Quarantine is a weirdly good time for animation

The trailer for Tooning Out the News

The creators of the surreal animated series Tooning Out the News had Rudy Guiliani on the show multiple times during their first week on air. They also had a six-year-old hang up on the former New York City mayor. Like many people around the world, the people behind Tooning Out the News are working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic. For RJ Fried, that involved turning an iPad over to his young son while the showrunner sat in his bedroom, calling Guiliani every hour to see if he'd pick up, computer at the ready to record on short notice. What he didn't realize was that, through the vagaries of the cloud, Guiliani's calls were being routed to the iPad his son was using, and that his son had hung up on him (and also Stephen Colbert).

I tried to explain the enormity of hanging up on the attorney of the president, who the president was, that this was his good friend," Fried says. The explanation didn't really take-his son just became convinced that he himself was now famous-but for Fried, the story has become emblematic of his bizarre-yet-productive time in quarantine.

Were Tooning Out the News a live-action series, neither the gaffes nor the triumph of luring Guilani onto the show in the first place would have been possible. It's basically impossible to film a conventional television program while social distancing, which is why so many have paused production. Animated shows, however, from newcomers like CBS' Tooning Out the News and Hulu's Solar Opposites to veterans like The Simpsons, Bob's Burgers, Big Mouth, and Family Guy, along with Hollywood animation studios like Paramount, have been able to keep working, largely thanks to innovative technological workarounds. All of us feel incredibly fortunate that we're in this industry at this time," Fried says.

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