Cinnabar and Almanac Adventures Week: Edibles Exchange

Edibles Exchange is also not a particularly funny episode, but it still tells a complete story. Cinnabar and Almanac have apparently gone to a jungle to collect more food. (The potatoes and fish were unpalatable, I guess). All they find are pungent yellow gross things, which are potentially edible.

A storyboard from Edibles Exchange. Cinnabar holds a yellow fruit-type thing, unconvinced that it’s real food.

This episode was interesting to animate on many levels. First of all, there was a new character – and not just any new character, but a Salamander.

The Salamander’s model from Edibles Exchange.

She actually moves in the episode as little as possible, since working around four squat legs was a bit of a challenge. However, in terms of design, she was fun to come up with. I wanted her to look definitely reptile-like, but also as friendly as possible, resulting in a smiley snake mouth. She was also colored mostly in yellows for two reasons: first, Cinnabar is red and Almanac is blue, so yellow sets her apart from each of them. Second, we wanted her color scheme to blend better with the jungle, indicating that she’s the one in this episode who knows her way around. As it turns out, she’s on the hunt for these pungent yellow maybe-fruits, and she’s got a cart full of recognizable food to trade.

Speaking of the cart, it was another thing that made this episode a challenge. It took some time wrestling with layers so the characters could properly put things into carts and crates. This wasn’t something I had considered until fruit was falling directly in front of the cart instead of into it.