The New Episode Of "Adventure Time" Took A Year To Make

Adventure Time takes time, man.

The upcoming episode of Adventure Time took a year to make because it was filmed entirely in stop-motion.

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We chatted with the episode's writer and director, Kirsten Lepore, about what it was like to recreate the Land of Ooo.

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Animators could complete, on average, 1-2 shots in one work day, which is part of why the episode took a full year to make.

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But it's actually not that crazy, a normally animated episode takes almost as long.

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"It’s actually a pretty similar amount of time. A normal episode is about 9 months in production. Not crazy different," Lepore told BuzzFeed.

Shockingly, not much clay was involved in the process.

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"It’s funny when people assume that because they’re stop-motion, they’re clay. If you were to use clay and move your characters around, [after] a couple frames they’d just be mush."

Each puppet was first made in clay, then artists made a mold of the clay object, and cast the mold with either silicone or hard plastic.

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"It's a long, intense project."

The hardest character to recreate was, of course, LSP.

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"In the 2-D show, they show her from all different angles, and sometimes she’s lumpy from the front or flat from the front… We had many prototypes of her, the early ones looking very wrong and very weird."

And the easiest puppet to create was Jake.

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"We put a magnet underneath the casting, his 'skin,' and then we made multi-layered, paper mouths and backed them with magnets, so we were just popping the magnetized mouths on and off."

Each main character had four puppets each, and they were all made out of different material.

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"LSP is almost entirely silicone, if you touch her she’s kind of squishy. It feels almost like skin. Finn has a squishy silicone head, Jake and BMO had more of hard bodies with arms that could still bend and be flexible."

Each puppet is about 8 inches tall, except for BMO who's only about 5.5 inches tall.

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Any kind of material was fair game for the episode. Pillow stuffing, putty, gel, everything was usable.

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"Every time I go into Home Depot I’m getting stuff for animation, and inevitably someone asks me what I’m using it for, and I’m always like, 'Oh God, how do I begin to explain this to you?'"

Check out "Bad Jubies" this Thursday, January 14 at 7:30 p.m. on Cartoon Network.

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