Sure, but I have no idea what you guys will find interesting or not so I apologize if this is all just a dull rambling.
When I started work there I was fresh out of animation school so I was about as low on the ladder as you could get. I was handed my Johnny "Bible" (style guide) and I can tell you with absolute certainty that every ugly artistic choice on that show, from claw hands to weirdly long necks, were all entirely deliberate. Basically a lot of the ugliness you see makes things quick and easy to animate, which was important because we were churning out these episodes fast. You may hear from other animators that their shows can range from 3 weeks to 6 months per episode, well, we were finishing up Johnny in a week.
Again, this was not our choice. This was all mandated by people well above our heads. Some new animators would come in occasionally and take a look at the show, vowing to improve it with their slick animations and better proportions and the boss would sigh, say thank them for putting in four extra hours of their own time but fuck off with that shit, and have someone on the clean up crew basically redo the entire scene to fit the style properly.
It's built to be fast, ugly and cheap.
And honestly, that's kind of what made it fun to work on. We had enough left over creativity and drive to do something nicer that most of us ended up putting effort and time into our personal projects. Or, you know, throwing lovingly detailed, fully animated, huge flopping dicks into scenes.
I shit you not this is something people in our studio did a lot. They never made it past the clean up crew (aaand weren't even supposed to make it THAT far but what can you do? You get tired and forget to delete you layer with the 4 foot phallus on it) and our contracts all started that trying to slip ANYTHING unapproved into a scene would result in immediate dismissal, but sometimes you just have to put dicks on dads, or tits on a dog. It wasn't a sexual thing, just a 'frig, how am I going to make it through this 12 hour work day without going nuts' kind of thing.
And please keep in mind this was just our studio and we only had the show for a short while and I know it bounced around a lot so the studios that have had it the last few years probably have a stricter policy about animated genitalia.
I think that's probably the only interesting or informative things I have about the show. The studio I worked at was great and I feel like we made the best of our time with Johnny.
