Bob Boyle

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Bob Boyle
Statistics Occupation American Animator Other Names Bob Boyle Gender Male Marital Status Married Notable Credit(s) Former Producer/Art Director on The Fairly OddParents and Danny Phantom, creator of the Nick Jr. show, Wow! Wow! Wubbzy! and the Jetix show, Yin Yang Yo!.

Bob Boyle is an American animator. He was a former producer/art director on The Fairly Oddparents and Dany Phantom. He now is the creator of the shows Wow! Wow! Wubbzy! (Nick Jr.) and Yin Yang Yo! (Toon Disney Jetix block). His cartoons are usually made in Flash.

[edit] W!W!W! Creation

[edit] YYY! Creation

The idea came for the show came from a trip Boyle's wife and himself made to Little Tokyo [in Los Angeles]. He saw a little girl wearing a shirt that said ‘Samurai in Training.’ He thought that it was cute, and then went on to think that a tiny samurai would be funny, and then went to ‘what is the cutest’ animal and thought of a fluffy little bunny and it took off from there. Always hearing from folks in pitches that an idea didn’t have enough boy appeal, or enough girl appeal, he decided do both. To have equal characters, or equal importance, boy and girl. Then give them that sibling rivalry.

He was working on the pilot for the show at Disney. Disney usually does three or so pilots and tests them before greenlighting a series. So he was in competition with some other series. And just a couple of months after Wubbzy went into production, Yin Yang Yo! got picked up! Yin Yang Yo! was totally different from Wow! Wow! Wubbzy!. To keep costs in line with Disney’s needs, the pre-production and recording were done in Canada. So at Disney they have a limited crew of around five people. They do the scripts and the key designs and new characters. They also do backgrounds, maybe five for each 11-minute show. They do some preliminary color things and then send it to Canada. Canada will storyboard it there; do the final designs and all the animation. It was as simple as that. Unlike Wubbzy, the show does along smoothly in Canada.

Bob was initially concerned about sending the work to Canada. But in the end it worked out. For example on the voices, he said: “we found some great talent. And the upside was they were people in the States had not heard a lot of before. When we did the pilot, we used some really top Los Angeles talent, but they were the talents you hear on lots of other shows. So we found what I think are some fresh voices, which might help us stand out a bit.”

For the series, Bob would send the script and assorted designs up to Canada and they would send back a completed storyboard. He quotes, "We would pin it up on a wall and punch up the gags, make our revisions and notes. Actually it was great. Luckily we got a great storyboard crew up in Canada. And right now there is so much work going on here that the local talent is kind of spread out all over. It can be really hard to get six good board artists these days. In Toronto, I think we got the best of Toronto.”

Yo, is part of Disney’s Jetix block, which gears for the more usual male 6-12 market. There are a lot of similarities in the design styles between Wubbzy and Yo] but tonally they are very different. They are literally night and day. Wubbzy is candy colors, while Yo is dark and mysterious. Bob said in an interview: "On Yin Yang Yo! we change things up until the day of the mix. You know you always get that great idea for a joke right before you go to the mix. You say, ‘Oh, we should have done this!’ Now we can say what we should have done, and actually still do it. In a matter of hours, if it is not too complicated, we can change a little animation. On Yo we use it to punch up the humor a bit.

Bob said once that, "There are definitely some shows where you say ‘that’s a Flash show’ and not in a good way [laughs]. But I think our design style hides the ‘Flashiness’ of it. Definitely on Yin Yang Yo! that was an issue with the network. They were concerned about it. They had just done another series in Flash, and that series ended up testing very young. The network worried that some of that may have been because it was in Flash. So we did a test and we did all these crazy dramatic angles and action scenes. The network folks said, ‘This is Flash?’ So we definitely had to overcome some resistance to the Flash process.”

Yin Yang Yo! is heading for a second season with 26 episodes.

[edit] Future Show Devlopment

Bob Boyle might later create another pre-school show for Nick Jr. He might also create a sequel show for Yin Yang Yo!. The show will have more action and be more serious; it's most likey to be in anime.