For co-founders Chris and Shannon Prynoski, what began as a side-gig selling t-shirts eventually became an award-winning animation production powerhouse with studios in Burbank, Hollywood, NY and Vancouver and a legion of adoring, passionate, and often slightly bent fans.
This year, the American animation studio Titmouse, famous for their work on award-winning projects like Big Mouth and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, celebrates their 25th anniversary. After a quarter century of making exemplary cartoons – like Superjail!; Arlo the Alligator Boy; Beavis & Butthead; Star Trek: Lower Decks; Fairfax; The Legend of Vox Machina; Love, Death & Robots; Tales of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and over 60 others – Titmouse has earned admiration from almost every corner of the animation industry.
To celebrate this milestone, the studio received dozens of video-recorded Thank-Yous from friends like Digman!’s Neil Campbell and Andy Samberg, El Tigre’s Jorge Gutierrez, Mappa’s Masao Maruyama, Star vs. the Forces of Evil’s Daron Nefcy, the folks at Critical Role, and many more. Titmouse’s founder, Chris Prynoski, rented a white van at this year’s San Diego Comic Con and invited journalists - contrary to warnings most of us remember about stranger-danger – to hop in and take a ride with Titmouse.
AWN obliged and joined Prynoski in the camper van – decked out with banners of tigers, mushroom curtains, and supplied with ample sketchpads and colored pens – to talk about Titmouse’s origins, their most challenging projects, raising his son in the studio and future experimental endeavors.
Victoria Davis: I don't know if you've answered this a thousand times before, but where did the logo and mascot come from? Why a titmouse bird?
Chris Prynoski: It's really stupid. There's no good story.
VD: I'll take any story.
CP: When I started the company, I intended it to just be a side hustle where I sold t-shirts on the internet. I’d sold some to my friends and wanted to start a website. In the year 2000, in my 20s, the internet seemed like a good place to sell shit. And “Titmouse” just sounded like a funny, stupid word that maybe sounded a little dirty, but wasn't. It’s just the name of a cute bird. But once we got into animation and started going to festivals in places like France, people thought the name was really cute because the French word for “little” is “petit,” so it sounds like “small mouse.” Meanwhile, in the U.S., people were like, “Do you guys do porn or something?”
VD: Had they not seen the logo?
CP: Well, I mean, have you not seen Big Mouth?
VD: Fair enough.
CP: But how I even found out about the bird was, in high school, watching comedian Chris Elliott on an episode of Get a Life where he’s asked to spell the word “titmouse” and he can’t because he’s giggling too much. That’s what made me think of it as being a stupid but funny name for the company.
VD: It works though because Titmouse’s animation work is very comedy-forward.
CP: Exactly. We don't really have a house style. The closest thing we have to that is our sensibilities. It really boils down to, “Is it a cartoon?” and “Do we like it?” And that's it.
VD: One of the first projects you guys worked on was Avatar: The Last Airbender and one of the more recent projects was Critical Role’s The Legend of Vox Machina. Is it wild to be at a convention like San Diego Comic Con where Avatar and Critical Role are both celebrating milestone anniversaries alongside your studio? Especially considering Titmouse was initially supposed to be a t-shirt company?
CP: It is weird. And it's fun. Avatar was such an interesting thing because I’d worked with Mike DiMartino, who created the show with Bryan Konietzko, at MTV for years in the pits as artists. And, when Bryan moved out to LA and was soliciting advice for the pitch for Avatar, I gave him thoughts on it. When that was greenlit, Titmouse was brand new, but we did the main title sequence.
And separate from Titmouse, I still worked on Avatar at Nickelodeon. I was still working at the other studios because Titmouse wasn’t a viable company yet and I needed an income. It was like my wife Shannon, who co-founded Titmouse with me, who at some point said, “You’ve got to quit your job at Cartoon Network and focus on this because this is becoming something.” But I was not certain.
VD: I love that she was such a cheerleader for this.
CP: And because we didn’t have kids or a house or anything at that point I figured, “We could always live in a van if things go south.”
VD: And here you are, celebrating 25 years of a very successful animation studio, renting out a van for interviews.
CP: Yes. And we promise not to murder you.
VD: We at least need to finish the interview. Was Shannon also in the animation industry before Titmouse?
CP: We both went to the School of Visual Arts in New York, but she was in live-action film, and I was in animation. She ended up working on projects doing a lot of retouching work and, when she would visit me at MTV, was always like, “It looks like you guys have fun.” And I was like, “Yeah you should quit your job and get into animation.” She did and became a color stylist where she’d be basically picking the colors for all the characters. Then she started getting hired for production and animation. Early on at Titmouse, she was the sole producer.
VD: It’s cool that you and your wife both convinced each other to quit jobs in order to pursue your passions. And you’ve had kids since then who have grown up as your studio has grown. What’s that been like?
CP: Our son is really into it. He's 13, so who knows what he's going to do with his life. But he's a creative kid and sometimes we'll make little cartoons and movies together, so he gets to experience the culture of the studio. Titmouse is kind of like his second home. He spends a lot of time there and brings his friends over. He actually runs Dungeons & Dragons campaigns with his friends at the studio. He’s also our best critic and will tell us what shows he likes and doesn’t like. We recently introduced him to Big Mouth and, initially, he didn’t really have much of a reaction. When I asked him later if we wanted to watch more, he told me he already binged watched the entire series.
VD: I imagine it's hard to choose, but when you look back on the many projects Titmouse has been a part of, are there ones that stand out as either being particularly challenging or unique?
CP: Every single one. They all have different challenges because no production is the same. That’s what makes it fun. If they were all the same, it would get boring. In the middle of working on these projects, things get stressful, but we always look back and think, “That was weirdly fun.” Metalocolypse, in particular, was probably the most fun and the most challenging simply because it was one of our first series. I'd worked on many series either as an artist or as a showrunner, but never at my own studio. So, it was a whole new challenge to try and figure out how to do such a thing.
Metalocalypse was such a group effort and such a challenge, but it was also so fun because we were all figuring it out together. And that came with no style, no meetings, no plan, no anything. And the things that we didn't know at the time, we just made up. I'm kind of glad I didn't know anything, because some of the decisions we made at the time, which turned out to be the right choices, wouldn’t have been made the same way if I’d known more. That show did well because we went with our guts.
VD: How much has Titmouse grown over the years? I know it started out with just you and Shannon against the world.
CP: It ebbs and flows. We now have four locations: Hollywood and Burbank in LA and then we also have our two locations in New York and Vancouver. We might be looking at opening up another location in the future. Plus, so much of our work is remote now so, to give you a broad scope, in the last five years, we’ve had anywhere between 800 to 1,500 employees. And it goes up and down depending on the project.
VD: How do you keep things fun with such a large group of artists without letting operations at Titmouse get too serious or rigid?
CP: We have had to grow and become more professional, but we find ways to keep things fun. For example, in our Burbank building, which is a three-story building, there’s a lot of wall space. We put paint markers in both stairwells so anyone can draw and have fun when they need a work break. We want to keep the environment creative.
VD: Do you ever find questionable content drawn on the walls?
CP: Oh yeah. Anybody can draw whatever they want on the walls. I didn’t want to make a set of rules for what can be drawn. But, for things that could potentially be an HR issue, we ended up implementing a drawn character on the walls called “HR Bot.” So, if anyone draws something problematic, HR Bot comes along and draws over it to make it into something less questionable. We’ve had HR bot turn penises into four-leaf clovers with the thought bubble, “How lucky! A four-leaf clover!”
VD: That's a brilliant idea.
CP: It’s a way to keep things respectful but also fun and funny… hopefully.
VD: Well like I said, comedy is really a through-line for you guys.
CP: Exactly.
VD: As you guys look ahead to the future, are there types of animated projects you haven’t done that you are anxious to tackle?
CP: Something we’re getting into a lot now is experimental stuff. Typically, our work is seen on a screen of some sort, like a TV, iPhone or computer. But now we're getting into projects where it's in an environment of sorts, and that's fun.
VD: Can you share anything more about that?
CP: We're working with partners on that which have not been announced yet but will be announced sometime in the future. I can’t even share what kind of environment it is. But we will soon.
Victoria Davis is a full-time, freelance journalist and part-time Otaku with an affinity for all things anime. She's reported on numerous stories from activist news to entertainment. Find more about her work at victoriadavisdepiction.com.
