Craig of the Creek Releases Special Anime Opening

Craig of the Creek is rolling out a special anime opening. Cartoon Network premiered the exclusive clip this morning on their social media channels, and you can bask in the amazing work down below. Craig, Kelsey, J.P., and Omar are all right there up front. But, unsurprisingly, the creek residents all lend themselves well to the fluid animation. Jeff Rosenstock’s original theme song got re-recorded in Japanese by producer Foxchase. Vivien Liew provides the vocals on the song. (From Just Cosplay Sings fame.) Charlie Frade and Mai Phung directed this version of the opening. Tomas Kiyoshi and Daniel Cuervo animated this stunning clip. Lana Brown served as producer. If you’re loving that theme song, It will be available to stream this Saturday.

“In Craig of the Creek, Matt Burnett, Ben Levin, Tiffany Ford, and the entire crew created a charming, imaginative, and inclusive world that represents the best in kids animation,” Sam Register, President, Cartoon Network Studios and Warner Bros. Animation previously said. “We could not ask for a better foundation as we expand the stories of the Creek into preschool and long-form projects ensuring that Craig of the Creek is well on its way to becoming our studio’s next big kids franchise.”

In a conversation with Comicbook.com Matt Burnett and Ben Levin described the down-to-Earth vibes of their show. A lot of cartoons push toward the fantastic, and while Craig and his friends are not short on whimsy, they do live on Earth and play in a literal creek.

“It takes place in a much more grounded world and they can never get too crazy, and there’s more rules to reality than there are to something of your own creation, so we’ve had to play within certain parameters in terms of the stakes,” Burnett said. “The risks that the characters are in, it’s never that they’re gonna fight a giant monster that’s going to eat them, but we still want it to have the feeling of watching an episode with those kinds of stakes, so it’s trying to find clever ways to impart that drama through these young kids in a very grounded reality.”

“What Matt is saying, as writers, what you look for in a story is conflict, and so the conflict in this show, yeah, can’t be monsters,” Levin added. “It’s gotta be something else though that the kids care about, so that’s one thing that makes it a little different is it’s not magical conflicts.

He added, “I think that when you have a grounded show of kids using the objects around them to make their armor and costumes and fun contraptions, as a kid watching, I think you’re really inspired to look at your own world differently, and feel like there’s something magical about the real world that you live in, because it is reflected like that in the cartoon.”

Do you love this Anime opening? Let us know down in the comments!