[INTERVIEW] ‘Jesus 2’ Animator, Jesse Moynihan (Sundance Animator Spotlight Series #5)

Next up in our series interviewing the Sundance animators, we have a conversation with Jesse Moynihan of the short ‘Jesus 2’. 

We’d like to give you a chance to introduce yourself, and tell us a little bit of how you got started in animating?

I just started putting all my film ideas into comics and applying for grants and stuff like that. And I started self publishing and going around to comic conventions and selling my comics… And then Penn Ward, who created the show Adventure Time, found my comics at a convention… and a couple months later, he offered me a job because that was the, around the end of the first season of Adventure Time… My career has been animation since then. And I worked on Adventure Time for, like, seven years.

Why don’t you tell the readers a little bit about the short?

The short is called Jesus 2… it’s a counterargument to myself, to my own anxiety and fear. I made this story about this Messiah who flies around on a black comet. And these black comets or black orbs are like a big, major motif in my work. And he flies around on the black orb and he sprays this, like, goo all over the universe. And when the people absorb the goo, they can’t die. And so it’s been thousands of years of no one dying. And it’s sort of, everyone’s dealing with their immortality in different ways.

…And some people are fighting to kill, that want to kill this creature named Jesus 2, in order to restore mortality to the, you know. And so that’s what these two brothers are trying to do. And they’re communing with, like, angels and stuff like that in order to get power to destroy Jesus.

One of the things that impressed me the most about it was the colors that you were able to achieve and the incredible backgrounds. What was that process like, creating?

There are some backgrounds that took me… months to get done…. Luckily, there was no time limit. It was just whenever I get this done. I worked with some people, this guy Adrian Dexter, who helped me paint the city backgrounds. And we  would go back and forth for months about, like, how to approach what cities looked like in this sort of Hell future.

What would be your advice to animators who hope to submit to Sundance?

I’ve been rejected from a lot of festivals. Like I submitted to a lot of festivals and I got into a few and I still am getting accepted into a few here and there, but there are some that I really wanted to get into that I didn’t. I was like crossing my fingers and I didn’t get in, you know, and I think it’s really… I do think it’s kind of random in a weird way because the people who are curating these festivals all have different tastes.

And you just don’t know who you’re going to line up with. So you might not get into… Like Jesus 2 didn’t get into some big festivals and then got into like Sundance. I don’t think there’s any rhyme or reason to it. I think it really is just the specific taste of the panel of people who are curating the festivals. So I, my suggestion is just if you’ve got the budget, apply everywhere.

For more of our conversation with Jesse check out the full interview below. If you get a chance to see ‘Jesus 2’ at the Sundance Film Festival, let us know what you think.