Originality

OK, I’m just gonna get it out. Every day I worry about my future in Animation. I worry if I’m ever going to get a good job at a real animation company, if I’ll ever be able to make any of my cartoons a reality, and most importantly if people think my ideas are original enough. I have ideas for my own cartoons that I hope to make in the future, but being my own toughest critic, I sometimes tell myself they’re not original enough. Looking at a lot of the cartoons today, outside of Disney anyway, nothing seems original to me anymore. And I don’t want to get in trouble when trying to pitch my cartoons, or be accused of ripping others off.

Recently, the one cartoon of mine that I’ve been expanding on a lot is My Dog’s A Vampire. After checking out a recent new show on the Disney Channel called The Owl House (which is a very damn good show by the way), watching it just sparked my creativity to expand on my vampire dog story. But honestly when I first saw it, there were a lot of elements used in that show that are similar to some of the ideas for my vampire dog cartoon, even down to one of the characters named being named Lilith! Although, as I watched our house, I also get some senses of familiarity, like in particular, I get a lot of Harry Potter vibes watching the show, Especially when it comes to the school. I also get a lot of Doctor Strange vibes based on how the witches in the show perform magic. Another example for me would be Gravity Falls. It’s hailed as one of the best animated series in recent years. When it first came out, I didn’t think it was that special. I thought “Ok, I got this story figured out. It sounds more like the plot to a Goosebumps book.” But then it won me over with its quirky, memorable characters, deep stories, intriguing mysteries, and abstract uniqueness, even thought the plot sounded too familiar. Just because an idea doesn’t sound original on paper doesn’t mean it’s bad, as long as something fresh is added to it. Granted, Gravity Falls was just all over the place and in a good way, and nobody can ever compete with that.

Another thing I learned a while ago is that Cartoon Network has already made an adaptation of the Bunnicula books, which I will confess I was sort of inspired by. I’ve seen a few episodes of that and I was charmed by some things about it, like some of the creativity that went into it. But watching it, I pretty much got what I was expecting to see. I did imagine the show to be a little goofy. I mean the director was Maxwell Adams (the same guy who created the Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy), but the show was OK for what it was. But I wanted to tell My Dog’s A Vampire in a different format. Like, if Bunnicula was Teen Titans Go, then My Dog’s A Vampire would be similar to the original Teen Titans, where the focus is more on character development, recurring story arcs, and has an overall mystery, and just sprinkles the zany comedy. My show will also teach lessons like individuality, peer pressure, and overall dealing with prejudice; Explaining the wrongs of fear vs. acceptance, even though a lot of things in recent years have already done a message like that, like Zootopia, Hotel Transylvania, and Star Vs. the Forces of Evil (which I swear to God, I have never seen an episode of in my life!!!). Before you grab your torches and pitchforks, it just didn’t seem like a show that interest me. I guess I just couldn’t get into it because of the animation; it was during a time when I thought cartoons nowadays were taking the bandwagon similar to Adventure Time or Regular Show (again, please don’t grab your torches and pitchforks!!!). But I recently learned that Star Vs. also deals with prejudice (which honestly Disney has been exploding a lot in some of their other recent movies). I learned it based on what this person has to say...

and 17:00 of this link (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsU60IMMajU).

In conclusion, I’m sure my ideas for animated shows don’t sound very original right now, and they probably will never be as out of the boxes any of the shows I mentioned above, but I am still trying as hard as I can to make my shows as enjoyable and interesting as possible so that one day they will get picked up and become a reality one day, even though it is possible that possibly many of them, if not all of them, won’t.