The original South Park prototype was made with construction paper cutouts. The 1995 'Spirit of Christmas' short took creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone about 3 months to animate by hand.
South Park's Paper Origins: 3 Months of Cutting
Before South Park became one of television's most irreverent animated series, it was literally arts and crafts. Creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone spent approximately three months hunched over construction paper, scissors, and a camera to create the prototype that would change adult animation forever.
A $750 Christmas Card
The story begins in 1995 when Fox executive Brian Graden paid Parker and Stone $750 to create an animated Christmas card he could send to friends. Working out of Parker's apartment in Colorado, the duo painstakingly cut out paper shapes, moved them frame by frame, and photographed each position.
The result was "The Spirit of Christmas"—a crude, profane short featuring early versions of Stan, Kyle, Kenny, and Cartman watching Jesus and Santa Claus beat each other senseless over who owns Christmas.
Why It Took So Long
Stop-motion paper animation is brutally tedious:
- Every character movement required repositioning paper cutouts
- Each second of footage needed roughly 12-24 individual photographs
- Mouth movements meant swapping between different paper mouth shapes
- Any mistake could mean starting an entire sequence over
For a short running just a few minutes, three months of work was actually efficient. Parker later described the process as "miserable" but admitted the limitations forced creative solutions that defined the show's iconic look.
The Bootleg That Built an Empire
Graden's video card got passed around Hollywood—then copied onto VHS tapes that spread like wildfire. This was 1995, before YouTube or viral videos were concepts. People were literally mailing bootleg copies to friends.
The underground buzz caught Comedy Central's attention. They greenlit a series in 1997, but with one major change: the actual TV show would be animated digitally using software that mimicked the construction paper aesthetic.
The Irony of Speed
Here's where it gets interesting. That painstaking three-month paper prototype led to one of the fastest production schedules in television. Modern South Park episodes are written, animated, and completed in just six days—sometimes responding to news events that happened the same week.
The deliberately crude animation style that came from paper limitations became a feature, not a bug. It lets the show stay culturally relevant in ways traditional animation simply can't.
Construction Paper's Last Stand
Only one sequence in the actual TV series was animated with real paper: the opening scene of the pilot episode. Everything since has been digital, though the software carefully preserves the wobbly edges, visible "cut lines," and jerky movements that made the original feel so distinctively handmade.
Parker and Stone have joked that they couldn't go back to paper animation even if they wanted to—they've forgotten how. But those three months of cutting and gluing in a Colorado apartment remain the foundation of a franchise worth hundreds of millions of dollars.