Fish Hooks

Fish Hooks is a Disney cartoon created by Noah Z. Jones. It premiered on September 3, 2010.

Plot
The series follows Milo, Bea and Oscar, three best friends who live in a giant fish tank trying to navigate their way through the choppy waters of high school. Together they experience the typical life challenges and triumphs, including friendship, dating and sports, along with more atypical situations such as giant lobster attacks and, with the use of special land suits, school field trips to the hamster cages.

Production
President of entertainment Gary Marsh said of the show, "The Fish Hooks team has created one of the most original, inventive animated series on television – bringing an ingenious twist to the classic archetypes of high school life." The series is produced using a mix of 2D digital animation, CGI, and photo collages.

Early production
The series started out when Noah Z. Jones was contacted by Disney executives after seeing some of Jones's work online. They asked Jones if he would like to do anything with his drawings for a television series. Jones sent Disney 5 ideas for a short, and out of those ideas, Disney picked one that would eventually become Fish Hooks. During early production, Fish Hooks was called Fish Tales. The original pilot is likely to be an early version of "Bea Stays in the Picture" (the pilot), and parts of it have only been seen in a promotional advertisement for 2011 TV series and movies in Latin America.

Picking out the details
Jones chose to do a series on fish, because fish are easy to draw and are very colourful. "They look like little gumdrops with faces," Jones said. He chose the location of a pet store, so the fish could have a massive world to explore. Noah said that he chose a high-school environment because it's a rich environment for stories, and high school is a time when friends are most important to your life.

Other production
Sometimes, when the crew designs a new character, they make it look a bit like their voice actor; usually it's by accident. When the board artists pitch a new episode, they show a rough comic-strip on the story, and show it to the rest of the crew. When producing characters, the crew of "Fish Hooks" create the character and come up with a story to go around it, and sometimes its the other way round.