Toon In: Animated TV Highlights for November 2023, from the Pixels vs Pencils Debate to Scott Pilgrim’s Return
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.
Invincible Season 2 (November 3)
It’s been more than two years since the Season 1 finale of the animated adaptation of Robert Kirkman’s comic book, Invincible on Prime Video. But, as they say, better late than never for this hard-R series that uses the aesthetics of Saturday morning cartoons to tell a very mature story about the ugly realities of superheroes and villains. The first half of Season 2 returns with four action-packed episodes that reveal the fallout of the chaos caused by Omni-Man (J.K. Simmons) leaving his family—Mark Grayson / Invincible (Steven Yeun) and wife Debbie Grayson (Sandra Oh)—and Earth behind.
Kirkman tells Paste that Mark’s dilemma this season is all about growing up fast to protect both those he loves and Earth from an impending Viltrumite invasion. “Invincible has this dual problem of ‘my dad’s this bad guy who betrayed me and my mother, and I’m the only guy left when really bad stuff happens,’” he explains. Figuring out new threats and allies will consume a lot of Mark’s attention going forward, including the appearance of the Coalition of Planets teased by Allen the Alien (Seth Rogen) in Season 1.
“The fact that you’re going to see Invincible from season to season, spiral in scope and go into different places that you wouldn’t necessarily have expected just from watching the first episode is really exciting to me,” Kirkman says of the ambition of the series, already in production on Season 3. “I want to take the fan base on this ride, and I want the viewers to be constantly off balance going, ‘Wait a minute, this show is this now? What’s going on?’ And that’s something that Prime is able to get behind us on. And being animated, it really lends itself to that and has put us in a great position to explore that aspect.”
Kirkman also praises the work of Season 2 additions, supervising director Dan Duncan and art director Shaun O’Neil. “Between the two of them, they have improved and streamlined the process of making this show in ways that I don’t necessarily comprehend, which is fine, because that’s not my skill,” he jokes. “But it’s great seeing what was done in Season 1 getting an extra level of refinement and a new level of process. I think there’s technically less 3D than you saw in Season 1, but where we use it is more surgical and seamless. When it popped up in Season 1, I feel like sometimes it stood out a little bit too much. We’ve made a more unified look to the show in Season 2 and 3.”
And what about Invincible’s trademark portrayal of violence that’s akin to Adult Swim’s Primal or Netflix’s Blue Eye Samurai? Kirkman says it returns but with continued purpose.
“It’s not about looking at the spectacle of this insane gore, but it’s about really feeling the tragedy of it while you’re witnessing it,” Kirkman explains. “I think that has really brought the audience on our side. We’re going to continue that. So, I don’t know if Season 1 was a six, and we’re going to go to nine. But there’s definitely going to be moments where we’re peaking, and then dropping back down. It’s a fine balance and it’s something that we spend a tremendous amount of time on because you have to make sure that you don’t overdo it, as it’s something that your audience can grow desensitized to very easily. And then it won’t have the same emotional punch, and it won’t provide that drama that you’re trying to get out of it.” The final four episodes of Season 2 drop in 2024.
Blue Eye Samurai Post Mortem (Aired November 3)
Before Netflix’s adult animated series, Blue Eye Samurai, husband and wife creatives Michael Green & Amber Noizumi never developed a series together. But their real shared life ended up triggering the gestation of this particular premise.
“We had our first child over 15 years ago, and she was born with blue eyes, so we called her our little blue eyed samurai,” Noizumi tells Paste of the literal birth of the idea. “We then started thinking about what it would be like to be a blue-eyed samurai, knowing in Edo period Japan that the borders were closed. It was illegal to be a foreigner there and to have blue eyes would be a monstrosity.” Adding in her own experiences of being and feeling caught between two worlds, the character of Mizu formed. “It was a notion of a story that we just slowly developed. But the gestation of that story took a lot longer than the gestation of our human,” she laughs.
Green continues, “For a long time, we talked about how interesting it would be to tell that story. But it just felt undoable. Then, it was one day in a conversation about this idea of adult animation burgeoning as a genre, and that there was a chance for it to be a genre, that it was instant. The idea we’ve been talking about, now we can tell that story with no compromise.”
They pitched the series to Netflix, who was excited about the premise. The pair wrote the series and then they were introduced to director, Jane Wu, who took point on the animation production with studio Blue Spirit. “With Jane, we sat down and we agreed on so many levels about this idea of everything being a hybrid in the way that our main character is,” Noizumi says. “Jane had this idea that she wanted of “East meets West,” and then we also did the mix of 2D and 3D, live action and animation. All of these elements came together to create our style.”
Fully embracing adult storytelling in the animation medium is still relatively new and still jarring for some Western audiences. But Noizumi says their team, including Netflix, had no qualms about it. “We wanted our show to announce itself, as this is for adults,” she stresses. “All of the sex scenes are in service of the story and our character. All of the violence is too. Some people may feel taken aback by it, but it’s also the intention of it.”
Green continues, “It is great when people are taken aback by what adult animation can be , because when people think of adult animation, they usually think comedies. And they are great comedies like Rick and Morty, Big Mouth, and on and on. Drama, it’s new. We’re really, sincerely hoping if people watch the show, that [studios] want to make more adult animated shows.”
With the Season 1 finale, “The Great Fire of 1657,” ending on a massive cliffhanger as Mizu (Maya Erskine) sails to London with her captive, Abijah Fowler (Kenneth Branagh) and Japan burning, Noizumi confirms they pitched it as a multi-season story. “We have many, many ideas, and the second season is broken out, and approved,” she adds.
Asked if the story will leave Japan, Noizumi offers, “We will not burn down all of Japan after we already burned down part of Edo. We definitely have storylines that will stay in Japan.”
And that in future seasons, should they get ordered, Mizu will grow beyond her singular mission of blind vengeance. “You do see cracks in her revolve and you see the origins of what she was capable of, that she was capable of being happy and love,” Noizumi catalogs. “She’s not this monster she pretends to be. When you see the human inside of her, you know that it’s still there and she’s not meant to be this killing machine forever.”
Pencils vs Pixels (On VOD November 7)
This year is the 100th anniversary of Walt Disney Studio Animation, but the end of the hand-drawn, 2D animation era really came after the theatrical release of The Princess and the Frog (2009) and the massive success of Toy Story and the subsequent rise of CG animation across the industry. It created a perceived rift between the two animation styles for more than a decade now, which prompted filmmakers Bay Dariz and Phil Earnest to make the documentary charting the clash in Pencils vs Pixels. Featuring some of the greatest animators of our generation, including Floyd Norman, Glen Keane, Tina Price, Sergio Pablos, and John Pomeroy, the doc lays out how Walt Disney himself created the hand-drawn, 2D theatrical animation market, how his studio thrived during its golden periods, and then how 2D has since been marginalized, but very far from dead.
Phil Earnest tells Paste that it was through his career and meeting animators like Tom Bancroft and John Pomeroy that he came to learn about the “passion, drive, and experiences animators go through” to become great at their art, and literally will any animated film into existence. Wanting to tell that story more formally, Earnest and Dariz put in the leg work to get a huge array of animators to speak on camera.
In the development, Dariz says the narrative of the doc, and its very title, came from the rift that financiers and studios caused between 2D and 3D animation. “The Pencils versus Pixels is more how the industry saw it, than how the artists themselves saw it,” he says. “There was this thought that CG would be like stop motion animation, or any different type of filmmaking form that would be a parallel way of telling a story. They never saw it as being something that would overtake 2D animation. But it was a bit of a perfect storm of a couple of movies that did really well that were CG, and a couple movies that did pretty poorly that were hand-drawn that the industry altogether said we should make this shift. To make either, it’s about the same amount of time, same amount of people, and the same amount of money. It’s just that the industry decided this is where it was going to go. What we were trying to do is not make CG look like an evolution of 2D animation. It’s really important to us that that’s not the takeaway from this, rather that this is just the history of how things went, this is where we are, and there’s room for both, and both can be wonderful.”
In fact, the film closes with the triumph of director Sergio Pablo’s Netflix hand-drawn, animated film, Klaus, which united together many classically-trained Disney-era animators and the newest generation of artists to honor the 2D style. Dariz says, “It was a great place to kind of end the story because it was this big budget, hand drawn animated film that was also incorporating computers to add different volumetric lighting to make it feel like it was really modern. And when talked about how the [animation] apprenticeship was such an important thing, now we’re getting those animators, who were animating back in the ’90s, training and teaching this young generation, so it felt like a really wonderful place to sort of end it, and then ask what’s going to happen in the future.”
Earnest says the future of traditional animation, ironically, is on social media apps like Instagram, where artists from all walks of life are sharing their work under the tag: pencil test. “The interest is so crazy,” he enthuses. “Once you figure out how to make a ball bounce, you can’t stop doing it. And the more opportunities there are for younger people, and even older people, to start animating, the more that they’re going to come up with their own stuff. And the more they’re going to fall in love with it, the more that demand is going to happen. I feel like we’re gonna see a lot of really cool stuff. It’s booming in Europe but the United States is where I can tell it’s going to be blowing up just from meeting college students.”
Appearing in the doc is John Pomeroy, a former Disney animator who helped start the Bluth Group, making such legendary projects like The Secret of Nimh, The Land Before Time, and the Dragon’s Lair video game. Now teaching storyboarding at Lipscomb University and online at his own academy, Pomeroy tells Paste that he observes the next generation’s appetite to take 2D animation to the next level daily. “Every once in a while, I come across a person not only interested in animation but in story, which I encourage a great deal. The class I have now is dynamite,” he says with pride. “Someone will pick up on a new franchise and take it to the next level. So, cultivating the ideas and appetites of these young minds will maybe guarantee a third renaissance of the art form. Who knows? But I think we’re on the right track. And kudos to all of the art departments around the world that are taught by former Disney, Sony, and 2D animators keeping the art form alive.”
Scott Pilgrim Takes Off (November 17)
When Netflix announced that Bryan Lee O’Malley was bringing back his beloved Scott Pilgrim comic book series as an anime series, there were some major questions from fans because O’Malley has long been vocal about not wanting to return to that world just to do it.
O’Malley confirms to Paste that was very much his position, even when Netflix proposed the idea to him years ago. “I was bored but didn’t want to be bored,” he says with his usual candor about the Pilgrim mythology in general. “So when the idea was floated to me about what if we did an animated show, I had no ideas. To me, it was kind of dead and done. I had a certain geography of Scott Pilgrim in my mind.”
However, a dinner with his friend, writer BenDavid Grabinski changed his perspective. He shared his creative ennui about the project and got immediate feedback. “BenDavid came out like 6000 miles away with his own idea, and that sparked the whole thing.”
Grabinski jumps in to clarify, “I had never had a single thought in my life about what I would do with Scott Pilgrim. I just listened to a friend talking about the things that he viewed as creative hurdles for making a show. So, I just blurted out the concept of the season in response to it, kind of just as a goof,” he laughs. “It was just me saying, ‘Well, if these are the things that you’re worried about, you could do this.’ Then, we both got really excited about it, and it just became years of us turning that into a real show. We wanted to make something that was the most exciting, new Scott Pilgrim story we could tell. But also something that worked for people who have never seen any version of it.”
When it came time for the animation phase of production, O’Malley and Grabinski admit they were both beyond thrilled to find out that renowned contemporary Japanese animation studio Science Saru was attached to bring the series to life.
“It was incredibly exciting for both of us,” Grabinski says. “It just felt like we knew that, no matter how insane we made the scripts, they could execute at a level that was just very artful and respectful of Bryan’s work.”
O’Malley concurs and adds that they handed the scripts over with the utmost trust for them to do what they do best. “All those [decisions] were up to Saru, Eunyoung Choi, our producer, and Abel Góngora, our director,” he explains. “They constantly made all the right decisions. It was like Christmas morning, pretty much, once or twice a week from six months to a year when we were just getting new stuff from them.”
And then the cherry Sex Bob-om on top was getting every single cast member from Edgar Wright’s live-action Scott Pilgrim vs. the World movie to voice their characters in the anime. O’Malley says once they had the series idea, they reached out to Wright, the film’s producers, and Universal because they own the rights to the movie iteration. “At that point, we’re already involving so many of them, why not just try to go the whole mile and get everyone to make it a real getting the band back together, reunion tour kind of moment?” he says of the effort. “And then we were shocked. Pleasantly surprised. It was unexpected. It was delightful. I still don’t know to this day how it happened. It’s just like an act of God.”
Check back for next month’s TOON IN for a post mortem with O’Malley and Grabinski for Scott Pilgrim Takes Off.
The Velveteen Rabbit (November 22)
Margery Williams’ beloved book, The Velveteen Rabbit, has been adapted many times into traditional, 2D animation specials and films going back to 1973. However, for this holiday season, Apple TV+ and London-based Magic Light Pictures are adapting the story as a hybrid, using live-action and CGI animation to tell the tale of love and sacrifice. Actor Phoenix Laroche plays William, who is gifted what will become his beloved stuffed rabbit, voiced by Alex Lawther (Andor). With the advancements in technology and animation techniques, this is shaping up to be a gorgeous take on the three-hankie tale that could become a new seasonal classic.
The Bad Guys: A Very Bad Holiday (November 30)
After the box office success of director Pierre Perifel’s 2022 DreamWorks Animation hit, The Bad Guys, Netflix is bringing the gang back for the original holiday-themed special, The Bad Guys: A Very Bad Holiday. Director Bret Haaland takes over the reins on this one, and features the return of Mr. Wolf, Mr. Piranha, Mr. Snake, Mr. Shark, and Ms. Tarantula (all voiced by new actors) as they plan for a Christmas Day holiday heist. However, the abrupt cancellation of the holiday has the thieves donning Santa’s red coat and altruistic spirit so they can restore Christmas, and get back to their larceny. While there’s a new creative team behind this, the world and charming cast of characters are worth coming back to on the small screen.
Tara Bennett is a Los Angeles-based writer covering film, television and pop culture for publications such as SFX Magazine, Total Film, SYFY Wire and more. She’s also written books on Sons of Anarchy, Outlander, Fringe, The Story of Marvel Studios and the upcoming Avatar: The Way of Water. You can follow her on Twitter @TaraDBennett or Instagram @TaraDBen
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