Animation and live action collide when a cartoon barbarian dad leaves his war-torn village to re-connect with his moody, non-animated teenage son in suburbia. This is the first time when an animated character has joined in the live action with the live characters on a sitcom. The series, Son of Zorn is about Zorn, a warrior from the fictional South Pacific island of Zephyria who moves to Orange County, California to reconnect with his ex-wife and teenage son Alan.
Can you guys describe the show to usIJ
Cheryl: Son of Zorn is about one animated character voiced by Jason Sudeikis who is this warrior, muscular barbarian-type character from a different country who comes to Orange County to try to reconnect with his son, who he hasn’t seen in ten years. And he’s the only animated character in the show. The rest of us are live action people. And besides that, it’s about a family.
How hard is it to visualise Zorn when you are trying to direct him and maneuvering actors around the setIJ
Eric: Well, I mean, it’s not that hard, there’s a lot of prep that you have to do. There’s a lot of rules that we have with having this two-dimensional animated character in this show. You can’t do certain camera moves, like we want him to look kind of like a flat 2D old Hanna-Barbera character like he’s from the early 80s or something. So the camera can’t rotate around him.
How’d you guys settle on the animation styleIJ You said late 80s; how did you guys settle on thatIJ
Eric: Phil lord had pitched the original idea, it was sitting with lord-Miller for a while. That was kind of the conceit of it when I came on, that it was this action, you know, this character that’s reminiscent of all these Conan the Barbarian and Thundercats and all these different cartoons from that era. So that was kind of set in stone when we hired Titmouse as the animation studio. We just got a little bit deeper into how do we want this character to move in our worldIJ He moves at a different frame rate than the live-action characters do — he’s animated on twos. The live-action people move in 24 frames per second, so there was a lot of figuring out that had to go into that.
How do you guys break convention throughout the seasonIJ
Cheryl: Well, what’s great about Son of Zorn is our writers are so talented and talk about imagination. Every week you cannot believe what you’re seeing, because they come up with something so out of the box. But because our show has a heightened reality, because we have one animated character, they can really take it to a place that you can’t imagine. So when you’re watching the show, there are moments where you’re like, oh my God, that did not just happen. But it did just happen. So I think that’s what makes the show so unique and really fantastic.
Tim: Well, I was going to say some of the storylines, too, are sort of based in, like, reality. And then we have the world of Zephyria on top of those storylines. So we can go anywhere with, you know, how a problem is solved on the show. like, for instance, we had one episode where characters came from Zephyria that were friends of Zorn, and it turned out that one of them was battling alcoholism. We don’t know that in the beginning of the show, and then it’s solved through the characters. It’s hard to explain how it was all done. But it starts off as just sort of like a real, grounded problem that you would see on a sitcom. JohnnyIJ
Johnny: Oh, yeah, Zephyria. It’s like, anything can happen there. There are some rules but there are essentially no rules with that place and where he’s from. Zorn can do anything within reason.
Tim: Yeah, I think we are still all figuring out, like, the rules of how it all works. Because sometimes I’ll ask those guys, is this thing real that we’re talking about, or is it something that’s made up, or how does this logically fitIJ They say don’t overthink, just say the lines and shut up.
If you could have a dream crossover to go on your show, who would you want it to be from FoxIJ
Johnny: lisa Simpson. She’s cool.
Eric: I’d say probably The Simpsons, just because it’s a show that I’ve been watching since I was in fourth grade. I feel the only thing that would make sense is if Radioactive Man somehow existed in Zorn’s universe.
Can you explain to us how it’s a family showIJ
Sally: Well, it’s basically Zorn coming back to Cheryl and she’s now engaged to Tim Meadows’s character, Craig, and she’s got her son, Alan. Zorn is coming back to reconnect with his family, to try to get her back. It’s really kind of the inappropriate dad who shows up wanting to win his family back, except he’s from an animated island.
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