CLIP: Cubot's head isn't screwed on right

Three snippets of Cubot animation I got to do!

As of right now, animation has finished on the second part of the next Mashed cartoon. Expect it to drop next week!

This time around, I've worked on 28 different shots, versus the 19 or so I worked on last time. So I got to contribute a liiiittle bit more animation-wise. But just like last time, I storyboarded the whole thing, and the other animators have gotten really good at mimicking my style!

Most of the scenes I worked on were Orbot and Cubot scenes. This is mostly because I really like them and wanted to make sure they were animated with justice. It has the side benefit of me not having to animate traditional lipsync, though, since their mouths just light up or jostle around instead of contorting to form different vowels.

Something I've recently realized is that I love doing gags with Cubot's head. In Sonic Babies, baby Knuckles punches Cubot's head off (in a gag that I remember adding very last minute). That continues here, as you can see: In one scene, a Cluckoid spews a gust of wind that blows away Cubot's head, and in another, Orbot pulls Cubot's head along the track on his body to make him look backwards.

The latter of those is actually one of my favorite visual gags in this cartoon, since it's paired with a really stupid line that I'm very proud of. My wish is that everyone who hears that line will tell me it made them laugh out loud.

Also in the third gif, we have Cubot's clothes falling off, which is a great visual for the moment, I think. It was also added pretty last minute. In the storyboards, Cubot was just naked for this scene, implying he ripped his clothes off between shots or something. Just because I wanted the full visual clarity of his head being pulled backwards.

 However, for the shot immediately preceding this one, one of the co-animators, Brandon, took it upon himself to draw the clothes on Cubot, probably because the reference sheet called for it. So i was kinda like, Hmmm, okay, well for consistency's sake I can't just have him naked, since the two shots are within the same conversation. The only problem is that, by the end of this scene, Cubot is DEFINITELY not wearing any clothes, since my OTHER co-animator did a later shot where his clothes are off. And I did not want to tell anyone to reanimate their scenes with a different outfit. So I had to devise an in-universe on-screen reason why Cubot's clothes would have suddenly come off.

The solution? The clothes just fall off of him as a compliment of the emotions of the scene. Ta-daaahhh. When you watch this full cartoon, I bet it won't even REGISTER in your MIND that I had to do that kind of problem solving since it will feel so natural. That's kind of the goal with a lot of these issues that you encounter when creating something. You want to make everything feel as seamless and logical as possible, so your viewers won't be distracted doing mental gymnastics as to figure out what's going on. Because I've done the problem solving FOR them!

Oh, yeah, and Cubot does the robot dance. Some of you will laugh at that for a specific reason I won't reveal.