Getting Gross with Devin Flynn

“Y’all So Stupid” is an internet cartoon show the length of a pop-song, packing in a non-linear miscellany of neon abstractions, metrosexual cholos, flying eyeballs squirting goo, and catchy musical spoofs. The creator is New York-based Devin Flynn, who does the animating, sound, music and writing. Flynn is also one half of the band Devin and Gary with fellow renaissance-man artist Gary Panter, and juggling all of these things means he’s often up working on his animations all night. I woke him up around noon with my call.

Theme: Your narratives seem spontaneous and improvised—a cholo rejects an old pizza because cockroaches have built a pueblo on it, then we’re in the pueblo’s sleazy club, settling in a room with cockroaches hitting bongs. Is your working process unusual for animation?
Devin Flynn: I describe “Ya’ll So Stupid” as a garbage disposal for all my ideas. I do a lot of note taking and sketching, piling up material, never knowing where it’s going. It’s stream of consciousness, a collection of disparate scenes and drawing styles and universes, with a connective tissue. It’s like a city, a mental location. I feel like I could do the show for the rest of my life because it’s so accommodating. I was brought up with both parents being fine artists and I approach these animations like paintings, each episode like a canvas. I think of the ideas as compositional elements. If something’s missing it’s really obvious to me—it could be a piece of narrative or an abstract background. My early work was like animated sketchbook pages, improvised to move to music. Each scene was done quickly, in a couple of hours, which is how I developed my loose style. Some scenes are waiting around and I’ll just slot them into an episode. This improvisation isn’t so common among animators.

“Aqua Teen Hunger Force”

Some of the most far-out characters are actually based on real people—Cee-Stilt, the krumping party clown on parole, is clearly based on the real-life Tommy the Clown from the documentary Rize. How distant is the world of “YSS”?
It’s a parallel universe. If I want my favorite rapper to go hang-gliding, I can do it because he’s in my animation. I want to distort and filter things from the real world. I loved Rize, I was so into the characters. Cee-Stilt is actually a combination of people. The voice actor who does him is a friend I grew up with, Lance Lamont, an abstract painter who spent his childhood in a really rough area called “The Jungle,” right near the Baldwin Theatre in Los Angeles. He based Cee-Stilt’s voice and persona on a kid from his neighborhood. Lance has never done any acting other than the show—he’s just a friend, like everyone involved. None have professional experience in this type of thing. Another constant is the artist Todd James who did the voice of that blue guy who puts dynamite in the frog that explodes oil. There’s musical help by Brian Chippendale from Lightning Bolt playing drums, jamming with me on bass.

Photo by Fumie Ishii

There’s a scene in “YSS” where guys drink beers in their butts, another where a jock applies shit to his own face in the mirror...
A lot of that humor just comes out of growing up and vandalizing magazines. Since I was a kid, me and my dad used to draw arrows on people’s heads and black out their teeth. The jock with shit on his face actually came from a photo of some dude in front of a mirror that I defaced to look like he was doing that. The drinking beer through your ass is based on an urban myth—you always hear people say they have a friend of a friend who tried it with rum and he drank too much and got real sick. These are jokes you might think but never say. Because I have an outlet, especially animation, you can almost hide and still say the joke. I don’t think I’d generally be known for having a sick sense of humor. It goes back to joking with friends, because I get egged on to get grosser.

The theme music and pacing is rooted in television culture, while also subverting it—like playing a laugh track as a mother explains gang war traditions to a baby. Do you watch a lot of TV?
I got all my TV-watching out of my system when I was younger, frying my brain on enough TV for ten people, I was a zombie from six to my early teens. The other influence is music. The sound effects are timed pretty rhythmically, with each sound like a beat. My musical timing informs my animations and because I’m making more music nowadays, the animation is actually informing my music.

“Aqua Teen Hunger Force” poster

You worked with Eric Wareheim of “The Tim and Eric Show,” making the video for the Flying Lotus song “Parisian Goldfish.” It’s pretty sordid. What inspired you to paint out that couple’s underwear in flash in front of wild background patterns so that they’re making crazed, psychedelic love?
I thought that song sounded porny. It had a sensuality. The video didn’t have the warmest reception at the outset, the artist was a little shocked. We had requests to make it more psychedelic and less porny, and we were like “No, it’s supposed to be nasty!” You get a lot of requests from clients making videos. I recently did a video for hip-hop producer Alchemist, and he insisted his buddy Prodigy from Mobb Deep be depicted busting out of jail through the walls.

“Parisian Goldfish”

Is it difficult working in commercial animation, coming from a fine arts aesthetic?
I was a little self-conscious being the guy in my family who became a commercial artist. Artists like Gary Panter helped me—someone who’s comfortable designing sets for “Pee Wee’s Playhouse” while showing fine art in museums and making music. Gary made me feel terribly ambitious, almost to a fault. I want to do everything now! Everyone’s always complaining that TV sucks, culture sucks, so it’s like, “I’ll make TV, I’ll make a band, let’s make our own culture!”