Animator’s Tale Is of the Mimicking Kind

Youth-obsessed Hollywood’s newest wunderkind has been taking a lot of meetings with producers and directors lately--that is, when he can squeeze them in between basketball and soccer practice.

John Reynolds, a 12-year-old seventh-grader at Valley View Middle School, is creator and creative consultant of “Terry & Chris,” which airs next fall on Nickelodeon’s prime-time animated series “Oh Yeah! Cartoons!”

The wiry preteen with a casually spiky haircut has been putting in regular shifts at Nickelodeon Animation Studios in Burbank, fine-tuning his animated comedy short about Chris, a boy with a cockatiel, Terry, that not only talks, but pops his head into a likeness of anybody he imitates.

While Hollywood is abuzz over ever-younger writers and directors taking over plum projects and roles, John has quietly trumped such rising stars as 16-year-old Maggie Whorf, who has been shopping around a cartoon about high school girls, and wannabe teenager Kimberlee Kramer, who at 32 landed a writing gig on the TV series “Felicity” earlier this season by posing as 19-year-old Riley Weston.

“Riley who?” John asked last Saturday, unwinding after basketball practice with a bout of Super Nintendo against his 9-year-old brother, Kyle, in the living room of their Simi Valley home.

“John draws a lot; everywhere we go he brings his paper,” said his mother, Sandy Sumpter, a teacher’s aide at the city’s Santa Susana Elementary School. “His first cartoon was called ‘Goon & Geek.’ I think he did that in the first grade.”

His latest--the one destined for prime time--was inspired by the family’s pet cockatiel, Petrie, who perches in a cage high over the TV set. The yellow and gray bird with white legs and orange cheeks arrived about a year ago, a gift of his aunt Lisa.

“First, I drew the bird, and he had to belong to somebody, so I drew Chris,” John said, leading a visitor into his room where he has rendered the cast of “Terry & Chris” on the wall: the tow-headed, sunglasses-wearing hero, his pet, and a gaggle of buddies.

John can’t explain exactly the inspiration for Terry’s unusual mimicking ability. “It just came to me, like a daydream. I started drawing and didn’t even think about it.”

John drew more pictures of Chris and Terry, dramatizing their adventures in a book in panels that, it turns out, resemble storyboards used by Hollywood animators.

One day last summer, he tagged along to Sony Studios in Culver City with his father, Ray Reynolds, of Chatsworth, who is a camera operator on the shows “Jeopardy” and “Wheel of Fortune.” His co-worker Julie Anne Hartman, and husband Butch, a producer of short cartoons at Nickelodeon, are family friends of the Reynolds’. Julie Anne happened to catch sight of John’s drawings of Chris and Terry and faxed a few panels to her husband.

Butch Hartman showed them to his boss, “Oh Yeah!” series creator and executive producer Fred Seibert, who was impressed. The series producers sift through hundreds of proposals to come up with 39 shorts that will air during the season--and this was one worth pursuing, so they called John in.

“I went into Fred’s office, and I pitched it to them. I had to tell the whole story and everything,” John said. “Terry & Chris” was signed in a mid-four-figure deal for an air date in late September.

What clinched it, John said, was that “it’s a cartoon about kids and things that happen to kids in real life.”

Seibert, a veteran TV executive who helped launch MTV and is a former president of Hanna-Barbera Productions, said that young viewers occasionally mail in ideas that producers use in cartoons, but John’s pitch was virtually unheard of.

“He came in with his characters all drawn with their dialogue, and a sense of a story and what he wanted to get over in that story,” Seibert said. He assigned the project to Hartman, whose first task was designing the characters.

“The hard part is getting what kids wear today,” Hartman said. “I’d draw Chris, and John would say, ‘No, I’d never wear that.’ So we’d change the shoes, change the shirt, change the haircut.”

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They reworked the story to a simple tale: boy finds bird, boy meets girl, boy loses girl, bird helps boy win back girl. Hartman helped John pare down the cast of characters to the pet store owner, a couple of friends and Chris’s schoolyard crush, blond-haired Angela, who is not meant to represent any real girl in particular, John insists.

After the story was blocked out on real storyboards, John picked the cast, with 14-year-old Chris Marquette as Chris and veteran voice-over actress Kath Soucie, (Phil and Lil in “Rugrats”) as Angela.

“When you have the love interest there, you have a 14-year-old boy and an adult woman in the booth,” Hartman said, chuckling. “Visually it’s weird, but in the voices it sounds just perfect.”

Still ahead is the laborious drawing and painting of the 10,080 12-by-9-inch cels required for a seven-minute cartoon that runs at 24 frames per second.

“John is learning what I learned in school--how to storyboard, how to animate, how to time, how to design characters. It’s all acquired skills,” said Hartman, a graduate of the animation program at CalArts in Valencia. Hartman said he is learning from this project, too.

“My shows are frenetic and fast-paced. A character moves from one side of the room in two frames. I’m learning to move characters a little more realistically. In this show they are human, there are real emotions. This is more charming.”

The hope of an animator on a showcase series like “Oh Yeah!” is to attract a strong enough viewer response that producers and network executives will order more episodes next season--so Chris is keeping his fingers crossed.

After this project, John has ideas for more cartoons. There’s “Filbert,” about a penguin and a fish, kind of a Sylvester and Tweety meets the South Pole. There’s “Wrinkled Powerhouse,” about four superhero grannies battling crime in and rocket-powered wheelchairs and waving magic canes. There’s “Model Snails,” a clutch of haute couture escargot.

“I’m going to save this money for college,” John said. “This is what I want to do.”