Maxwell Atoms Reveals Lost Student Film That Inspired ‘Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy’

By Amid Amidi | 05/01/2016 6:36 pm | 4 Comments

Last night during the Tromanimation Film Festival, Maxwell Atoms screened for the first time his 1995 student film that inspired the series
The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy.

The short, which preceded the Cartoon Network series by eight years, is called Billy and Mandy in Trepanation of the Skull and You. Following the screening, Atoms posted it online:

Atoms (who then used his birth name, Adam Burton) made the film when he was a 21-year-old junior at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. “The directive was to make a two minute animation, and that’s what I did,” Atoms wrote on his Youtube page. “I was big into fringe culture at the time, and found trepanning fascinating. I also wanted to do something with this ‘Billy’ character I was obsessed with, and I HAD to have some dinosaurs.”

He offered a few additional notes about the student short on his YouTube page:

The animation was hand draw[n] on paper, colored in markers, and then cut out and glued to cels. I thought that would save time over painting cels, but the cut-and-glue process really sucked. So I was probably wrong about that.

Atoms attributes the potato quality to the fact that it was “transferred from 16mm shot on a WWII-era Bolex, which was transferred to VHS, then DVD, then ripped [and posted online].”

The short is a reminder that what ends up on television often doesn’t begin as a fully-formed concept. Young artists who aspire to create their own TV shows might be advised to take a page from Atoms’ playbook: focus on developing an artistic voice and honing creative instincts — and worry about the polish later.