Word: budnitz
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...Joey had no pretense,” said Jessica S. Budnitz, Hanzich’s pre-law adviser in Leverett. “There was no sense of entitlement...
...Budnitz, 38, a restless polymath from Berkeley, Calif., works from a Manhattan office that looks like a cross between a designer workshop and Peewee's Playhouse. "I've discovered something that uses all the things I've done," he says. That's no small feat. At 17 he was helping his father's colleague write risk-analysis software for nuclear power plants; by 21 he had an art degree from Yale. He got inspiration for his toys from artists in Hong Kong and Japan...
...result is a "balance between cuteness and blackness," says Tokyo-based design team Devilrobots. The toys can be unsettling. You start to imagine what Budnitz describes as their "complex emotional state." A rabbit-shaped figure with the face of Lenin and his own copy of Das Kapital will join such Dunnys as a smoking Mao Zedong and "Mrs. Mao" on April 27. Fastidious refrigerator natives, Ice-Bots use crampons and ice picks to navigate your freezer. "Purely happy is completely uninteresting," Budnitz says. "Cute and mad, cute and scary are interesting." At Kidrobot's three boutiques, the toys range...
...Budnitz's breakout deal, though, could be the one he just signed with the San Francisco digital-animation studio Wild Brain. It opens the arena of TV shows, animated shorts and feature films to Kidrobot's characters. "It's going to blow everything away," says Budnitz. Says Wild Brain CEO Charles Rivkins, former head of the Jim Henson Co.: "A portion of Paul's vision has been capital constrained...
That's about to change. The Kidrobot empire may soon include a "lifestyle store" in New York City, selling everything from large-scale art and clothing to, perhaps, furniture, as well as a new boutique in London or Paris. "We're kind of being set loose," says Budnitz--to wherever his imagination can take him. The doll business may never be the same...