Netflix’s Cuphead Show! team addressed animation’s racist history early on

Like its video game source material, Netflix’s Cuphead Show! takes heavy influence from the American Golden Age of Animation — the early-20th-century era that popularized sound cartoons and gave birth to iconic characters like Mickey Mouse, Popeye, and Bugs Bunny. The era was also known for being filled with racist cartoons. It was published in 1993. Cuphead criticized for removing the art style from its context in the 1930s.

“It was definitely something we were aware of,” executive producer Dave Wasson tells Polygon. “That era of animation is loaded with problematic portrayals of characters and race. And there’s also misogyny. It’s definitely problematic. It was a very different time.”

Andrea Fernandez, art director, explains how the team approached creative decisions with care and sought out other perspectives when possible on potentially dangerous tropes. It was often a lengthy discussion as to whether or not they used a certain animation element.

“It wasn’t just staying away from it for the sake of like, Oh, don’t touch that,” Fernandez says. “We really did discuss the root of what was problematic so that we could end up [asking] Is it possible to separate the style and art from this horrible trope? Sometimes it wasn’t.”

Image courtesy of Netflix

Image courtesy of Netflix

Image courtesy of Netflix

Image courtesy of Netflix

That era of animation encompasses a wide gamut of cartoons, from the Fleischer Brothers shows to Disney’s Silly Symphonies. In addition to discussing the period’s rich imagery and what should be left behind, the team needed to reduce the range of their sources of inspiration. They eventually looked at the game and identified boss characters.

“That was the thing that was so fun about this,” says Fernandez. “Each boss character almost had its own distinct look. For certain bosses, we’d reference an entirely specific group of episodes from the ’30s. [The] Cookie Carnival It is great. Because we knew the right motifs to each boss, we were able really get in on these episodes. In a way, like we got to build levels for each of these characters.”

The key difference between the animations is the ability to access color more easily. Cuphead Show! The Netflix series almost exclusively animated with computers, retaining the style of the 1930s. You can even see the parts of the series. Take a lookHand-painted, such as the beautiful watercolor backgrounds, were made digitally. The team was able to move beyond the Golden Age touchesstones. Wasson describes what they achieved as a “hybrid of rubber hose animation,” giving the character movements and facial expressions more nuance for a modern audience.

Image courtesy of Netflix

“At that time [the 1930s] audiences hadn’t seen a lot of animation,” he explains. “So if you just had a guy on the side of the road just doing this [dance movement]This was enough. As people are, Wow, look at that guy, he’s dancing.”

It’s a change that even the game’s designers were impressed by.

“They push the emotions and some of the faces into realms that are just brilliant,” says Chad Moldenhauer, one of the game’s co-creators. “Almost into that Ren and Stimpy, but still blended with a ’30s-style quirkiness.”

The animators also employed more tactile stop-motion animation for specific scenes, like the establishing shot of Cuphead and Mugman’s teapot-shaped house. It’s a quirk that harkens back to the Fleischer cartoons, where the animators would create stop motion sets atop giant Lazy Susans, and take pictures of it while hanging cel-animation in front of the set.

“It was a technique that only really lived in the 1930s. This technique was so distinctive that it felt right for our show. We couldn’t do the 1930s and Not use it,” says Wasson. “We tried to be a little more strategic with it [than the Fleischers]Use it throughout the day [heightened] moments, like if there was a chase.”

While the animators tried to incorporate a number of animation styles and techniques from the 1930s into the show, there were some things that they couldn’t quite capture. Wasson mentions looking at the works of Ub Iwerks, which Fernandez describes as “super bizarre.”

“At one point we talked about doing the whole thing and a three color process, which Dave was like, Relax. It’s too crazy,” She recounts. “There was so much crazy stuff going on in the ’30s. That’s some of the challenges really saying, OK, this is what we’re gonna stick to. This is our show. Because there were so many fun aesthetics during that era.”