The guy at the left is a dog with a funny voice. Yeah, he's a 'toon, but nobody has to draw him. His name is Moxy, and he is an automatically animated cartoon character. When his producers, the hot-shot graphic wizards at Colossal Studios, feed him a tape of recorded voices, he automatically lip syncs the words like a pro. The animators just watch and chuckle. Later, they'll fine-tune the mouth movements. To make him move, a human actor wearing a sensor-wired hard-hat waves two foam-board 'toon hands loaded with location-sensors. The outfit transfers the actor's movements in real time to Moxy, who lives on a hard disk. Moxy's movements can be tweaked with a bank of controller knobs at a computer (a heavy- weight SGI Crimson Reality Engine); parts of his gestures on tape are later redrawn.

Colossal is the graphic studio creating the radically innovative animation series Liquid TV on MTV - Beavis and Butt-Head and the rest. Moxy, the automatic 'toon, was created as a character for sixteen half-minute episodes to appear on The Cartoon Network late this November.

Stuart Cudlitz and Brad De Graf are two of Colossal's creative souls behind Moxy's technology. Cudlitz worked with Cartoon Network's Vice-President Betty Cohen to select the ensemble of writers, designers and performers who create Moxy and cast Bobcat Golthwait as voice talent. De Graf is known in the animation business for his innovative puppeteering waldos - you could stick your hand into a device and make Mike the Talking Head grimace and move on the computer screen. Moxy is the first step toward a completely automated character, De Graf says. "It's a different medium we are making. Instead of creating a character's dialogue and action, we are creating a personality."


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