Toon In: Animated TV Highlights for November, from BAT-FAM to the Jurassic World: Chaos Theory finale
(Photo: Netflix)
Welcome to the ink, paint, and pixel corner of Paste TV, where we’re highlighting some of the best premium animation projects on streaming or direct-to-video aimed at teens and adults. This monthly column not only provides an overview of the new animated series to check out, but we’ve also collected some of the finest creators and voice talents in the medium to give updates or introductions to their series.
Arcane Season 2 Blu-Ray (Available now)
Arcane closed out its first story arc last year and completely reinvigorated the scope and ambition of adult animation. The incredible animation of Fortiche Studios over two seasons earned the series 16 Annie Awards and eight Emmy Awards (including two for Outstanding Animated Program).
Season 1 and Season 2 are now available outside of Netflix through GKIDS in separate 4K UHD Collector’s Sets, or 4K or Blu-ray Steelbooks sets. If you’ve been meaning to catch up or give it a try, now’s the time to do it because you can watch the whole story arc across these two physical sets. A modern classic worth owning.
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The Bad Guys: Breaking In (November 6)
Origin stories continue to be bellwethers of success, so it makes sense that director Pierre Perifel’s animated feature films, The Bad Guys and The Bad Guys 2 from Dreamworks Animation, would earn their own original Netflix animated series, The Bad Guys: Breaking In.
The six-episode season reveals how the once independent team first came together under the leadership of Mr. Wolf (Michael Godere). If you liked the Netflix The Bad Guys holiday specials, then rejoice because the same creatives are behind this series too. And this series features the same voice cast assembled for those streaming holiday specials as well.
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BAT-FAM (November 10)
Last December, Warner Bros. Animation introduced a brand-new, family-centric take on the Dark Knight as dad in the animated holiday movie, A Merry Little Batman. It was a funny, visually dynamic spin on superhero parenthood within Wayne Manor, featuring a deep bench of Gotham/Batman characters. And that story is getting expanded by executive producer and showrunner Mike Roth in the 10-episode Prime Video series, BAT-FAM.
Batman (Luke Wilson), Alfred (James Cromwell), and young Damian Wayne/Little Batman (Yonas Kibreab) are all back, along with Bruce’s new ward, Claire (Haley Tju), his BFF Alicia Pennyworth (London Hughes), the ghost of Ra’s Al Ghul (Michael Benyaer) and Man-Bat (Bobby Moynihan).
Roth tells Paste that there was a strong desire from Warner Bros. to explore more of this incarnation of the characters, and to build it out as a series. “We were wrapping up the movie and then we were ramping up the series,” he says of how long it’s been in production. “It’s everything you hope to see in a Batman film and we get to see behind the curtain a little bit. It’s kind of like, what’s the President’s private life look like when he has breakfast in the morning? That side of Bruce, not that it’s been hidden, but it doesn’t fit neatly into those other properties because they have a different emphasis. But we loved leaning into this family aspect.”
BAT-FAM the series is akin to a sitcom approach at Wayne Manor. “This extraordinary family is doing all these crazy, extraordinary things, but yet they’re also doing mundane, day-to-day stuff,” Roth explains. “They’re dealing with the same issues we’re dealing with, it’s just that they’re dealing with the capes and cowls. For Batman, his mask is Bruce. He is himself when he’s Batman. And our property is interesting because we get to see Bruce unmasked.”
Aside from the extended family living together in Wayne Manor, BAT-FAM introduces Alfred’s daughter, Alicia, as Bruce’s childhood friend and now adult confidante. “In order for that to feel natural for us in the writers’ room, we needed that intimacy and we got it with that decision of them being childhood friends,” Roth says of their tinkering with the usual canon of Bruce Wayne. “The other thing that’s really interesting about her that I love is that she’s a therapist, but she’s not just any old therapist. She’s a therapist to some of Batman’s worst villains. We find out in this series that crime always has a way of coming back. Temporarily, [Bruce] cleaned Gotham up but some of those villains took it hard. She runs a group therapy for them because they really do want to reform. They don’t want to be villains anymore, so she’s their therapist, which puts them in Bruce’s orbit. It means that they’re coming to the house for dinner,” he laughs.
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In Your Dreams (November 14)
The first animated feature release for Alex Woo’s Kuku Studios also happens to be his feature directorial debut, In Your Dreams. Co-produced and distributed by Netflix, Woo tells Paste that the film idea came to him and his studio co-founders, Stanley Moore and Tim Hahn, in 2016.
“Dreams have always fascinated me, and a dream movie in the animated space has sort of been a white whale,” Woo explains. “I think every animation studio in the world has had a dream movie in development at some point over the last couple decades, but none of them have ever been made because I think nobody could figure out how to give a dream movie its stakes. When we started our company, we were dreaming up different movie ideas and when we cracked it, we were like, ‘Oh my gosh, we’ve got to make this really quickly, otherwise somebody else is going to figure it out before us.’”
They formalized the script with Erik Benson on younger siblings Stevie (Jolie Hoang-Rappaport) and Elliot (Elias Janssen), who are trying to process some recent big changes in their family. When they discover a portal into the dream world, they enter with the intent to get a very specific wish granted by the Sandman (Omid Djalili).
“Personally, I grew up on movies that told me that if I wished hard enough, if I wanted something badly enough, that my dreams could come true,” Woo says of his own childhood. “As I grew up, I realized sometimes that’s true, but sometimes it’s not. I really wanted to make a movie that explores the question of, what do you do when your dreams actually don’t come true? How do you find hope? How do you keep moving forward in life? How do you find a way through? That was the big inspiration for me with this movie, and that’s why I wanted so desperately to make it.”
He also based Stevie and Elliot’s dynamic on his own relationship with his little brother. “We’ve had our epic battles throughout our childhood, as I’m the perfectionist, overbearing older sibling while he’s the carefree, fun-loving, charming little brother,” he shares. “A lot of this movie was me trying to understand and appreciate him and his unique perspective and take on life. One of my good friends who knows me a little too well saw the movie, and he said, “You know, this film is just a really circuitous way of you telling your brother that you love him.” And I was like, ‘I guess?’ I don’t know, making movies is easier than dealing with your feelings.”
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Jurassic World: Chaos Theory Season 4 (November 20)
Surprise, surprise but ask Jurassic World fans their favorite new era story and many will say DreamWorks Animation’s original, canon animated series: Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous and Jurassic World: Chaos Theory. Both Netflix series follow “The Nublar Six,” six teens who first meet on Isla Nublar and then survive that catastrophe to grow up to be complex young adults investigating dino Black Markets in a post Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom world.
The more mature Chaos Theory surprised many with its noir mystery tone. And animation-wise, all four seasons have reproduced major dino species from the films and placed them in thrilling action sequences that often rival the films. All the while, the creators have been just as interested in giving audiences absorbing human characters to invest in and care about over time.
The fourth and final season drops this month with a storyline that weaves right into the events of Jurassic World Dominion and reunites the fractured “The Nublar Six” for one last harrowing mission. Series showrunner Scott Kreamer tells Paste that from their greenlight as a sequel series, they’ve known this would be the final season.
“When I first started coming up with the idea, I saw it as very small, like 16 to 20 episodes,” Kreamer shares. “Luckily, because people liked Camp Cretaceous, they came back and said, “How about 39 [episodes]?””
Knowing their runway for story, Kreamer says he, co-EP Aaron Hammersley, head writer Bethany Armstrong Johnson, and their writers worked within the storylines created by Jurassic World film architect Colin Trevorrow.
“I always knew the conspiracy theory of Season 1, and liked the idea of book-ending by having Season 4 be a survival story, much like the first season of Camp Cretaceous,” Kreamer details. “Then in the middle two seasons, I knew we were gonna end up going to Malta, but everything else we figured out as we were going along.”
Working along with their storyboard artists and animators to bring feature film thrills and upscaled CG animation to fans, Kreamer says the last two seasons have been a creative marathon. “No one got a day off because we ended Season 3 with all the dinosaurs running through Malta, which was also a huge ask. And this season definitely, as our seasons tend to do, picks up momentum as it goes.”
Not only does this season take place parallel to the events in Dominion at Biosyn Valley HQ, but it also gives the fractured friends a lot of emotional space to explain their choices to one another, especially rogue Brooklynn (Kiersten Kelly), who faked her death to infiltrate the dino Black Market world. Kreamer promises there is equal time given to characters to land a satisfying ending.
Having worked on the series since 2018, Kreamer says he’s still processing the ride that was Camp Cretaceous/Chaos Theory. “As a writer, I really don’t have the words to say it,” he admits. “To get to tell this story with an amazing group of people, and there were a lot of us who started with Camp Cretaceous, I’m just so grateful to have been part of this thing and to be part of this team that worked so hard to do something that really seemed to make an impression on so many people. Hitting kids and young adults on an emotional level, helping, in some way, in getting them through the pandemic and lockdown and the aftermath, and where the world is now.”
With the success of Jurassic World: Rebirth this year, it certainly begs the question of whether “The Nublar Six” could have more adventures in that untold space between Dominion and Rebirth?
“I wish the decision was mine,” Kreamer admits. “Seeing the direction Rebirth goes, I’d be lying if I didn’t say, ‘Well, everyone else got a trilogy….’ I have an idea, but I think the biggest thing is, we did 90 episodes with the same characters and that’s how it was presented to me,” he says of the decision maker’s less-than-enthusiastic feedback. “Just the fact that we got to do so much: we got to do 90 episodes, we got to do a time jump, and so much that was just unheard of, or at least, very rare. But, do I have a story that leads us into Rebirth? Yes, I do.”
Asked if an animated feature could be a more reasonable idea, Kreamer offers, “I don’t think they want our films competing with their films. But again, I’ve got a cool story. I think it works. I think it helps lead us in, but it doesn’t sound like it’s going to happen. But, you never know.”
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Prep & Landing: The Snowball Protocol (November 27)
Prep & Landing: The Snowball Protocol is the first new Prep & Landing animated special in 14 years. The holiday series harkens back to 2009 when Walt Disney Animation released the original CG animated special, Prep & Landing. It introduced the calamity-prone Christmas elves, Lanny (Derek Richardson) and Wayne (Dave Foley), who aren’t the sharpest elves on Santa’s bench.
The characters (and the voice actors) return in this adventure that pulls back the curtain on many of Wayne’s less successful prior holiday assignments. The animation is by ICON Creative Studio, and the special debuts on Disney Channel, then streams on Disney+.
Tara Bennett is a Los Angeles-based writer covering film, television and pop culture for publications such as SFX Magazine, NBC Insider, IGN and more. She’s also written official books on Sons of Anarchy, Outlander, Fringe, The Story of Marvel Studios, Avatar: The Way of Water and the latest, The Art of Ryan Meinerding. You can follow her on Twitter @TaraDBennett or Instagram @TaraDBen
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