Writing for a Saturday morning audience

Jane Espenson - who is truly one of the great writers on the show and is one of our writers on Buffy Animated - was asked the difference between writing for the animated series and the live action series, and she said that it's really quite simple. All you do is write it as if it were for the live action show, and any time you think there is going to be sex, you put in a joke. Then you have the animated series!

That is not far from where we go, but we don't want anyone to think that it's jokey. It has a sense of humour, the same sense of humour that the [live action] show has. What it would lack is the more blatant sexuality or the more obvious innuendo.

We push the envelope as much as we can and as much as the network will let us. As I said before, these characters have crushes on each other, but they don't quite know what they are going to do when they get together. As my son once said to me, "No one on the cartoon show is going to hook up," and that's quite accurate - no one is going to hook up.

Each episode has its own particular flavour - there'll be sad episodes and there'll be funny episodes and there'll be romantic ones. It'll be very much like the live action show with one big exception. In the live action show, each season has an overall arc that you follow, but each one of the animated shows will be stand-alone shows. The pilot episode introduces you to Sunnydale and introduces you to the entire cast in kind of a unique way.

There's not any need for anything to run at a particular order, which is something you have to keep in mind when you do animation because networks move the order of animated shows around all the time.