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Hungarian Edition
ORIGO Studios opened an exhibition dedicated to Gábor Csupó in Budapest on September 17, celebrating a career that stretches from Hungary’s Pannónia Filmstúdió to some of the most recognizable characters in American animation. Csupó inaugurated the display himself and spoke to Budapest Reporter about the creative instincts behind the work on show.
His thoughts returned to the feeling that drove him long before his work reached an international audience: the excitement of imagining a character nobody had seen before.
“Day and night, all I could think about and dream about was what kind of crazy character I could draw the next day—something that would either astonish people or make them burst out laughing,” he said. “That was what occupied my mind.”
The exhibition brings together original memorabilia, personal belongings and stories from his working life. Its setting connects that history to a working production environment. ORIGO Studios, whose credits include Dune, is part of the infrastructure through which Budapest participates in international filmmaking today. Csupó’s career traces an earlier, personal journey between Hungary and Hollywood.
The work before the recognition
Csupó began his professional life at Pannónia Filmstúdió in the early 1970s. He left Hungary in 1975, spent time in Sweden and eventually settled in Los Angeles, where he and Arlene Klasky established the animation studio that bears their names.
Asked what a young filmmaker should avoid today, Csupó began with motivation. The industry has changed considerably, he acknowledged, but he still believes that loving the work is essential to sustaining a creative career.
“I still believe you succeed when your goal is not to get rich from whatever talent you believe you have. You have to truly love what you do,”
He credits much of his own success to an almost obsessive absorption in drawing. Financial security initially meant something quite modest.
“I was already happy when we could pay our rent in Hollywood. We weren’t chasing money.”
Commercial success followed, he recalled, as the company developed the ability to create characters of its own. Klasky Csupo’s work would encompass Rugrats, Aaahh!!! Real Monsters, The Wild Thornberrys, Rocket Power and Duckman, building a body of television animation with a distinctive appetite for unusual characters. Its expansion into features included The Rugrats Movie, which became the first animated film outside Disney to pass $100 million at the domestic box office.
Csupó also moved into live-action directing, including the 2007 fantasy drama Bridge to Terabithia. Across those different forms, the question of how to make an imagined world feel distinctive has remained central to his work.
Bringing Springfield to life
When discussing The Simpsons, Csupó carefully distinguished the original idea from the work of realizing it. Matt Groening created the characters; Klasky Csupo supplied the animation that helped bring them to the screen.
“I would describe The Simpsons as commissioned work, because we didn’t come up with the original idea. But we brought it to life,” he explained. “We were given characters drawn in black marker on a white sheet of paper and told, ‘Make an animation out of this.’”
The studio animated the shorts for The Tracey Ullman Show from 1987 to 1989, then continued on the first three seasons of the half-hour series. That progression, placed Csupó and his collaborators at a formative stage in the show’s development.
Asked whether he felt particularly attached to any member of the family, he resisted isolating one character. His recollection was of a team receiving scripts, creating storyboards and solving the practical problems of animation. He also credited the writers working with James L. Brooks’ company, recalling how Groening drew on family memories for the early shorts.
The production process he described was intensely physical. Drawings were made by hand and transferred onto transparent cels. As the volume of work increased, the studio brought in a South Korean animation company. Boxes of material traveled overseas; painted cels returned weeks or months later, depending on the production, and were photographed frame by frame on an Oxberry animation camera.
His account gives a sense of the time, coordination and labor behind those short scenes. The drawings had to move through an entire production system before they could move on screen.
“It was a very lengthy process. Today, everything has sped up enormously,” he said.
Finding a voice when the tools keep changing
Faster production tools brought the conversation back to the young artists entering the industry now. Csupó’s advice was to develop a style they recognize as their own, while remaining open to work that inspires them.
“Don’t try to imitate other people. It’s fine to like something and be inspired by it, but try to go beyond it rather than copy it,” he said. “Create your own version, or something better—or at least aim to make it better and more interesting than what inspired you.”
That emphasis on individual judgment also shapes his view of artificial intelligence. He sees potential for people who have ideas but lack particular technical abilities, including drawing skills. Used thoughtfully, he suggested, AI can help them give those ideas a visible form.
“If you use AI to help bring your dreams and ideas to life, and you also have the taste to choose what truly represents your vision, then AI can be very useful.”
His qualification concerns the artist’s role in deciding what an image should express. Generating an appealing result does not, in his view, establish an artistic identity.
“If you try to sell yourself as an artist by typing in an amusing prompt and immediately deciding you’re a genius because of what comes out, that won’t work.”
In Csupó’s account, the useful possibilities of AI depend on the ideas and judgment someone brings to it. That places the discussion close to his earlier advice about influences: the tools may expand what an artist can attempt, but a personal direction still has to be developed.
What still surprises him
Asked which of his characters he liked least, or would most want to revisit, Csupó declined to disown any of them. His usual answer to questions about favorites, he explained, is to ask whether a parent could choose a favorite child.
“I really do love them all.”
He would, however, approach their visual style differently today. The world has changed, and his enthusiasm for animation is still strongly tied to the discovery of a new visual language.
One example is Sony Pictures Animation’s Spider-Verse films. He singled out their mixture of techniques and the freshness of their imagery as qualities that had captured his imagination.
“I found it wonderfully fresh, and I loved the way they mixed techniques,” he said. “What interests me is something new.”
He was less enthusiastic about what he described as the plastic, toy-like appearance of some recent Pixar animation, saying that it no longer had the same power to enchant him. The comparison was a statement of his own visual taste: he responded most strongly to work that made the medium feel unfamiliar again.
For an artist being celebrated through an exhibition of past achievements, it was a revealing choice. Asked to look back at his characters, Csupó soon found himself discussing the possibilities he admired in someone else’s work.
At ORIGO, the exhibition gives a lifetime of invention a home in the city where Csupó’s career began. His reflections bring that history back to a simple creative impulse: to draw something unexpected, make someone laugh, and discover what animation might do next. Across decades of changing tools, that curiosity remains the clearest thread connecting his early drawings with the artist he is today.
Interview conducted in Hungarian. Quotations have been translated into English and lightly edited for clarity.
