Before Chris McKay worked on The Lego Movie and helmed the Chris Pratt blockbuster The Tomorrow War, he worked on and directed many episodes of Adult Swim’s Moral Orel. The shockingly dark show received rave reviews for its intricate storylines and McKay enjoyed getting to work on the cult classic.
“I loved working on Moral Orel,” McKay told ComingSoon. “I’d been working on Robot Chicken, and Moral Oral and Robot Chicken they sort of shared a space and a team of animators and things like that. So for half the year, we would do Robot Chicken, for the other half of the year we do Moral Oral. Working with Dino [Stamatopoulos] and Jay [Johnston] and Scott [Adsit] on Moral Orel was a real treat and a real education. So a lot of fun. I loved working on the show. I love the design of the puppets and it was fun.”
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Due to Moral Orel‘s intricate plotlines, McKay learned a lot about directing and rewarding viewers.
“It was fun to do storytelling in stop motion and sort of storytelling that went. It wasn’t just a bottle episode after bottle episode, it was storytelling that went on. You were rewarded if you paid attention over multiple episodes and things like that. That’s what was behind Dino’s initial impulse on that show is to really tell us the story about this family and that town. That was a lot of fun, but it was a great training ground for me because Robot Chicken was very sketch comedy-based. So being able to do storytelling in Moral Orel and Titan Maximum, that was great. That prepared the way for me to work on The Lego Movie with Chris and Phil, and then ultimately direct The Lego Batman Movie after that.”
Chris McKay (@buddboetticher) explains how working on Moral Orel helped prepare him for The Tomorrow War.
Full interview: https://t.co/NPAZS5Lkn7 pic.twitter.com/sgN4L9oyGy
— ComingSoon.net (@comingsoonnet) July 8, 2021
Moral Orel is now streaming on HBO Max.