Miguel Esteban, Ernesto Sevilla and Joaquín Reyes have been collaborating for decades on various projects, some animated, in their fun times, such as Enjuto Mojamuto and Maricón y Tontico. Even then they had foreign titles for reference, from The Simpsons, Futurama and South Park. And although adult animation took new steps until it reached the current Rick and Morty and BoJack Horseman, this wave of risky and disruptive content in content and form, something ugly and dark, has not been reflected in the Spanish television industry until now. Esteban recalls one of the few attempts of the last 25 years how nice it is to survive. (1999), by Emilio Aragon. And a little more. Poor Devil, his new collaboration with Sevilla and Reyes, attempts to open that door by looking in the mirror of the genre’s recent milestones.
Poor Devil is the first adult animated series commissioned by HBO Max Spain, produced by Buendía Estudios (also responsible for the Blackout series and the program Drag Race Spain) and arrives in the platform’s international catalog this Friday, February 17th under the name Poor Devil. Its protagonist, Stan, looks like an average guy, but he’s actually the Antichrist. He has only a few 666 months left and with them the prophecy that must fulfill his mission: to plunge humanity into terror and chaos. The problem is that, against the wishes of his three parents, he’s more interested in making it big in a Broadway musical.
“We would be very happy if, thanks to our series, people could see that this genre works, that it is possible and that we can benefit from the large number of good animators in this country. These are people who actually work in foreign productions,” said Miguel Esteban, the head of this project, at the beginning of the week. He mentions another type of narrative talent that the Spanish audiovisual sector could use to promote animation for adults. Rafillo, creator of the web series Querida Conchi, the filmmaking duo Burnin Percebes or Rocío Quillahuaman from Lima, Barcelona. They could all have their own animated television series, says the director and writer.
In fact, the entertainment industry (and how much it mistreats its talents) in the opening chapters of this first season of Poor Devil is one of those hellish places that this comedy, a little over 20 minutes a chapter, poke fun at. . It appears in it as another branch of wild capitalism, along with other current hells like advertising and social media. “The theme of the series allows us to open a path to talk about good and evil. But we prefer it to be a very earthly good and evil, one that we already know,” Esteban comments.
New York, animated from Granada
Based on a horror genre masterpiece like Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968), the creators of Poor Devil are relocating this special family comedy to modern-day New York instead of shooting in Spain. They do this, among other things, to take advantage of the creative possibilities offered by the animation of the story, which would be much more difficult to achieve in a live-action comedy. “We enjoyed playing the story in a place we didn’t live, including flaws that the viewer can easily spot even if they didn’t come from there. It’s a way of reversing something that’s been happening all our lives, when Hollywood movies showed a Spain we don’t know,” he says. The natural evolution of this trio of creators has meant that in Poor Devil little remains of the absurdist, Manchega-accented humor of La hora chanante in favor of what Esteban calls “a more formal, less gag-based madness.” Are defined.
Rokyn Animation, the Granada studio with which the trio is already preparing a future feature film, shaped the sketches created by Joaquín Reyes to build the characters and the fake New York of the series. From this company comes the creative direction of Manuel Sicilia and the production of Francesca Nicoll. For 15 months and many online conversations in between, they created Pobre diablo together, between Madrid and the Andalusian city.
Part of the Rokyn animation team working on one of their animation projects from Granada.
Sicilia has been promoting the Spanish animation industry from Granada for years, albeit almost always in the field of cinema. He is a Goya Award winner for Best Animated Film for El lince perdido (2008) and has worked in a variety of genres and formats, from short films to children’s stories. With the arrival of Poor Devil adult animation on television, this quote, attributed to filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock, is reconfirmed. “To write a great story you need three things: the script, the script and the script,” he recites over the phone in his studio.
“Now there’s more and more animation content that’s similar, Pixar-style and Disney-style. Here we looked for the aesthetic that best suited the story,” he defends. For the animator, the design of the backgrounds of the image and the careful definition of the identity of some characters, like the sweetness and vulnerability of his protagonist Stan, were two of the key points to find his own personality in this series. . . As the chapters progress, famous characters appear that are very recognizable to the audience. Maintaining the visual essence of the project was the most important thing for Rokyn Animation, which is why, explains Sicilia, the facial features of these celebrities had to adapt to the aesthetic universe of Poor Devil.
Additionally, the actors who voice the characters were responsible for interpreting, not dubbing. Many of them, Esteban recalls, were created with the actor or actress in mind who would impersonate them. For example, Joaquín Reyes is Stan, the young protagonist; Ignatius Farray plays his father, a Satan with a Canarian accent; and the late Verónica Forqué takes care of her mother, inspired by the sweetness of Mia Farrow from The Devil’s Baby.
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