Toon In: Animated TV Highlights for January 2024, from Hazbin Hotel to the Stop-Motion In the Know
TV Lists animation
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 for 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.
Solo Leveling (January 6)
An anime adaptation of the immensely popular South Korean web novel written by Chugong, Solo Leveling premieres on Crunchyroll’s streaming platform. This series is a reunion for animation studio A-1 Pictures and director Shunsuke Nakashige, who worked together on the anime fantasy series Sword Art Online. With Solo Leveling, they bring to life a contemporary fantasy that takes place in a version of our world where monsters are a constant threat to humanity. Some people, called Hunters, have supernatural powers they use to conquer dungeons and clear out the threats for a price. The least successful of their kind is Sung Jinwo, who constantly gets his butt handed to him in battle. During another stacked-against-him dungeon mission, Jinwo wakes to find he’s been mysteriously imbued with the rare power to level up and embarks on a new quest with a whole new set of skills. Think of this as a modern day Dungeons & Dragons with plenty of battles and mysteries for Jinwo to figure out.
Grimsburg (January 7)
Just about any time actor Jon Hamm signs on to voice an animated character, that’s reason enough to give it a try. In the new FOX adult animation series Grimsburg, Hamm acts as both executive producer and voices Marvin Flute, the self-appointed “world’s best detective” who left his small hometown of Grimsburg to chase bad guys. But he finally returns home to redeem himself with the wife (Erinn Hayes) and son (Rachel Dratch) he left behind, as well as his fellow Grimsburg detectives. Skewering true crime and noir, the episodes feature over-the-top crimes—like decapitations, slasher-style murders, and serial killer sprees—that Flute has to solve, all while he’s trying to restore the relationships he left behind.
Hazbin Hotel (January 19)
In the realm of animation, not many independent creators can translate their internet following into an actual paid career. But artist and animator Vivienne “VivziePop” Medrano figured it out by building a passionate fandom around her original idea, Hazbin Hotel. An adult musical centering on Lucifer’s daughter, Charlie Morningstar (Erika Henningsen), she’s an eternally-optimistic princess of Hell intent on figuring out how to redeem souls. Medrano’s crowd-funded pilot dropped in October 2019 and has since garnered 93 million views on her YouTube channel.
A24 and Prime Video took notice and tapped Medrano and many of her creative team to turn Hazbin Hotel into an animated series. And as she told Paste, that was Medrano’s plan all along.
“When I set out to make the pilot, that was my goal,” she says. “As we were making it, it became bigger and bigger and felt like the first episode to something. Obviously, I just wanted the show to have a life. I didn’t know if that was through self-funding it, or if a studio would want it. I was open to a studio wanting it because that’s the nice route for it having a bigger life. But I was also willing to do a Kickstarter or crowdfund to continue it myself. I was going to continue, but it was just about how? And I was very picky with who would get it. Then A24 came in, was amazing, and did it right.”
Shifting from indie maker with her own studio (SpindleHorse Toons) to executive producer of a backed series made with Bento Box Entertainment, Medrano admits it has been quite the journey for her and her collaborators. “It was definitely a learning curve because this was my first big job with an industry production studio,” she explains. “Obviously, there are a lot of things that I do differently at my studio because it’s very artist-based and it’s very grassroots. I’m very hands on there. So, having this bigger pipeline and bigger apparatus was definitely new. Working with an outsource studio was new, too, but I learned a ton. But what was nice was I was bringing so many artists from Spindle. I really appreciate that Bento let me bring on so many people who had worked on the pilot, and worked at my studio. So it really maintained that feel of being made by the same team. And I think that shows in the final product.”
When asked if the Prime Video series has served as an opportunity to hone her intentions and overall aesthetics, Medrano says that has been her favorite part. “I feel like the series compared to the pilot is a lot more polished,” she says. “And what’s nice is between the original pilot and the launch of the first season of Hazbin, we’d already made a couple episodes of Helluva Boss [Medrano’s 2019 webseries], so we kind of had that figured out. That’s in a shared universe, so it really felt like we’d figured out the visual style of this world. I also think I developed as an artist. My style kind of changed. When I drew the characters again, I saw comments saying, “Oh, they look so different,” which is so interesting to me because I’ve been drawing them for years. But I think it’s just because there was a gap in between, and I developed as an artist and my style kind of changed from the pilot series. It still looks like my style, but it’s like a more evolved version.”
Masters of the Universe: Revolution (January 25)
A sequel to Kevin Smith’s 2021 Netflix animated series Masters of the Universe: Revelation, Revolution sees the Mark Hamill-voiced Skeletor joining forces with Motherboard (Meg Foster) and Hordak (Keith David) to attack Eternia in the battle for Castle Grayskull. One of the most handsome renditions of this world, Powerhouse Animation returns to bring to life these very different visualizations of He-Man (Chris Wood) and now Sorceress Teela (Melissa Benoist). Purists of the OG ‘80s animated series didn’t take too warmly to this very different take on the world, but for those ready to see some updating to these characters, this new ‘verse is visually compelling and provides some unexpected story turns.
In the Know (January 25)
2024 is starting off on exactly the right foot in the streaming realm because Peacock has invested in a rare stop-motion live-action-hybrid series from ShadowMachine (Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, Bojack Horseman) and creators Mike Judge, Brandon Gardner, and Zach Woods. Even better, this is an ensemble comedy series revolving around the eccentric personalities running a small New York NPR station, including Lauren Caspian (Woods), the narcissistic and neurotic host of the interview program, In the Know.
Executive producer/creator Zack Woods (The Office, Silicon Valley) tells Paste that, while the concept seems perfectly tailored for COVID era production—with its individually, hand-crafted animation married with Caspian’s Zoom interviews with celebs like Ken Burns, Finn Wolfhard, Norah Jones, and Mike Tyson—the premise actually owes its existence to a classic Cartoon Network series.
“One of the original things Mike and I talked about was Space Ghost Coast to Coast, where there’s these live action interviews with the animated character,” Woods explains. “It was a format that, in Mike’s case, had interested him, even pre-pandemic. And then stop-motion seemed like the perfect medium for these kinds of delicate, spindly, very fragile, slightly twee characters,” he laughs. “Also, I think, because we wanted to make a satirical show, having puppets gives you a longer leash in terms of where you can go without people bristling quite so easily. Although, we’re about to put that to the test.”
Bringing the series to life is Portland-based studio ShadowMachine, with Brian Hansen serving as In the Know’s animation director. Woods says from their very first visit to the studio, they knew they found the right collaborators to bring their character-centric satire to life.
“It felt like such an emotionally healthy and functional group of people working in an unabashed way,” he says with sincerity. “A sad thing that I have occasionally witnessed in Hollywood is a kind of bashfulness about creative passion. It’s such an industry-run town, there can be a kind of practiced worldliness that people have where they’re embarrassed to just be like little kids at summer camp about the things that they’re making. And ShadowMachine was the opposite. It’s just all of these incredible artists who are at the top of their game led by people like Brian who have such care, married with a kind of pragmatism.”
When asked if there was a moment that he and Gardner knew that this technique was the right one for the concept, Woods remembers, “One of the first things is Brian just did a test with Carl (Carl Tart) and it was so beautiful. We realized, even from the first test, that we’d had these scenes written where people are kind of mean to Carl. When we saw the vulnerability of the puppet and the softness of him, we were like, ‘Oh shit, we got to cut that because people are never gonna forgive being too mean to Carl.’ So we revised based on the animation.”
Remarkably, the six-episode season of In the Know was shot in about half a year. For stop-motion, that’s incredible. Hansen says they were able to pull it off because all the episodes primarily take place inside broadcast studios. “There are a lot of interviews and stuff, so there’s a lot of the characters sitting down,” he explains. “Instead of using a tremendous amount of time and energy with walking and jumping and stuff, quite often we’re just at a desk, so a lot of energy is putting all the performance into hands and legs. It just meant that, with all the characters, you really feel them because the animators could spend most of their time just to give them energy and life and care.”
Woods continues, “I think one of the gifts of stop-motion is that each of these characters is brought to life by like 30 people. The creative process matched the thematic intention of the comedy, which is to be like: no one is just one thing. Fabian (Caitlin Reilly) is this kind of a hardass. But when someone’s actually respectful and listens to her, she’s actually incredibly vulnerable and caring. Lauren is a venal, self involved putz, but he’s also just a really lonely guy who is lost. There’s all these kinds of counter currents, and having a stop-motion process where so many different souls are putting themselves into each of the characters felt very appropriate to that kind of idea.”
Tara Bennett is a Los Angeles-based writer covering film, television and pop culture for publications such as SFX Magazine, NBC Insider, SYFY Wire and more. She’s also written official books on Sons of Anarchy, Outlander, Fringe, The Story of Marvel Studios and Avatar: The Way of Water. You can follow her on Twitter @TaraDBennett or Instagram @TaraDBen
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