Making Kirsten Lepore's Stop Motion "Adventure Time" Episode, "Bad Jubies"

Last year a unique infusion of stop motion came to the wildly weird and zany Land of Ooo – the magical fantasy world of the popular Cartoon Network show Adventure Time.

The 11-minute all-stop-motion episode was spearheaded by animator and filmmaker Kirsten Lepore and the talented crew at Bix Pix Entertainment – a California-based stop motion studio. In the making-of video for this season 7 episode – Bad Jubies – Kelli Bixler, executive producer on the project, explains that Kirsten was the ideal candidate to bring episode-length stop motion to the show because of the simplistic aesthetic of the show and its correlation to her prior work in animation. Her past work in stop motion, such as is employed in her short films Move Mountain and Sweet Dreams, has a unique aesthetic – one that is very minimalistic and yet charming, giving her work a very intimate feel. Rachel Larsen, Animation supervisor on the project and an artist at Bix Pix, elaborates concerning Kirsten’s work, “When you are doing any kind of animation you are always striving for an emotional impact. And her [Kirsten’s] stuff consistently has a really emotional quality to it.”

The episode features both two- and three-dimensional stop motion, and from an animation and technical standpoint the episode is a really beautiful work of art, one that is certainly worth a few moments of your time.

It should be noted that, while this episode is the first full-length utilization of stop motion on Adventure Time, it is not, in fact, the first time stop motion has been used in the show: Back during YouTube’s 2013 “Geek Week,” Cartoon Network released a stop motion Brickfilm iteration of the Adventure Time main title, an endeavor helmed by the animation studio Screen Novelties. Curiously, Bad Jubies doesn’t even mark the debut of Kirsten’s stop motion work on Adventure Time, as she animated the stop motion Frederator Studios end tag that is featured in the credits of practically every Adventure Time episode ever. (You can go watch Kristen’s short Frederator logo tag here.)

You can go watch the full Bad Jubies episode of Adventure Time – legally and for free – here, on Kirsten’s Vimeo page. You can go here to watch the excellent 12-minute making-of video, which features interviews with the creative minds behind the project as well as giving one a window into the behind-the-scenes process on Bad Jubies. Furthermore, you can go listen to an interview with Kirsten on the "She Does" podcast here, to get her take on this episode of Adventure Time as well as her past films: Bottle, Move Mountain, and Sweet Dreams.

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