Nickelodeon and Disney welcome VCU alumnus

Turn on Nickelodeon or Disney and you will find the work of VCU alumnus Bob Boyle. Twenty years ago, Boyle graduated with a degree in communications art and design with dreams to create something great.

Today Boyle is the creator and executive producer of Nickelodeon’s “Wow! Wow! Wubbzy” and Toon Disney’s “Yin Yang Yo!”

His journey to executive producer involved a bellman’s suit, ramen noodles, what he calls a “really crappy portfolio” and unwavering determination.

Boyle came to VCU after realizing that California Institute for the Arts, a school known for its specialties in animation, was out of his price range. VCU offered a good arts program, he said, and it was closer to home. It wasn’t long before Boyle fell in love with Richmond and the school in the center of it all.

“I just loved Richmond,” he said. “It’s such a great place to live and go to school.”

Boyle, fascinated by the old buildings and their histories, embraced the stories of Richmond told through architecture, music, food and the old cemeteries and churches.

“It’s just cool to have a college that’s whizzed into all of that,” he said. “In retrospect I’m happy I didn’t go to Cal Arts. Being at VCU, I was exposed to a whole bunch of different people. You know the crowd. It’s all different walks of life and ethnicities.

“It just opened my world and made my world view that much larger. I think I’m better off for it in the end.”

Boyle came to VCU to do “happy, funny cartoons” and submitted some of his work to The Commonwealth Times. As the clocks ticked by, Boyle grew and developed as a person, and he saw his art style change.

“By the time I came out of VCU, I was doing sort of dark, moody editorial illustrations, which I guess that’s what art school can do to you,” he said, laughing.

After graduating, Boyle moved to the Big Apple. Motivated and exploding with fresh ideas, he pursued his career in illustration with a youthful energy and almost childlike innocence. His work appeared in The New York Times, but mostly, he was a bellman for the Marriott Marquis Hotel in Times Square.

“I’d be working at the hotel and have to take a 15-minute break and throw on an overcoat over my stupid bellman outfit and run to meet with an art director and hope he didn’t look down and see the goofy looking pants with the pin stripe,” Boyle said.

That was a hard life, he recalled. So he packed up his belongings and portfolio of designs and headed to Hollywood “to make it big and pursue all of my dreams,” he said.

The first thing he did? He got a job at the Marriott.

Surviving on Ramen noodles and dreams, he landed a meeting with John Kricfalusi, the creator of “Ren and Stimpy.” Kricfalusi sat down with Boyle and went over his drawings, teaching him ways to better his portfolio and talent.

“I sort of had a crash course in animation,” he said.

With his improved portfolio, Boyle landed a job with Film Roman designing characters and worked on background painting and storyboards for “Garfield,” “Felix the Cat,” “Bobby’s World,” and “C-Bear and Jamal.”

Working on these shows, Boyle met Butch Hartman, creator of “The Fairly OddParents” and “Danny Phantom.” Boyle started working with Hartman as an art director and then producer.

Though he was happy to be working in the field of animation, Boyle got the itch to do his own creations. He began to contemplate ideas for shows.

One day he was playing with his 9-year-old niece, Viviana Owgawa, who was doing what most children do, creating made-up stories with intricate characters.

“She would come up with all these crazy stories, and I was the cool uncle who could draw,” he said.

Owgawa’s story involved three detailed characters, which Boyle renamed to Wubbzy, Widget and Walden. He drew the characters and together, they made a four-page comic book.

At this time, Boyle was still searching for ideas and his niece’s story kept coming to mind.

“It just kind of stuck with me,” he said. “Then when I was looking to do my own show I remembered that story and those characters and I thought, ‘Wow that make a good children’s book.’ ”

Boyle started to work on a children’s book, but instead it ended up as a 26-episode Nick Jr. show called “Wow! Wow! Wubbzy!” for preschoolers.

“It was great that it was an idea that started from a kid’s point of view,” he said. “It had that sort of innocence built into it.”

Though Owgawa was slightly upset her uncle changed the names of her characters, she is thrilled her story is viewed by youngsters all over the nation.

At the same time Boyle was working on “Wubbzy,” he attended a tofu festival in Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo with his wife, Teri Shikasho. There he saw a little baby’s shirt that read “little samurai in training” and found his new idea.

He went home immediately to draw. He wanted to create an animal that was the opposite of a “huge and fierce samurai.” When his art tools stopped moving and he looked down his work, he had a little samurai bunny.

“Ideas can come from anywhere and in everything,” Boyle said.

The little samurai bunny now appears on ABC Family and Toon Disney’s JETIX cartoon lineup for 6- to 11-year-olds.

Boyle said his wife, whom he met 10 years ago, is one of his inspirations to his work.

A Japanese-American, Shikasho opened his world to what Boyle calls “a culture of ‘cute.’ ”

On a trip to Japan, Boyle noticed every business, bank and pharmacy as well as other organizations had little character mascots “like a pharmacy that has a big orange elephant,” he said.

This world of characters fascinated Boyle, and he took that imagery with him to his work. Boyle’s work consumes his days. Waking up around 4:30 a.m. and reading over e-mails, scripts and music sketches over oatmeal and coffee is only the beginning of his day.

“I do a lot of work before I go to work,” he said.

When he heads to work around 9:30 a.m., he is inundated with questions about designs, storyboards and characters, just to name a few things.

“It seems like the day kind of gets eaten away,” he said. “There’s just no end to it really.”

But he doesn’t mind.

When he found out two of his idea proposals were being picked up by Nickelodeon and Disney, he was “beside himself,” he said.

“It’s a dream come true,” Boyle said. “Very few people get to it, so it was just like, ‘Wow.'”

Boyle, who describes his job as one of drawing samurai bunnies and creating fantastical worlds, loves his job. In fact, next to being in the NBA “it’s probably the greatest job ever,” he said.

“It’s the opportunity to leave something behind.”

Sean Van Damme, a senior mass communications major who wants to make movies, said Boyle serves as a motivation.

“It’s a good sign that VCU’s putting out people who are getting jobs in the industry,” he said. “The industry will start to associate VCU with creativity and talent.”

Boyle understands what it is like to dream about the entertainment industry.

“There’s so many people I meet and they have dreams and ideas and they do a lot of talking about their dreams and ideas, but they never seem to do anything about it,” he said. “I think it just takes doing it.”

As Boyle continues to wake up to his coffee and animated characters, he remembers what it took to get him to executive producer, and his advice for VCU students sitting in editing booths and trying to pull together portfolios is quite simple.

“Just don’t stop.”