Animating Buffy: Words With Jeph Loeb Circa 2002, Part 2

Animating Buffy: Words With Jeph Loeb Circa 2002, Part 2

Aug 07

As a follow-up to the Buffy Animated magazine story I posted the other day, here’s some interview bits that got hacked out of the story for space considerations. Would that the Official Buffy Magazine had always been 223 pages long…then it would have all fit. I’ve tried to reconstruct the Q&A as best as I recall it.

How far into the production process are you at this point?
We have eight scripts out of thirteen. We have all our preliminary designs and are starting to do backgrounds, which means you start building your preliminary sets. We will be recording the first six soon; it’s more about scheduling than anything else. When you’re dealing with an acting troupe that’s as seasoned and as professional, and knows these characters as well as the people on Buffy, it just becomes a joy. What great words can we give them to play with?

Pretty much everyone actor-wise has committed. In animation, everything prior to the record is dress rehearsal. Then once you record, you’ve started the lawnmower; all you do at that point is cut grass. It’s different than even film and movie production, because with film production, even though you’re on a schedule, you still have an opportunity to go back and do reshoots, and look at stuff and assemble it. With animation, if you draw it, you use it, and the only reason you don’t use it is because you’re long.

What’s behind the idea to do an animated version of this character?
I’ve said it before–there is no reason that Joss has to do this show. He has an extraordinarily successful franchise in Buffy and in Angel, and in his new show that’s coming. Why do an animated version of Buffy? Well, the reason is twofold. One is love; he loves the character and he wants to see the character explored in a new and exciting way. Two, it very much opens the door, because Buffy Animated very much takes place in what we refer to as Buffy: Year One. These are the stories that happened between the pages of the stories you already know, or between the episodes you already know. They’re in-continuity stories; they’re just not stories that you know. They’re not gonna be stories where you’ll say, ‘Oh, that’s how Angel got that apartment.’ That’s not something we’re dealing with. We’re not gonna be that continuity-specific. What we will be doing is telling stories that, if you’ve never seen an episode of Buffy, you’ll be able to say, ‘Wow, this is a cool show.’ And if you’ve seen an episode of Buffy, you can sit back and go, ‘I get the irony of that.’

We have the ability to be able to know where the characters are going to go. Even though Joss knew in his first year where he wanted to go, those stories hadn’t been told yet. If Buffy says, ‘I’m gonna get the greatest car in the world, and you’ll see. People are gonna talk about the way I drive,’ you’ll know that people are gonna talk about the way she drives, but not in the way she’s thinking. That’s the kind of fun we get to do.

Is it fun to play with the unlimited potential of animation, in terms of what you can depict in each story?
On the one hand, one would think, ‘Oh, your imagination could go wild,’ and your imagination can go wild, so our monsters can be a little more fantastical. But at the end of the day, someone is still going to have to draw that. We can talk about having a barbarian horde coming over the hill, but someone’s gonna have to draw it, and it’s gonna be on a television screen, so it ain’t gonna look like a horde–it’s gonna look like a whole bunch of little things. You’re better off coming up with a big barbarian.

The really, really big difference between the live-action and the animation is scope. We’re going to be able to do something the show’s never been able to do–we’re gonna be able to go above the town. We’re going to be able to fly, to see things from a perspective that they haven’t been able to do. We can dissolve down through the earth and go down underneath and into the Hellmouth in a way that allows the Hellmouth to be enormous from a visual point of view. That’s the nature of animation.

Will the show’s mythology differ from that of the live-action series?
We work from the same bible. The Watcher’s Guide is still the Watcher’s Guide, the truths of what a Slayer is, the relationships between those characters–all of those things remain true. The Hellmouth plays a very important part. In talking about using the Master, one of the things Joss pointed out is that the Master didn’t really get out very much. We don’t want to start telling stories where the Master’s out running around, because that’s not true to the continuity. But we have plenty of stories we can tell that invoke the same feeling, but can bring in new characters that we haven’t seen.

The joke is that it’s an absurd concept–it’s an absurd title. It’s supposed to be. You’re supposed to get the joke, and all of the characters within the show get the joke. That is the gift that Joss gave to the audience.