Hey Arnold

"Hey Arnold!" was an American animated television series created by Craig Bartlett for Nickelodeon. The show's premise focuses on a fourth grader named Arnold who lives with his grandparents in a large city. Episodes centre on his experiences navigating big city life while dealing with the problems he and his friends encounter, including urban legends.

The series aired on Nickelodeon from 1996 to 2004, having received generally positive reviews with critics praising its character development and the quality of its animation. The feature film based on the series that came out in 2002 was unfortunately met with negative reviews. A second feature film titled "The Jungle Movie" had been planned as the finale for the series, it involved Helga and Arnold going into the jungle to find Arnold's long-lost parents. Nickelodeon however cancelled this project for reasons unknown, many fans to this day still campaign for it to be made (Myself included, to be honest, especially after seeing the amazing leaked test footage...).

In 1987, while working on "Pee-wee's Playhouse", Craig created claymation cutaways about a character named Penny and her friend Arnold. During pitch meetings about 6 years later when he started working as a writer (Alongside five other writers from "Rugrats"), Craig had intended to highlight the Penny character in the "Penny" tapes during one of these meetings. What he did not expect was for the executives to be more impressed with Arnold, who was a minor character as compared to Penny, and it was from there where they began developing Arnold and evolving him from claymation to cel animation.

At the time (I am going to include the early 2000s here), there were many cartoons that focused on the lives of preteens and teenagers (Such as "Pepper Ann", "As Told by Ginger", "Doug", "Rocket Power", "Recess", "Braceface", etc... and don't get me started on the live action ones...), but it wasn't surprising to see that "Hey Arnold" was in the top five of that considerably long list of animated teen sitcoms, especially as its writing and animation just continued improving with each season (Which is not something that happens with most shows).

One of the most obvious things about the show is its incredibly diverse cast of characters, while Arnold already has a pretty unique design of his own, what with his football shaped head and interesting attire (Well, it's not that interesting, but that shirt under his sweater gets mistaken for a kilt all the time), the supporting characters are just as interesting as him. When it came to their designs, Craig and his group did an absolutely fantastic job in creating a set of unique looking individuals, and I am not just talking about the kids, but the adults as well. The designers were definitely not afraid to make more normal or even ugly looking characters (An issue a lot of us inspiring character designers definitely face is giving our characters rather generic features, in fear that they would look unattractive otherwise).

This was probably because the main cast were still preteens, but I felt that the designers weren't afraid to give their attractive characters more strangely shaped features, especially since most folks would think that the prettiest face shape would be a slender (Sometimes long) one, characters such as Ruth, Lila, Helga (YES, she is definitely good looking), Phoebe and grown ups such as Miss Felter (A substitute teacher in one episode), Olga Pataki, Tish Wittenberg and Stella (Arnold's mother) all happen to have rounded faces. There are definitely a few characters with more slender shaped faces... but I don't think they were as attractive or outstanding as the characters we grew to love over the run of the series.

And no, they didn't cheat just by giving them different coloured skin tones from one another, they all had unique body shapes, facial features, hairstyles (Some even whackier than others), clothing and accessories. And by including these so-called minorities such as asians and african-americans, they made sure that they were just as fully developed as any other character in the show, instead of making them token characters.

When it comes to the writing, while the characters initially seemed to fit various well known cliques or archetypes (Such as the bully, the rich girl, the nerd, etc.), each character is shown to evolve past such labels overtime (Well, unless they were really, REALLY minor characters). It has already been mentioned before, but "Hey Arnold" had a fantastic group of writers, seeing that they were able to successfully create such three dimensional characters that each had their own merits and faults (Even Oskar has his moments despite all the crud he pulls throughout the series... also R.I.P, Steve Viksten).

And so this was a serious trip down memory lane, when we were told to write about various examples focusing on character and narrative, this show immediately came to mind. It is a perfect example of how designs and writing should be done (Also did I mention that the animation quality is pretty impressive?), even in this day and age.

But yes, here's hoping that they will actually finish that second movie someday... (Nickelodeon seriously makes the worst decisions sometimes...)