Development The idea for a series about a boy with super-genius powers was first conceived in the 1980s by John A. Davis, who scripted and storyboarded a short narrative titled
Runaway Rocketboy, centering around a character named Johnny Quasar (inspired by a facetious nickname that his summer co-workers had coined for him in his youth) who builds a rocket ship and runs away from his parents. Davis stated in an episode of the
Nickelodeon Animation Podcast that he initially wrote the concept with the intention of creating it as a live-action film with special effects and matte shots, even going so far as to apply for a grant to fund the project, but found that getting such an investment was difficult since the film was not educational or informative. He cold-called Davis requesting to see a tape of the full short. After watching the demo, as well as seeing the show bible which Davis and Alcorn had developed, Oedekerk expressed interest in helping to pitch their concept to different networks. After teaming up with O Entertainment, the company began working on developing a full-length episode for a TV series, titled
The Adventures of Johnny Quasar, writing an expanded version of the original
Runaway Rocket story and tweaking aspects of Johnny's design to make him look more like a child. In Fall 1995, the idea was pitched to
Nickelodeon, who expressed immediate interest in the idea.
Albie Hecht, the then-president of Nick, was particularly impressed, coining him to be "half
Bart Simpson and half
Albert Einstein", he strongly praised Johnny's blended personality as an adventurous and intelligent character and one grounded in the reality of childhood, which, according to him, made him "the perfect Nick kid". Production officially started in February 2000 under the direction of Davis. In order to speed up the pace of work for a feature film, the company's staff count was considerably increased from 30 to around 150 employees, and the studio's workspace was also reformed in order to fit such a team of filmmakers.
Casting Nancy Cartwright,
Pamela Adlon, and
E. G. Daily were all considered for the role of Jimmy Neutron before
Debi Derryberry was cast for the film and subsequent series. The film was Derryberry's biggest acting role at the time, as previously she had mostly provided minor roles in films and TV shows.
Animation Jimmy Neutron was the first computer-animated film to be created entirely using commercial animation programs rather than proprietary software, with most animation done using both Lightwave and
project:messiah. Characters were first modeled in Lightwave, after which they were rigged and animated in Messiah. Texture painting was done via
Adobe Photoshop, while compositing work was completed in
Maya Fusion. In addition to serving as executive producer, Alcorn was the film's lead character designer, and created actively simplistic and cartoonish designs in order to avoid overcomplicating production. To animate crowd scenes, methods of simplification were used to make animation less time-consuming: characters that were farther from the camera had less articulation, and animators would duplicate the same characters, offset them to different areas, and change their body parts to differentiate them. One particular scene shows a crowd of 6000 Yolkians, each of which uses one of 30 distinct animation loops. According to Davis, the character models were intentionally given a "sculpted, graphic look," both to avoid making them look overly realistic and to circumvent the prospect of having to deal with simulating cloth or hair. The over-the-top character designs, in turn, influenced the film world's aesthetic (e.g. cars were modeled to be able to fit the characters' stylistically large heads). Off-the-shelf shaders were favored over ones which created more photorealistic lighting in order to maintain a cartoonish appearance throughout. == Music ==