December 3rd, 2024 
Lauren Ashton 
Animation Scoop had the amazing opportunity to speak with the Executive Producers of SpongeBob SquarePants, Vincent Waller and Marc Ceccarelli, as well as Screen Novelties Producer Chris Finnegan, Producer and Co-director Seamus Walsh, and Producer and Co-director Mark Caballero. We discussed the timelessness of Stop Motion Animation and how wonderfully it lends itself to the world of SpongeBob, as well as the deeper attention to detail in de-evolving the look of a project to uphold a feeling of imperfection. We also talk about what goes on behind the scenes, and how the differences between traditional animation and stop-motion are conducive to maintaining the nature of our favorite members of Bikini Bottom.
Lauren Ashton: I want to ask about the creative process of making this film. I can imagine it’s so much fun! Actually, I got to take a peek at the set some time ago, and it looked absolutely fantastic. But I wonder if there’s pressure with deadlines, as well as working with an IP as iconic as SpongeBob SquarePants and Sandy Cheeks. Can y’all talk a little bit about balancing the storytelling and the fun with approaching deadlines and other realities of making an episode for television?
Seamus Walsh: The deadlines are always fun. We love those deadlines!
Mark Caballero: Thankfully, the SpongeBob team gives us plenty of advanced notice, and that allows us enough time to schedule our production on our side accordingly.
Seamus Walsh: We can put the resources in the right place. That’s half of it. Because if you’re starting on things too early, or you don’t have enough information, you just end up wasting time down the line.
Vincent Waller: Yeah, it just looked like an incredibly difficult dance card to fill. It’s like, you’ve got so many rooms and you’ve got the different sets. And like you said, timing all of it together, my brain would explode!
Mark Caballero: Yeah, that’s why we have this board—we call it a “big board”—where you have all the storyboards printed out. You’re constantly juggling because you can’t build an unlimited number of puppets, because each one is so much work. So you’re always trying to think, like, “Oh, let’s shoot this over here on stage six.” But then you might see, “Oh no, all the puppets are on stage four.” So yeah, it can be a giant headache.
Chris Finnegan: Stop motion is definitely the kind of process that you can endlessly noodle everything. If you have all the time in the world, you’ll spend all the time in the world. So it is good to have some limits and deadlines, and it forces us to make choices. For example, when a puppet is talking, you sculpt these different mouth shapes. On some movies, they might make hundreds and hundreds per character, but we try to whittle it down to the core—maybe 30 to 40 per character. And fortunately, SpongeBob is very broad, you know, poppy actions. It’s not super subtle, which helps us to be very bold with those kinds of choices.
Mark Caballero: And with the process with Mark and Vince, they’ll give us a heads-up. And then, you know, maybe a couple of months later, we’ll get a script and say, “Hey, guys, read that.” And so we’ll read it, and we’ll say, “Great!” And then later on, we’ll get boards and animatics and stuff. And then what they’ll do is they’ll give us enough time to be able to take a look at everything and either suggest some ideas or maybe ask if we can modify these different scenes to help consolidate and streamline our process, because at that point, that’s when we’re kind of thinking ahead—like, what kind of specialty gags we want to do, or any kind of specialty puppets or new characters. And that starts playing into the schedule as well. And then we go on our hands and knees, and we beg them for some of our ideas to get done! And they’ll say, “Yeah, do whatever you want!”
Vincent Waller: Everything they do is amazing. These are the only guys that do SpongeBob that don’t have me yelling at that hole placement.
Mark Caballero: That’s high praise! Well, SpongeBob, like our style of animation, is naturally cartoony. We’re big fans of the old-school cartoons where there’s a lot of distortion of proportions—things like bug eyes and everything. And SpongeBob is one of the only ones nowadays where it feels like they’re not afraid to push the bar further and further. And we love that. You know, when we’re asked, “Can you guys do that?” We say yes because it’s a nice challenge.
Seamus Walsh: We want that challenge.
Mark Caballero: We want to be able to not worry about the limitations of what a puppet can do. We always try to exceed ourselves to meet that high bar.
Chris Finnegan: That is a challenge, though it’s a fun challenge, like Mark said. You know, in 2D animation, if you want SpongeBob to, let’s say, twist himself into a pretzel shape, you can just have to draw it. It’s drawing, whereas for us, it’s this whole fabrication process of building. So we have to pick our spots a little bit. But that’s what makes it fun. That’s what sets it apart.
Marc Ceccarelli: And also, these guys are really creative with the techniques that they use. They don’t just stick to, like, simple 3D animation. They really use stop motion. They use puppetry. They’ll throw the kitchen sink at it, you know, they’ll do anything to get the shot. So there’s just this sort of creativity unbound whenever they work on something for us. It’s really amazing.
Mark Caballero: One of my favorite things, Marc, is when you did the first boards for the first Christmas special, and you did a little drawing of Santa as an elf. And we just honed in on that drawing of Santa because he looked a little bit, you know, tired—like, he’s gone throughout the world but he keeps on going. We thought, “We’re gonna take that and go with it.” I loved that drawing. We loved it so much that we decided to make it into a puppet. And so we made him look tired, you know? And that got some good attention!
Marc Ceccarelli: There’s this conversation that’s gone back and forth between you guys and our 2D show because you guys just did that Santa for stop motion, and then we’ve done 2D Santa episodes since then, where we designed it based on your puppet.
Mark Caballero: Yeah, he is a jolly old elf, yeah, and he gets tired, like everybody else!
Lauren Ashton: A relatable Santa. That’s hilarious, and it sounds like there are a lot of moving parts. And while it can be stressful, it adds to the fun and creativity in the world-building, which is amazing. So, on the note of how we were just talking about, for example, different mouthpieces, and how we can keep that animation sort of consistent with what SpongeBob is, I was wondering, if those of you who are animating or overseeing the animation for the stop-motion process, do you often reference existing SpongeBob episodes? From the early stuff or even the most recent 2D episodes? Obviously, the show’s been going for a long time now, and there’s so much richness in all of it. How does that influence what you’ve built in the stop-motion special?
Mark Caballero: Every time we’re gonna go back into Bikini Bottom, we immerse ourselves in it. I always like to catch up on a few of the episodes. For this project, I decided to go back and watch some of the first season that I hadn’t seen in a long time, which was a lot of fun. It was funny because I actually watched the season one DVD extras on it. And then there was a cool interview with Steve Hillenburg on there, where they showed a little montage of his old sculptures and other stuff that he did. But then there was this one little sculpture he did of a house that predates SpongeBob, but the house kind of looks like a primordial stack house. So we decided, as a little tribute to Steve, to make that Stackhouse and put it in the background. And we’ll also look at the episodes and just look at their poses, you know. You’ve got to really match those poses because they really fit the personalities of each of the characters. We want to have that connection between the 2D characters while also establishing the characters in stop motion. When we have our animators jump on the stages, we try to keep it consistent. Like, we know which animator is going to do Sandy, or who is doing other characters, for example, because we want to keep that consistency going. But we also have the reference Sandy from the 2D show because it’s important. It would feel weird if they didn’t move at least within the same ballpark as the 2D characters, right?
Chris Finnegan: Stop motion, more so than CG animation, is a little bit more of a straight-ahead performance from the animator. There’s a little bit of re-timing we can do later, but it’s not like 2D or CG, where you can do lots of revisions. So the animator—every animator—has a slightly different kind of personality that goes to the puppets. That’s really cool.
Lauren Ashton: Speaking of traditional hand-drawn animation versus stop motion, I’m thinking about the evolving technology in the medium. There’s a lot of discussion right now about AI and changes in animation and filmmaking as a whole. We’re seeing some really amazing stuff that utilizes technological advancements to enhance aesthetics and storytelling in animation, but at the same time, it’s really cool that a major studio is putting out a stop-motion film with SpongeBob, right? Stop motion has such an incredible history—I’m thinking also of the original, like, Rudolph and the Santa Claus holiday classics, you know? There’s something so timeless about stop motion. How do you think younger generations will relate to it in today’s world of AI?
Marc Ceccarelli: It’s so funny because stop motion was sort of my gateway into filmmaking. The first person I idolized as a filmmaker was Ray Harryhausen. I would study how he did things. It was my first sort of peek behind the camera, at the process itself. Back when I was a kid getting into it, in the mid-’70s, there was a certain amount of information out there for somebody who would be interested in that kind of stuff. You had to, like, scour the libraries and try to find articles. But nowadays, you can just go on YouTube. For me, it knows that I like stop motion, so it feeds me all kinds of information about it. So for kids nowadays, it must be like a smorgasbord!
Seamus Walsh: You can learn so fast now. Like, when we were first starting out, there weren’t even reference video frame grabbers. You just had to take a pencil or piece of wire, and that was how far you moved something. The ’90s was when the frame grabbers kind of started getting used, and then you had to learn how to use that tool. But I feel that for stop motion, the technique of it hasn’t really changed since 1912, exactly. Really, just the cameras and the video grabbers are different. But the technique itself is the same. It’s funny, because we do use a lot of technology in what we do, such as 3D printing, but we always try to bury it all so you can’t tell that any technology was involved. We try to kind of hide it. We bury the technology because if you don’t, it does end up almost looking too slick. It’s not stop motion unless it has all those weird little mistakes and stuff in it.
Mark Caballero: I’m gonna have a biased opinion, but that’s what I feel is classic about stop motion. I think that kids would still be into it because they know these things exist. Like, these are tactile puppets that exist somewhere—a box or a studio somewhere. And that kind of just lets them run amok with imagination about what you could do with puppets since you can just manipulate and move them around. I remember when I was a kid—Harryhausen was a mentor to me too—watching the Cyclops on the beach. I thought, “How? What? What is that? How does that work?” And nowadays I feel that if the younger generations watch something, they’re not going to be able to point at it and determine if it’s not CGI, or if it’s 2D or not 2D. It’s not that same “What is that?” But with stop motion, the faults of the animator are going to imprint onto the action of the characters. And I think there’s something attractive about that.
Chris Finnegan: It’s a counterpoint to AI. AI now tends to lean more towards slick and shiny and realistic. Stop motion is this other weird, handmade process. That said, I’m not going to say that in two years there’s not gonna be some AI that looks exactly like stop motion.
Mark Caballero: One of our mentors is Ray Harryhausen, and back when we were getting to work with him, he’d say, “Just use innovation as a tool to tell your story.” And I kind of have always taken that to heart. It doesn’t matter what comes our way, or what new medium is going to be used—just use it as your tool. You know, don’t rely 100% on it. Mix it up and get everybody interested in what you’re doing, get them thinking about it. The whole idea is that you’re making this cool story for somebody to follow, not to guess how they made it.
Lauren Ashton: Totally, and it’s such a big discussion right now. I think it’s really cool, as you all noted, that it can be used productively to help create that imperfect thing that, as an audience, we feel and love so much. My last question, on the note of lovable characters: who is everyone’s favorite character in this holiday special, and why?
Marc Ceccarelli: For me, it’s Sandy. Ever since the first stop-motion special they did, I’ve loved the way they portray Sandy. I think she just comes off really well in stop motion. It probably has something to do with the fur. Something about the tactile quality of it. She has this really interesting look, but I also feel that there are aspects of her personality that I always want to get into our 2D work, and it’s sometimes hard to. The way her acting works in stop motion gets us there a lot quicker.
Vincent Waller: I think it’s easier to hit Sandy’s kind of “rough and tumble” side, which is harder to express in 2D because everything’s smooth. Without making her look too ragged, in this one, she does look more ragged, and it’s great.
Mark Caballero: I’m torn because I did love working with Sandy on this one, but I also loved working with Pa Cheeks, because at first we were wondering how we were gonna design his shape, but then he just started coming together as a puppet. I was thinking, “Oh my gosh, I can totally see his personality and that big, huge mustache of his.” I also want to throw another special mention to Slappy, because Peter Lorre is one of my favorite actors. And I remember we were talking about Slappy a couple of years ago, and then all of a sudden, we saw Slappy in the animatic.
Seamus Walsh: Randy was a really fun puppet too, because his proportions are so great. His legs are so long—he has these long, spindly legs with those boots at the end. He was super fun.
Vincent Waller: And you got his wily, sort of cocky personality all with his movements. It’s beautiful.
Chris Finnegan: Also, Rowdy and Rosie, those two little kid squirrels. They’re so small, but they’re always jumping around and flipping stuff.
Vincent Waller: And personally, I still love Santa. He’s just beautiful.
Sandy’s Country Christmas is now available to stream on Paramount +. You won’t want to miss this hilarious holiday special that offers amazing artistry, nostalgia, and a deeper, memorable story that still brings audiences that undeniable deep-sea humor.
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