Science SARU

My artist ID for Disney XD!  Written, boarded and designed by Daron Nefcy. Music by Brian H. Kim. Animated by Science Saru!

OK K.O.! Lakewood Plaza Turbo Original Short: KO

Hey! Here’s the first original short with FULL CREDITS listed under the cut!

Last year the fine folks at Cartoon Network gave us the chance to create shorts to get the word out about the OK K.O.! Game! We get to do original shorts based on a game?! What!!!! Cartoon Network fully believes in the game and the idea so doing a cartoon for it was a no-brainer!

The idea for this short came from the development process between us and the game developers at Double Stallion.

We all felt super good about the controls, the punching, the throwing and the ground-pounding all felt great. The team had the brilliant idea to add slide kicks to KO’s moveset which was awesome! I collaborated with the games’ Art Director Eric Angelillo on the ingame animation:

Slide-kicking eventually became so fun that I was doing it all the time in the game, which influenced the story for this short! (Storyboarded by Toby Jones and Stu Livingston)

In a chance of a lifetime, I got to work with one of my FAVORITE studios, Science SARU on the creation of this short. The studio is headed by Masaaki Yuasa and Eunyoung Choi who are both huge inspirations for me. I got the chance to visit the studio during my visit to Japan last year and they are doing some amazing, next-level stuff. I’m completely humbled that they wanted to work with us and I really enjoy the energetic direction of this short which was thanks to Abel Gongora and Juan Manuel Laguna. We used several of the elements from the old pilot, but as you can see, Science SARU gave the look a distinctive twist!

FULL CREDITS UNDER THE CUT! 

Masaaki Yuasa’s episode Food Chain is headed to the 2015 Annecy International Animated Film Festival 

Chibi Maruko-chan: My Favorite Song “Shopping Boogie”