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Animated High School with 'Sit Down, Shut Up' Creator Mitch Hurwitz
by Troy Rogers
 There's no question that Fox is the reigning network champions of animated comedy on TV. With The Simpsons, Family Guy, King of the Hill, and other popular animated hits like American Dad and the gone-but-not-forgotten Futurama, Fox found a way to cultivate the growing animated seeds to strike ratings gold on a variety of levels. With King of the Hill about to bid farewell to primetime, Fox now rolls out Sit Down, Shut Up on Sunday, April 19 at 8:30pm, about a colorful, self-absorbed high school staff who live and work in a small Florida fishing town and battle their own inner angels and demons, from the old saying "those who can't, teach," science versus spirituality, and a performance enhanced vice principal to an always defeated German teacher, a washed up librarian, and a secretive janitor.
Featuring a voice cast that includes Jason Bateman, Kristin Chenoweth, Kenan Thompson, Will Forte, Will Arnett, Henry Winkler, Cheri Oteri, and Tom Kenny, Sit Down, Shut Up looks to have all the right vocal ingredients to be a decent newcomer on Fox's animated roster. At the same time, however, fans will be happy to see a number of the old Arrested Development gang reunite as animated characters.
Leading up to the new animated goodness on Fox, we sat in on a conference call with Sit Down, Shut Up creator Mitch Hurwitz and star Will Forte to find out what's up in the animated world of small-town Florida.
Mitch Hurwitz on putting animation against real life photos:
 "I could bluff a little bit and say that we wanted to set the show in the real world and the writing staff is made up of people that come from live action and animation so it expresses that mix well. But in fact it really was just an esthetic thing. I saw Mo Willems’ book, Knuffle Bunny, on a shelf in a bookstore.
"It’s all these pictures of Brooklyn and these little drawings on top of it. And then I got in touch with Mo and he actually designs these characters ... He’s asked that the show not be a representative Mo Willems show because he’s the number one picture book guy and there’s a lot of inappropriate stuff for kids, there’s a lot of stuff I think that’s even inappropriate for Will Forte.
"So he designed the characters and we started to do this technique and the early responses from bloggers and that sort of thing... There was a lot of concern. People said, ‘Boy these guys don’t know what they’re doing,’ which is true, by the way, about animation. But you don’t want to have detail in the background, you want the background to be bland and fall away. But what I have discovered just seeing this is that you really stop noticing it.
It really just becomes more interesting to see actual grass than just a field of green. In a way it has come around to keeping the show in the real world. Even though we’re joking about that, it inadvertently has changed the scale of the show so that you don’t expect animals to talk or U.F.O.s to land. You somehow believe you’re in the world we inhabit and I think it kind of resets the comedy bar a little bit that way."
Hurwitz on whether he had any doubts about diving into another show after Arrested Development:
 "You know, it’s funny, this is a show that I actually wrote in the year 2000 and it was an adaptation of a live action show from Australia. And I kind of kept it in the drawer for a long time and I finally brought it out, mostly because I needed money. I enjoy money and I always used it for all sorts of different things in my life, but mostly for food and shelter. So, no, I’ve been asked the question, ‘Why did you go back to Fox and they cancelled your show?’ You know, I was glad they were willing to make another show with me, and so they’re kind of the only game in town when it comes to animation, which we decided to do early on with this.
"And the only thing I’ll say, again not to embarrass Will, but he’s the only one... Actually, he and Will Arnett were the only two parts that I knew there was only one way to cast because they were both in the Australian show. There was a character named Stuart and there was a character named Stephen. Stuart was just funny and optimistic and still hilarious and I really couldn’t think of another actor that does that.
On whether Sit Down, Shut Up will appeal more to people in small towns since it’s set in small-town Florida:
 "I think it will be equally insulting to every part of the country, don’t you? Like I said, it does take place in a small town, except every time they go out driving they’re clearly driving in Pasadena and Glendale. So that’s little hard to understand. I mean, I personally believe that people are the same everywhere. People are as similarly motivated by self interest everywhere. The show started in Australia and it’s just about oblivious people. In fact, the original show was - in a way, kind of lead to Arrested Development. I just love the idea of people who are equally clueless and equally self involved. And Forte has lines in the show, like somebody insults hid character, Stuart, and then somebody else says, ‘He’s in the room. Aren’t we worried about him hearing this?’ And his line was, ‘He’s so clueless I probably don’t even know we’re talking about him.’ So I think they’re representative of any part of the world."
Writing for a live action show as compared to an animated show:
"Well, it’s interesting, there actually is a difference. There’s a big difference. Anything can be an art, but I’ve noticed that writing for animation is much more joke intensive and much more about the comedy and more specifically much less about grounding a character’s drive. The hardest part that I always found of live action writing - or what I like to call 'just writing,' because I never considered live action writing until this moment - is making a character plausible and believable in their journey, particularly if you’re going to try and get them to some big comic conclusion.
 "That was never more the case with me than on Arrested Development, where I wanted the final scenes to be these kind of block comedy scenes, where the character you’re following, usually Michael Bluth gets to a place where he does something desperate and ridiculous. So each scene is about building that character’s drive and trying to get to the end where somebody doesn’t say, ‘Oh, I don’t buy it. Why would he do that?’ So he’s suddenly going to wear a chicken suit because he needs the money to come in and the other guy is sick and now he can’t get out of the chicken suit. This is obviously a bad example.
"But in animation you do that in scene one - Okay, so the guy is stuck in a chicken suit. You know what I mean? And it becomes a different kind of craft, like - Okay, now where do you go from there and how do you keep that joke alive? That is the biggest difference. And I noticed that - like where actors that come from live action, like Jason Bateman who plays Larry in this thing, and he was very articulate in discovering this process with me - one of the things he noticed is a lot of the stuff he does is getting from A to B with a lot of facial expressions, with playing a lot of intentions.
"So you say, ‘I really support my son going to this football game, but ... I guess I have no choice.’ In animation you just do line to line. You say, ‘I can’t support my son going to this. But okay, let’s give it a try.’ It’s a different kind of acting, you’re really playing everything through your voice and it’s similarly kind of one dimensional that way. And it becomes a new challenge. Okay, now what’s the funniest version of that twist? So it’s just much more heightened comedy without the burden of character motivation, in a way.
"I think. by the way, that is why so many animated shows are about family, because there’s a shorthand there. You don’t need to see Homer feel remorseful about strangling his son and then decide he’s going to show up at the kid’s science fair. He just does it. He strangles him and then he shows up at the science fair, and people get it. People get that that’s his father and of course he’s going to show up. So it kind of deals with archetypes in that way. That’s about an unfunny answer as I can give you."
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