Nightmare Ned is looking like one of the surprise hits of this waning US TV animation season. It launched on April 19th, and already is one of the most popular shows among kids 2-11 on the ABC schedule. It's surreal on one hand and rather uncomfortably real on the other...Ned's daytime traumas with bullies and family life manifest in his wacky, surreal nightmares.

The man at the helm of this show is Donovan Cook, an animator and cartoonist whose relatively short career has been peppered with impressive milestones. While still in his Twenties, Cook directed an entire series for Turner and Hanna-Barbera, 2 Stupid Dogs. With Nightmare Ned he continues his role as senior director.

His love affair with animation really began in his teens, when most of his peers eschewed cartoons as "kids' stuff."

"Basically I was into animation like every other kid when I was young. Then you go through a period, maybe around 12 or 13, when it's suddenly not cool to like cartoons...you're in Junior High and you get persecuted by your peers if you still admit to liking cartoons....you get to that age and you phase out of it for survival reasons. Then you forget about it. Then when I was maybe 15 or so, my parents got cable and we got the Disney Channel in some package or another. I checked it out because I was curious and I got to see some of the great old Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck shorts....All of a sudden I saw the animation and could see a lot in it that I couldn't before...I was drawing comic strips at the time and seeing this amazing animation, I realized that what I really wanted to do was to animate.

"Disney really wasn't that huge for me as a kid...I liked Yogi Bear, Scooby Doo, the classic Warner Bros. shorts...Disney really didn't do it for me back then. I suppose that might have been because the shorts didn't get much exposure then...you'd see little bits and pieces but nothing straight through. The old Disney shorts were amazing in that they achieved a level of quality which nobody has touched even to this day."

"Once I got back into animation I revisited the Hanna-Barbera stuff and was really into Ed Benedict's design work. I also liked a lot of UPA's work too. Ward Kimball at Disney was great too...his designy stuff."

"I started pretty quick in High School...I was constantly making flip books on notebooks, school books...nothing was safe. I was constantly experimenting with things like that."

"I wasn't accepted in Cal Arts right after High School...my portfolio wasn't good enough, so I spent an entire year drawing and trying to better my style. I got in the year after...1988."

During his tenure at Cal Arts, he interned at Disney, and was involved in the making of the feature The Little Mermaid. But one of his most exciting periods was the brief time he worked at Spumco on the ill-fated second season of The Ren & Stimpy Show.

"I was only (at Spumco) for three months...not terribly long. I was there when all the bad stuff went down. I learned a lot there, though....John K.'s amazing. Up until the time I started working there, I had absolutely no exposure to the television animation process. I only knew the feature animation process, which differs greatly from that of TV animation. I just think John is the first guy to completely reinvent a style of animation since Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera. John created a new take on limited animation...limited animation that wasn't limited. He had so many cool people working with him at the studio in Hollywood, and also up in Vancouver at Carbunkle. Bob Jaques and Kelly Armstrong over at Carbunkle later wound up saving my skin on 2 Stupid Dogs...they animated 6 episodes out of the original 26. John created a new way to have really great animation but still be economical about it."

But Nightmare Ned, far more so than 2 Stupid Dogs, has pushed Donovan Cook into the public eye.

"I was approached about a year and a half ago to do the show...the property existed at Disney as a videogame that they had acquired. They decided to also do a TV show...they liked the concept of a little boy having nightmares. There already was a couple of writers on board when I started, and then from there I was able to get together a crew. We then kicked the development process off...everyone had an idea of where we shouldn't go with the series, we wanted to make sure the kid wasn't wimpy but still had some vulnerabilities. We kind of grew as we went along."

But did Donovan go back to the great granddaddy of dreaming kids, Little Nemo, for inspiration?

"We never looked at Little Nemo...I assume that maybe someone did somewhere down the line, but it never was anything we looked at. I didn't know much about him...I wasn't a real aficionado of the comic strip. Conceptually, dreams are a great place to go for animation...anything can happen in ones dreams. However, it's not like most of the similar concepts in the past, where the kid daydreams out of boredom or out of some sort of "Walter Mitty" thing...he is having nightmares. It's not in his control. Hopefully that's what makes Ned a little different."

Many have noted many similarities between the twisted world Ned lives in and the visions of auteur Tim Burton. The cartoon's score by Steve Bartek, a longtime associate, collaborator and orchestrator for Danny Elfman, only serves to amplify the Burton connection. But it's not really by design, as Donovan explains.

"The design of the show went through a strange evolution. Ned and Ned's Mom and Dad were designed by an artist named Walt Dorn who works at the software company, Creative Capers. They were first conceived of as part of the game. You wouldn't look at Walt's drawings and say 'oh, that looks like Tim Burton's character designs' but it's in that same sensibility. It's dark and kind of twisted. We have pushed a little more towards the UPA style and the Ed Benedict at Hanna-Barbera style to animate it. We wanted to lighten it up a little, make it a little less menacing. It definitely comes from that same direction, and people will probably make a connection between where we're coming from and where Tim Burton comes from."

The show's been a big commercial success, which encourages Donovan.

"Everyone's really excited that the show's been received so well. One of the big frustrations I went through with 2 Stupid Dogs was that it didn't have a venue. It started out in syndication, and it didn't even get into all of the ten biggest markets. It seemed like nobody could see it. Now it's running three times a day on The Cartoon Network. People see it a lot now, but back when it mattered nobody saw it. It barely existed. But Ned's been out for three weeks now (from the time this interview took place) and from what I understand a million people saw it last weekend. It's great. I hope the show goes well enough to where it gets picked up for another season by ABC. I believe it has a good chance for a nice run...a nice life."

And what else does Donovan have up his sleeve for the future?

"As for my plans...well, I am looking at a lot of options right now...there's possibilities for new series, and maybe features, not just here at Disney but elsewhere too. "

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Page last updated 1/15/1998

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