Buttonwillow Man is an animated series I am currently working on. 2 episodes are out, the third will be out soon.
A playlist with all Buttonwillow Man episodes and extras can be found here
I was responsible for all visual aspects and writing, credits for the voice acting, audio, and music are in the video description on YouTube. This series has been a really good excuse to work with other artists on a fun project and has let me meet a lot of voice actors.
How did I come up with this idea?
Mid November of 2025 I couldn’t stop thinking ‘what if there was a superhero show where the plot is a barely cogent vessel for introducing an absurd amount of quirky little characters and their abilities to the point where the introductions are most of the episode’. Then I realized that was incredibly stupid despite how it made me chuckle to myself like a madman as I paced across my room for hours while ruminating on the thought.
However, a lot of the characters and plot ideas I was coming up with were actually kind of good so I started writing them down. Episode 1 ended up using the initial introductions idea as a gag instead of it being the whole show. I currently have all 10 episodes written out, and the last 3 episodes will blow your mind I swear trust me it’s so good. Because of the fact I have it all written out beforehand I can iterate on the episodes I haven’t done yet to add more recurring jokes and continuity elements like physical parts or behaviors of certain characters changing. Or better yet, consequences for Buttonwillow Man’s actions.
While there is an intro segment in the episode, here are ALL* of the guys I made.
(*For episode 1 and also some of the guys that show up for like 1 second aren’t there)
To keep things in scope I divvied up the amount of actual effort I’d put into characters into 3 categories:
High Quality (main characters that will show up frequently and we get close to)
Medium Quality (characters that might show up again that are interesting enough to merit a cool design)
Literal Garbage (filler characters that take maybe 2 mins to make to fill out space in the introductions gag)
To make sure things stay on schedule, I would send W.I.P. clay renders with dialogue to whoever is doing the audio for each part so they would have more time to work at it while I continued with lip-sync, lighting, effects, etc.
This segment from episode 2 for example.
This animation isn’t technically ‘for’ Buttonwillow man. It was actually for a Pwnisher community challenge ‘Dream Sequence’.
It was in the top 100.