Dean Dodrill

Dean Dodrill (also known as Noogy) is a professional animation artist. He lives in Colorado, USA, and is married to fellow artist Elizabeth 2000.

Dean's dream of becoming an animator started during his time of junior-high/high school, inspired by the Foxglove bat-character, from one episode of Disney's Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers TV animation series.

He began drawing up fan art of Foxglove, creating his own characters, such as Leddinger, a flying squirrel, and Bonnie, a mouse-girl (created after his own blood-heritage as half-Korean).

Together, these characters were developed in various film-shorts, such as Living On A Prayer. The characters were initially created as short-bodied rodents. Since then, Dean has evolved his characters to have larger, more human-like anatomy.

WikiFur News has a related story:

Elysian Tail game wins $40,000 prize in XNA Dream-Build-Play competition

The Jazz Jackrabbit games

During this time he landed a short-lived job at Jagged Edge Studios(He and his brother, Justin Dodrill were in fact the establishers and owners of the company) in conjunction with Epic MegaGames, where he did the animation for the Jazz Jackrabbit 2 cutscenes. Then when it came to doing Jazz Jackrabbit 2: The Secret Files, he created Lori Jackrabbit, a yellow athletic femme-jackrabbit, being Jazz and Spaz's sister. Though those characters live on through fans, Epic ended up failing to balance their books and were forced to lay off Dean.

A third installment of the game, Jazz Jackrabbit 3 (also known as Jazz Jackrabbit 3D and Jazz3D,) in which Dean worked on the game's artwork, plot and level design, never came to be due to Epic's failure to fund the project. It would have been developed using the Unreal engine technology.

Elysian Tail

Shortly afterward, Dean got his well-deserved break at slowly starting to animate his dream-film, Elysian Tail (originally titled Elysium Tail), with Elizabeth and himself producing, directing, animating, and voicing the featured characters Bonnie, Leddinger, and Tika. Many of their fans/friends were impressed by the entire concept of animating this film, not to mention how heroic the characters ought to be. As Dean continued to tackle Elysian Tail, he had withdrawn from online activities back in December 2004. The project gradually grew from a purely home-made cartoon into a full-fledged animated film. From 2003 to 2007, Dean used the services of SEK Studio, the animation studio based in Pyongyang, North Korea. Such an unusual choice was made purely for pragmatic reasons, mainly because North Korean animators and background artists could provide a high quality work for a very cheap price at the time. The concant with the studio was established through intermediaries from Rough Draft Studios. Some of the backgrounds that were initially made for the movie were eventually rehashed for the Dust: An Elysian Tail game.

After freezing the production of Elysian Tail in 2009, Dean decided to develop a video game that was titled Dust: An Elysian Tail. Written in XNA, the game was released on Xbox Live Arcade on August 15, 2012, to general acclaim. Dust won the $40,000 grand prize in Microsoft's Dream-Build-Play competition and was later ported to many other gaming platforms, including the PC (Windows/Mac OS/Linux), PS4 and Nintendo Switch. More than 1 million units of the game were sold on all platforms.

Bonnie

Bonnie is a femme fatale mouse character, created by Dean Dodrill. Without a doubt, she is his pride and joy and his baby! Created somewhat after Dean himself, Bonnie is half-Korean. Her fur is two different tones of tan, and she has long ultramarine blue hair. Wardrobe-wise, she wears a pale-light turquoise-blue two-piece warrior ensemble.

Bonnie was officially born on November 1st, 1993. Quite unlike the mice's character, she's grown and evolved. She started small (more rodent-like) in a few rare animation experiments, one of which is Living On A Prayer (featuring that song of the same name). Another is Morning Bonnie, where she's awakened by her "blob-puppy" Bopo.

Since then, has Bonnie evolved into having a more human-like body. As Dean continued to experiment, he decided it was time to make a more exciting character in Bonnie as the big heroine for his dream-film project Elysian Tail. In it, Bonnie must put her sword-wielding skills to the ultimate plot-test when the unthinkable happens in her home-community, also involving her trainer/mentor Leddinger, and his young daughter Tika, who she's like a big sister too.

External links

• NoogyLand
• Elysian Tail official page
• "Noogy.com Gone Offline" message board thread from SnowBuni.com