asleep.”
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