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.”
