Title : Hey, Arnold, You’re Still a Cool Kid! | Craig Bartlett Interview | Hey Arnold!: The Jungle Movie **Update (11/16): Added New Interview**
link : Hey, Arnold, You’re Still a Cool Kid! | Craig Bartlett Interview | Hey Arnold!: The Jungle Movie **Update (11/16): Added New Interview**
Hey, Arnold, You’re Still a Cool Kid! | Craig Bartlett Interview | Hey Arnold!: The Jungle Movie **Update (11/16): Added New Interview**
Thirteen years after the show went off the air, Craig Bartlett’s beloved animated character returns in a wonderful new movie on Nickelodeon!
The wait is over! Children of the late ‘80s and ‘90s who have been waiting patiently to find out some answers about their favorite characters from Nickelodeon's hugely popular Hey Arnold! series will finally get some closure when Nick USA premieres Hey Arnold!: The Jungle Movie this November. The two-hour movie reunites us with Craig Bartlett’s “football-head” hero and the rest of the gang from Hillwood and explores the fate of Arnold’s parents.
Not only is the animated project bound to make Arnold fans immensely happy, it also makes Bartlett a very happy camper as he gets to provide some answers to some of the questions that were hanging in the air since 2002’s Hey Arnold!: The Movie and after the show ended its five-season run in June of 2004.
“It’s seems like we’ve been waiting forever,” Bartlett, who originally created the Arnold character 20 years ago for the clay-mated Penny shorts featured in Pee-wee’s Playhouse, told Animation Magazine. “We got the greenlight from Nick to make this TV movie about three years ago. So, we worked furiously to shape the story—Joe Purdy and I wrote the first part and Lisa (Groening) and Laura (Sreebny) worked on the second hour. In the spring of 2015, we had a giant table read with some of the cast members, all the writers and Nick execs. Then, we got started to record the voices and storyboarded the movie … It took about two and half years of recording, writing and production, and we’re finally at the finish line! It must be one of the longest inception to delivery dates in animation!”
Directed by Raymie Muzquiz, a 2002 veteran of the series, as well as Futurama and Clarence; and Stuart Livingston, storyboard artist on Futurama, Clarence and Steven Universe, the new movie serves as a sequel to Hey Arnold!: The Movie and the two-part series finale ”The Journal,” which both debuted in 2002, the latter on Nickelodeon USA as part of the fifth and final season of the original show.
“I think it is the coolest looking version of Arnold ever,” say the six-time Emmy-nominated Bartlett, whose credits include Rugrats, Sid the Science Kid, Dinosaur Train, and the 2018 Nick series Sky Rat*. “Our Korean animation studio Saerom, who worked on the original series, really brought their A game. It felt like a homecoming to work with them again. The Nick Digital team in Burbank helped us a lot, too. Hey Arnold! became digital in the last two seasons of the show. We now have a bigger and wider resolution frame than we had before. We wanted this movie to be more cinematic, so I hope we can have some screenings in movie theaters in some cities as well.”
Some New and Old Kids
Bartlett was also able to bring back most of the original cast, while recasting some of the children’s roles. Justin Shenkarow, Olivia Hack, Nika Futterman, Dan Butler, Dan Castellaneta, Tress MacNeille, Antoinette Stella, Carlos Alazraqui, Dom Irrera, Maurice LaMarche, Jim Belushi, Kath Soucie, Danielle Judovits and Danny Cooksey are all back for the project. Alfred Molina provides the voice of resident villain Lasombra, while Mason Vale Cotton, Benjamin Flores, Jr. and Francesca Marie Smith star as Arnold, Gerald and Helga respectively.
The design team made a big effort to refresh the characters and backgrounds. As Bartlett explains, “We revisited the designs and colors since the movie was going to be made in high-def and 16:9 aspect ratio. We could now use better technology and bigger format. Some time has gone by since we last saw the characters. The kids are now finishing fifth grade and getting ready for sixth grade. I wanted it to feel like visiting the old home, but everything is a little more vivid, and we have a broader, more intense color palette.”
The writer/director also points out that he was very pleased with the way fans reacted to some of the images at last summer’s Comic-Con. “We had a day and nighttime view of Arnold’s boarding house, and everyone pored over the images, and analyzed the assets. They knew that we spiffed up the alley and planted a few trees. That’s the kind of scrutiny our movie has been getting on the Internet … We showed every character that had been on the show, and fans could see that they are all slightly updated, but the core of everything is the same. Arnold is still Arnold, Gerald is still Gerald, and Helga, of course, is still Helga.”
A New World
Bartlett points out that making the movie for Nick’s audiences in 2017 has its own special kind of challenges. “We have three groups that will be tuning in,” he says. “There are the Hey Arnold! super fans who grew up with the show and are now anywhere between 20 and 35 years old. They are interested in the Arnold cannon and are very interested in all the details, and enjoy the foibles of the adults as well. Then, there are Nick’s current audience, who are between six to 11 and may not know the series and the characters. There’s a third group, which is made up of the children of the adults who originally watched the show, whose parents showed them the episodes on DVD. I am happy that we were able to be true to what the series was and didn’t have to make a lighter version. I think everyone can handle that.”
Bartlett says he is very pleased with the great mix of professionals who worked on the movie—half of them are old-school original Hey Arnold! staffers, and the other half were its target audience. “I think the movie really benefited from the mix. The younger crew were actual fans of the show when it was first on the air, and it inspired them to become animators or writers. They got to work on it with this deep love of a show that only a kid can have. Stu Livingston, who co-directed the movie with Raymie, has such a deep knowledge of the series and was able to offer such great details about the history of the show that none of us would remember.”
Closure Is Cool!
“I was hired years ago to co-direct the movie, and the project got mothballed,” Muzquiz recalled to Animation Magazine. “It took multiple regimes at Nickelodeon until someone thought it was a good idea to reboot the show. So we started to work on the script and refreshed the characters. Really, this movie is the culmination of getting a closure that we had dreamed about for 17 years.”
“We did some trimming along the way,” says the movie’s co-director. “We had to boil down the recaps and character expositions in the first half of the movie. We learned that it’s a good idea if Arnold just goes along on his adventure.”
Muzquiz recalls that back in the early days, he and the rest of the team would talk about the movies they had seen over the weekend. “We were really into Miyazaki movies back then, so we were always trying to find ways to infuse some of those mythological elements, amulets and magical machinery from films like Castle in the Sky into our show. For this movie, we also took great pains to make the characters a bit older, so in a way, we were road-testing them for a sixth season if that happens in the future.”
Both Bartlett and Muzquiz are hoping that fans will be delighted with the movie they’ve been toiling away on for these past few years. “I know it’s a big cliché, but just like fine wine, this property has aged very well,” concludes Muzquiz. “I think the added gravitas and underlying foundation of the show make it stand out from everything else that I’ve ever done in my career. I hope it’s not all in my head!”
Hey Arnold!: The Jungle Movie premieres on Nickelodeon USA on Friday November 24 at 7 p.m. (ET/PT). NickSplat, TeenNick’s programming block dedicated to Nickelodeon’s legendary library of hits from the ‘90s and 2000s, will celebrate Hey Arnold! throughout the month of November with fan-favorite episodes every night from 12:00 a.m.-1:00 a.m. (ET/PT). In addition, NickSplat will treat fans to a marathon of every single Hey Arnold! episode beginning Friday, Nov. 17, through Friday, Nov. 24, from 11:00 p.m.–6:00 a.m. (ET/PT). Hey Arnold!: The Jungle Movie encores Saturday, Nov. 25, and Friday, Dec. 1, at 12:00 a.m. (ET/PT) on TeenNick.
Online at nick.com/heyarnold, fans can find out more about the movie and watch exclusive video clips from the film.
* "Sky Rat" has still to be confirmed by Nickelodeon.
Also, from The Beat:
Interview: The Once and Future Football Head – Talking HEY ARNOLD: THE JUNGLE MOVIE with Creator Craig Bartlett
Since 2004, fans of the beloved, classic Nickelodeon animated series Hey Arnold! have had to live with an incomplete show. The last episode, aired so many years ago, was a cliffhanger, and a proper resolution for the series seemed to be out of reach. For fans, the proposition that there was never going to be closure on so many unanswered questions about the fate of the characters was a difficult proposition to reconcile with (as far as TV cliffhangers go). But for the cast and creative forces who brought the shows to air, the inability to leave viewers with a satisfactory ending that tied every loose thread they had carefully plotted was, to say the least, an unideal situation.
Behind-the-scenes voice record with creator Craig Bartlett, Mason Vale Cotton, Benjamin Flores Jr and Francesca Marie Smith of Nickelodeon’s Hey Arnold. Photo: Bonnie Osborne/Nickelodeon©2017 Viacom, International, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
And that frustration—for both sides of the show—is coming to an end. Next week, Hey Arnold! returns to Nickelodeon for The Jungle Movie, a years-in-the-making event that finally answers the unresolved questions left from the early years of the aughts. Anticipation for the movie—and its promise to show the fate of Arnold’s long-lost parents, primarily—has been high, and Nick has been playing up the nostalgia that fans have for the show with great fervor at both San Diego Comic Con and New York Comic Con this year.
But let’s back up for a moment. For a generation of kids coming of age in the 1990s, Hey Arnold! was a quirky, different kind of cartoon. Decidedly metropolitan, decidedly inner-city, and decidedly contemporary on the surface, this cartoon about a titular football-headed boy and his friends reveled in exploring the complicated lives of its animated denizens beyond the titular protagonists. While a comedy to be sure, there was a certain melancholy that permeated the show. Off-beat and seemingly stereotypical character types—the wacky grandpa, the crazy foreign neighbors, the bullies—each had complex inner lives with painful stories of love and loss woven into the fabric of their being. And, in its own way, Hey Arnold! was a tribute and celebration to the loners and outcasts of the world.
“The point of the series is empathy,” says creator Craig Bartlett, during a recent interview. To support this notion, I mentioned a personal revelation about the character of Stoop Kid. For those in the know, the timeless, endlessly memetic mantra of Stoop Kid’s afraid to leave his stoop! acts more than just a taunt in the episode. It hints at the character’s vulnerable self and his insecurities about the broader world. His existence is ridiculed. And during a particularly despondent moment during the early episode in which he is featured, the community joins together to make fun of Stoop Kid’s plight. After the humiliation, Stoop Kid lets out an incredible sob that is just heartrending. But as a kid, I laughed at this moment. It was ridiculous. This guy seemed absolutely bizarre.
It was only after a rewatch many years where my feelings turned towards Stoop Kid. He wasn’t bizarre, he was helpless and scared. I no longer laughed at him; I cried with him. “That was our edge, the emotion. And for something like Stoop Kid, you thought it was funny, you thought, what a weird character. Then you watch as an adult, and you’re like, ‘This is really intense,’” Bartlett says.
Moving on from our nostalgic jaunt, I asked Craig if having so much attention for the Jungle Movie, and to have Hey Arnold re-emerge as a part of the greater cultural zeitgeist, was a surreal feeling. Bartlett agrees: “To me, the most amazing thing about this how much stronger the response is then when Hey Arnold first came out. When the show came out, it did great. Millions of kids watched it, people were happy; it was a success. But compared to now, the love that people feel for the show is much stronger.”
Why is this the case?
“The kids who watched the show grew up. And the real kick for me is that I can’t believe how much stronger and articulate the love for the show is,” Bartlett commented.
One of the hallmarks of throughout the original run of Hey Arnold! was the use of kids to voice the kid characters, an untypical practice. This tradition has continued for the Jungle Movie as well, with Mason Vale Cotton and Benjamin “Lil’ P-Nut” Flores, Jr. taking over the roles of Arnold and Gerald, respectively. (Francesca Marie Smith Helga and Anndi McAfee, veterans from the original series, return as Helga and Phoebe.) “Both those kids were great finds,” says Bartlett. “All the actors gave incredibly layered and nuanced performances. The studio has really grown up since I left it [in 2002]. They’ve gotten much bigger and have a big casting department. They found really great kids to replace the actors who had come before. It’s kind of shocking how accurate we were able to get with the sound-alikes.”
So, while the new actors got the characters from a tonal perspective, could they also spiritually get them?
“There was a lot of time to talk about it. Trying to get the kids to understand the spirit of the thing is to just talk about it with them. And when we record—and I always try to do it as a group thing—I always go in and record on the actor’s side of the glass. It was a team effort.”
I asked Craig if he was surprised that Nickelodeon would green-light this project at all, or that fan pressure and demands to provide a proper finale would make The Jungle Movie an inevitable prospect.
“You would think that the fan support would do the trick, but that’s never a given. I thought it was great that there are these people creating petitions and writing letters. But there was a long stretch where I thought nothing would ever come of it. Finally, it just seemed like the time was right. The window opened and the opportunity came, and I just jumped in. I said, ‘Look, if we’re going to reboot Hey Arnold!, we have to do the Jungle Movie. And they didn’t know what that was. Right on the spot, I made a powerpoint that I called “Arnold 101” that laid out what happened during the 100 episodes of the series.
“I finished by talking about Hey Arnold!: The Movie, where Helga tells Arnold that she loves him [a recurring theme], and how that thread was supposed to be tied in the Jungle Movie. He was supposed to tell her how he felt. But that was left as a big, unanswered question that fans really wanted to know.”
This, sounds a bit like a pilot to a rebooted new series, right?
“Yeah, absolutely! By the time the movie ends, things are set-up really well for a season 6. If it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t happen. But if it does, everything is teed up.”
Hey Arnold: The Jungle Movie premieres November 24 at 7 PM (EST)
And for those that need to binge and catch up on the show before the movie’s premiere, fear not! Nick has you covered:
NickSplat, TeenNick’s programming block dedicated to Nickelodeon’s legendary library of hits from the ‘90s and 2000s, will celebrate Hey Arnold! throughout the month of November with fan-favorite episodes every night from 12:00 a.m.-1:00 a.m. (ET/PT). In addition, NickSplat will treat fans to a marathon of every single Hey Arnold! episode beginning Friday, Nov. 17, through Friday, Nov. 24, from 11:00 p.m.–6:00 a.m.(ET/PT). Hey Arnold!: The Jungle Movie will premiere Friday, Nov. 24, at 7:00 p.m. (ET/PT) on Nickelodeon and encore Friday, Nov. 24, at 11:00 p.m. (ET/PT) and Friday, Dec. 1, at 12:00 a.m. (ET/PT) on TeenNick.
--Ends--
More Nick: Arnold And Crew Are Back In Nickelodeon's "Hey Arnold!: The Jungle Movie", Premiering Friday, Nov. 24, At 7pm (ET/PT) On Nick USA!
Originally published: Wednesday, November 01, 2017.
Follow NickALive! on Twitter, Tumblr, Google+, via RSS, on Instagram, and/or Facebook for the latest Nickelodeon and Hey Arnold!: The Jungle Movie News and Highlights!
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