Cinnabar and Almanac Adventures Week: Delicious Citrus

Delicious Citrus was a very old story idea. Initially, it was going to involve a fabled magic citrus tree with a single fruit on it, so the episode would center around all the hilarious attempts to obtain this fruit. Once we got to the storyboards, it turned out to be a little more straightforward than that.

A storyboard from Delicious Citrus. Cinnabar punches a citrus tree trunk. She knows what she wants and she knows how to get it.

Delicious Citrus was the second episode started, and the first one complete. We revised that great plot to “Cinnabar wants a fruit, but something terrible happens to it.” After some brainstorming of what that terrible something would be, such as the citrus fruit splatting on contact with the ground or plopping into the water, we decided that the fruit’s demise would be Almanac’s helpfulness.

Almanac, as demonstrated only in this episode (and implied in Red Light District), can summon two strange little water-balloon-like fish. He almost never puts this to good use in Cinnabar and Almanac Adventures. In this episode, he sends a fish up to capture the falling fruit mid-air. Apparently Almanac’s control over his summons is limited, though, since the fish eats the fruit in one bite in the next scene. Cinnabar is understandably angry, and Almanac’s lovely catch of fish can’t console her. (Maybe she hates fish as much as he hates potatoes!)