Look both ways before crossing over a banana 🍌

Artist Commentary

Bo and Lil’ Bo have a fun dynamic that’s similar to traditional slapstick cartoons (think Looney Tunes or Tom & Jerry). It’s always fun to see how unpredictable things can get when both of these boneheads are in the same place. Unfortunately for Bo, he often gets the short end of the apple.

One of the more fun aspects of making shorts is the element of surprise. Slipping on a banana peel is common joke. I wanted to subvert that and make the same type of joke a bit more refreshing and fibrous.

The Production

This was one of the last shorts I made in 2025, so the production is missing a lot of the novelties my current pipeline has (animatics, production sheets, etc.). However, the production was fairly smooth, though there were some hiccups along the way. Namely there was an issue with the puppets ‘hose’ limbs not working (this is in Toonboom btw). This was a terrible time for that particular issue, because most of the difficult shots for Bo, used ‘hose’ animation. I eventually found a workaround by copy and pasting the keyframes where the ‘hose’ limbs were working, to where I needed them to be.

One of the other novelties of this project was its new ‘look’. Usually Giggle Gang shorts are black and white, and a few are occasionally in color. This time, I wanted to give it a more complete and professional ‘look’ and production as a means to develop a consistent and refreshed aesthetic. It echoes a more finished and professional type of cartoon which I would like to produce more of. I enjoyed making the subtle, faded aesthetic in Toonboom (this is a concerted effort to divest from Adobe programs), which surprisingly has a robust post-processing feature set. There’s something about the faded appearance that reminds me of watching cartoons in my childhood. Current animated videos tend to be overly saturated and a bit hard on the eyes some times. I find this a bit more relaxing.

I’m still working on the Giggle Gang look though. I’m hoping to settle on a more defined and consistent look to these shorts so I can focus more of my energy on the jokes and characters.

There was one other issue that was a bit of a pain for ‘Fruity Fakeout’. The timing. When I edited the short, it felt like too much action was happening at once. The pace was a bit off, but I was fine with it back in December. Once I looked at it before rendering the final, the timing bothered me a lot more. I went back and re-edited some of the timing before Bo slips on the apple so the actions could register for the viewer more clearly. Sometimes you have to take a couple of steps back before you nail your landing, and even though the edits were small, they did make a big impact on the pacing of the short. I’m usually not motivated enough to edit a short after I mark it complete, but I had done a lot of work on this one, and I like the idea enough to give it an extra touch of polish.