Adventure Time: Side Quest Creators Discuss Distinct Art Style, Iconic Faces, and Special Episodes

Like other Cartoon Network shows, Adventure Time has made an incredible comeback in the recent 2020s. Although this success is due to Adventure Time: Fionna and Cake, it has opened the door for more stories in this franchise to be explored. This can be seen in the upcoming series, Adventure Time: Side Quests.

Side Quests follows a younger Finn alongside Jake the Dog as they venture throughout Ooo, doing what they do best. The tone and format of the show are heavily inspired by the early seasons of Adventure Time, which some fans are curious to learn about.

I had the opportunity to speak with executive producer Nate Cash, supervising director Victor Courtright, and art director Nick Cross. In our conversation, we discussed designing the unique visuals of Adventure Time: Side Quests, recreating that early-series tone, and more.

Adventure Time fans have seen so many different stories, from the likes of Adventure Time: Distant Lands to Side Quests.

As this narrative diversity shows this franchise’s expansiveness, the Side Quests team reflected on how this series adds to that. “I think resetting Finn to being 12 years old was kind of the keystone of this series,” Cash began.

“All the familiar characters, they’re all the same, and Finn being voiced by a child actor helps everything kind of pivot around that. He is a 12-year-old barbarian boy full of excitement and wanting to be a hero, and as naive as he was in the early seasons.”

Additionally, Cash and Courtright also recalled some iconic episodes that inspired them to create these episodes.

“A lot of them. I think we’ve talked about classic episodes often. ‘Rainy Day Daydream’ is one of my favorites. I probably talked about it too much because it’s so good. ‘My Two Favorite People 2’ is another really classic episode.”

“We watched, collectively as a team, “Rainy Day Daydream” a whole bunch of times,” Courtright added. “We had access to the old animatics and stuff like that. 

“Watching some of those old episodes in their rawest, earliest form, even before voice actors and stuff were in there, it was a collective excitement, seeing a different side of all these classic episodes. That was a big one.”

Adventure Time: Side Quests also uses a different style that’s unlike what fans have seen from other shows. Cross went into detail about what was the hardest part of the show’s design.

“I think the most challenging part was probably just doing the characters without lines,” Cross explained. “It is extremely difficult, especially since the characters, as they’re originally designed, have very simple colors like blue, green, white, yellow. That’s a lot of the environments are in that color palette.”

“Making those characters still read against backgrounds without lines was its own challenge. There was a lot of effort, especially on the back end, to make sure everything all worked when we saw it all composited together.”

Even though Adventure Time: Side Quests utilizes a fresh visual tone, it doesn’t mean that there aren’t a few returning jokes. Fortunately for older fans, those hilarious facial expressions make a comeback, which Cross went into the process of.

“Those come from just the original series, leaning into the storyboard artist’s personal drawing style,” Cross explained. “There wasn’t a guide of how to do expressions.”

“It was just really embracing how individual storyboard artists draw the characters and get some really intense facial expressions, so unique to themselves. Embracing that and making sure that when we get the final product, it honors the weirdness of the original drawing.”

Additionally, Courtright explained how the creative team also accentuates these expressions in the upcoming series.

“It’s a rarity these days, but we were outline-driven,” Courtright added. “I think that draws a lot of visual storytelling power out of the people making it. It’s a requirement. When you get people pushing the extremes of the story through the storyboards, we’re that close to the emotions of the characters.”

“You get those kind of extreme takes and things like that. The board artists bring a lot of that energy and a lot of them are either worked on the original show or were fans of the original show and maybe even learned a little bit watching that back in the day.”

“I’m already thinking of an expression where Jake is trying to stop himself from laughing, and it gets really intense,” Cross recalled.

Adventure Time: Side Quests also has some episodes where Finn and Jake aren’t the main focus. One of these episodes sees Adventure Time‘s iconic girl group, consisting of Princess Bubblegum, Marceline, Lumpy Space Princess, and Lady Rainicorn, playing a Dungeons and Dragons-inspired game.

Cross explained the inspiration behind creating that episode and why that episode doesn’t focus on Finn and Jake.

“It started with that,” Cross recalled. “Just wanting to do an episode that was those four characters and they kind of were bouncing ideas around, and we just knew that we wanted it to be those four and exclude Finn and Jake from it.”

“That just snowballed into a ladies’ night where they’re not invited and a role-playing game. It just snowballed from that, just picking those four characters.”

Cross also presented his childhood Monster’s Manual book, which heavily inspired this episode. “This was such a big inspiration for the original series, too, leaning heavy into something that inspired the original series in a way where the characters in the series can still be inspired by that type of thing.”

—

Adventure Time: Side Quests premieres Monday, June 29, on Hulu and Disney+.

Follow us on X and on Instagram!

Want more from Tell-Tale TV? Subscribe to our newsletter here!