Ren & Stimpy finally has a replacement in Bullet Time

Eddie Alcazar loves cartoons from the ’90s. Ren & Stimpy, Rocko’s Modern Life, the contorted nightmares of MTV’s Liquid Television — you name it, he’s seen it. Maybe not that unique, but unlike the rest of us animation fiends who dream of the days of painted backgrounds and hand-drawn gross-out gags, Alcazar did something about it. Bullet Time, his new TV pilot premiering at the 2025 Fantasia Fest, is a transparent but audacious attempt at reviving a lost art.

Alcazar’s 10-minute Bullet Time pilot stars Looney Tunes veteran voice actor Eric Bauza as Bullet, a bull terrier who aspires to gaming greatness. He’s a classic burnout ’90s cartoon character, crushing cans of Fizzy Juice and clobbering his way through the claymation fighting game Battle Blast. Mixing hyperactive visuals and hyper-detailed close-up shots straight of Ren & Stimpy, Alcazar’s inspirations are all remixed in a delirious vortex of caffeinated slapstick. The look is awesome — and as he learned putting it together over four years, painfully difficult to achieve.

Check out this exclusive clip from Bullet Time

While Alcazar had an animation background after directing shorts like The Vandal, his “hunger to see more of these types of cartoons again” sent him knocking on doors of animators from the day who could teach him how to draw the way they used to for Nickelodeon. Bill Wray, who painted backgrounds for Ren & Stimpy, even contributed to the short. Alcazar discovered that compared to today’s animation pipeline, which is more model-based and built with comedy writers in mind rather than cartoonists, the old way was destined to be pushed out by cost-cutting studios.

“It’s so time consuming to hand-draw everything,” he admits. “They were able to do it in the ’90s and have the budget and people, to take that risk to achieve it […] I think changed in the 2000s when everything started becoming very corporate driven. It almost evaporated cartoons, in a way. Who’s supporting cartoons these days? It’s kind of rare. That’s what I was really curious about: What are people even going to think of this these days when you have a lot of younger folks who haven’t even seen something like this?”

There’s a lot packed into Bullet Time the young folk probably haven’t seen. On top of the retro 2D animation, a big chunk of Bullet’s gamer odyssey takes place in a Clayfighter-esque showdown, with stop-motion guided by Rich Zim of Gumby and Pee-Wee’s Playhouse fame. Tying it all together is an original soundtrack by none other than Danny Elfman.

The short tested Alcazar’s perseverance over what was intended as a lark between feature directing projects, but it wasn’t just a passion for ’90s cartoons that kept him going — this was personal. Yes, Bullet might follow the canine lineage of Ren, but he’s also inspired by the director’s actual dog.

“I picked my dog that was pretty much dying at the time to [star in it]. So, because I thought this was going to be a yearlong process, and I was like, All right, I have to find something that’s going to motivate me for a whole year to stick with this. I had to finish it and it’s got to be the best for him. And then it just ended up going longer and longer, even after he passed away — three more years in creating this thing.”

Over those years, Bullet Time grew into much more than a little short Alcazar might tour at festivals and eventually post online. He’s hoping a studio out there might get behind this daring throwback

“I obviously would love to see it continue on. I have so many ideas within the four years I worked on it,” he says. And he notes how much of a boon it would be for the industry — there are tons of talented artists out there waiting for this kind of call. “Having the combination of these older school guys that created this and then all these up-and-coming talent that really admire it and that are willing to do anything just to work on something like this… I was like, damn, there’s actually a lot of folks that are super talented that were just super inspired by Ren & Stimpy that drove them to become animators. Even though there isn’t that much work out there for it, they’re just kind of doing it on their own and really good at it.”