“Skateboarding is the best culture”: JJ Villard on his boardriding past, animation’s future and his new Volcom collection

As JJ Villard answers a video call from his home in Santa Barbara, California, his dog – a cute long-haired Pomchi – jumps onto his lap. ​“What’s up Dracula? This is Dracula, by the way,” Villard explains.

On the cabinet shelves behind him are skeleton and witch figurines, a ​‘Creepy T’ Monster Rods box, and a glistening Emmy award. The moment is a brief window into the animator and cartoonist’s inspirations and macabre-filled mind, which over the past decade has created some of the genre’s most outlandish work that has ever hit the silver screen.

Best known for his work with Adult Swim – Cartoon Network’s late-night programming block – Villard masterminded cult favourite series King Star King, about a muscled punk rocker who falls from his higher existence and ends up working in a waffle house. It remains one of the weirdest but also most boundary pushing cartoons to have ever aired, and like all great art, even attracted controversy for its extreme humour and daring stylings.

And in 2020, he returned to the channel for his series JJ Villard’s Fairy Tales, where he put his own gnarled, contorted take onto classic children’s stories including Rapunzel, Little Red Riding Hood, Goldilocks, Snow White and Pinocchio.

Now, Villard is the latest to helm skate and lifestyle brand Volcom’s long-running Featured Artist Series, creating a special ​‘Freak Family’ collection to time with Halloween. It features witches, bats, snakes, skeletons and all manner of ghoulish graphics in his signature style, but instead of being animated for screens, they are printed onto stylish sweaters, t‑shirts, hoodies and trousers for the JJ Villard X Volcom collaborative capsule collection.

To find out more, we caught Villard with him to hear about the new collection, his long-running relationship with skateboarding, and the challenge of creating in the age of social media and AI.

• Read next: Volcom teams up with Bob Mollema for the latest in its Featured Artist Series

Can you explain your journey to where you are now?

Animation is my main job. I went to the California Institute of the Arts and studied Character Animation. Then my first job, luckily enough, was at DreamWorks, and my very first project was Shrek 3. So it went from a $50 student budget film to a $150 million feature. I worked on a lot of movies there, and it was fun. I was there until 2010 and then I went to Cartoon Network, and then Adult Swim, where I was for 10 years. I had three shows there and one of them [King Star King] won an Emmy, which is awesome – it was the first Adult Swim’s first Emmy in animation. 

Then I went to work on Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider Verse and Shrek 5, which are coming out in the next couple of years. I’ve worked on tons and tons of cartoons, and I also do illustration, so Volcom hit me up to do this collection and I finally had some time and said: ​“Yes, let’s do it.” So we dropped nine pieces of apparel.

Were you always into drawing?

Yeah. It was always part of everything for me. Especially from seventh grade, when I took an art class and we were given a sketchbook, and I was like: ​“Oh wow, you can actually walk around with this.” As an 11-year-old, I didn’t realise that I could draw all the time, whenever I wanted. So that teacher was amazing – she gave me a sketchbook and it changed my life, really.

Then the second thing that changed my life, funnily enough, was when I was at DreamWorks, the CEO of Starbucks came in and gave a talk. He told us that he was thinking about how he wanted to make the company, and he said: ​“Remain small, but go big.” And I thought that was amazing. So I’ve always thought about keeping the sketchbook small but going big by pitching TV shows and feature films that are made up in the sketchbook.

How did the Volcom collection come together?

I’ve done several artist collabs down the years – one with XXXTentacion and Kanye, one with Stüssy… Volcom hit me up and said it was going to be an artist edition and didn’t really give me more than that. So, I just went ahead and created this whole witch theme, and they were very happy with the work. They made it an October drop and made amazing pieces of clothing. One of them is trousers, which was the first time I’d made them. There’s also a knitted sweater, which is my favourite, where the witch head that I drew was blown up to the full length of the sweater. Really good taste from the people at Volcom and they did a great job.

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What’s your relationship with skateboarding?

I’ve done at least 15 collaborations with Deathwish skateboards. Those guys are gnarly, dude. When you shake their hands and feel their bones, it’s like made out of titanium. They’re a different breed of people. I skated for a while, but stopped a long time ago – I still cruise, but that’s the extent of it. What you see on [2001 film] Dogtown and Z‑Boys is pretty much what I do. When you get older the injuries are just too much, you know.

I feel like skateboarding is having a bit of a comeback in the cultural consciousness – is that something you’d agree with?

Absolutely. It goes in waves, you know, just like everything else. I remember Warren Buffett said he invested in a train company and people were amazed – like: ​“Why would you buy a train company?” And he said that most companies have a bad 10 years, and trains have had a bad century, and that it would come back round. It’s the same with skating, where it goes up and down. During the pandemic, Deathwish couldn’t keep the skateboards in the warehouse because everyone wanted to buy them. I hope to god it’s on the up and up. It’s a great culture – it’s the best culture.

I saw your post on Instagram, where you talk about the astronomical size of budgets breaking the film industry – can you talk about that?

Yeah, over the years these animation moves get these astrological budgets – $150 million to make a 1 hour and 10 minute movie. I’m from TV, where you get one year to do a whole season, and our budgets are like 2% of 150 million. We literally have $240,000 for each 11-minute episode – the maths is crazy. So when you get used to this budget at big animation studios, they get complacent or lose that vitality to take chances and do some kick ass stuff. That’s what’s happening now, which is basically the fall of television and feature films, in a way.

What do you mean by the fall? Like people aren’t watching it anymore?

Yeah, Gen Z and millennials are really interested in YouTube and TikTok, and all the social media things. Getting a child to sit down and watch TV and movies is difficult.

So do you think the future of animations and cartoons will live on YouTube? And what do you think that means for the format of television? With its pre-defined slots and ad breaks – YouTube is almost a blank canvas isn’t it?

It’s what me and my friends are all talking about, discussing and trying to predict. On Instagram, they are saying that 25 seconds is all you need for a little piece of animation to keep the attention of someone, because they’re scrolling so much – same with TikTok. And there are famous animators on YouTube who do their thing. There’s this guy Zach Hadel, who created Smiling Friends on Adult Swim – he’s from YouTube and now has this awesome hit show. It’s interesting to see how he dealt with both worlds, so it’s yet to be seen what’s going to happen. No one knows really. There could be a new platform any day that just pops up and blows everyone away. 

The main thing is to just keep working, because there’s so much unemployment right now in cartoons and people are starting to feel like they are failures. You can’t let it break you, because you can’t go out and just get a normal job that you’d be able to 10 years ago – now you’ve got to branch out and do other things, whatever it is. You’ve got to think in different mediums, genres, platforms, everything, and rewire the way you think.

• Read next: Mapping the spread of skateboarding across the world

Your illustrations are so bold and original – I wanted to ask: with the rise of AI, creating a whole style of illustration – which can be a lifetime’s work – can all of a sudden be emulated in a second. Is it a scary time to be an illustrator and animator?

It’s nuts. First of all, I don’t mind AI. Funnily enough, it doesn’t bother me, and I think it can be helpful in many ways. Will it be taking jobs? Absolutely. Can it steal ideas? Yes. But there’s many ways of going about this; you’ve got to understand that if you come up with something cool and new, it’s going to get old within a week pretty much. So it sucks to say, but you’re just going to have to keep going.

A way that I’ve thought about it that calms everything down, is that if you can stick to just a few characters and keep redrawing them for your audience, then they are going to start appreciating and enjoying those few characters. And if you enjoy drawing them, that’s the most important thing.

Remain small, but go big, I guess?

Yeah, that’s pretty much it. Obviously, it’s going to be really hard, but this is the time that things grow and one of these young kids is going to create something so incredible and reinvent how we think about everything. So it could be a great time.

What does it mean to you to be Volcom’s latest Featured Artist?

I’m flattered, especially with what they came out with. They did such an incredible job with my work, taking assets of drawings that I did for them and turning them into pieces of clothing. It was awesome.

Check out JJ Villard’s Freak Family capsule collection for Volcom here.

Buy your copy of Huck 82: The Music Issue here.

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