Toon In: Animated TV Highlights for October 2023, from the Castlevania: Nocturne Finale to Treehouse of Horror XXXIV
Photo Courtesy of ABC 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.
Teenage Euthanasia – Season Finale Post Mortem (Aired September 28)
All of the animated shows on Adult Swim are odd, but that makes this network such a special playground of series that embrace non-conformity and abstract animation design. Case in point, Alyson Levy and Alissa Nutting’s white trash comedy, Teenage Euthanasia, which just ended its second season of zombie hijinks performed by the most-Florida of characters, Trophy Fantasy (Maria Bamford).
“Our only limitations we could possibly have are just ourselves,” Levy tells Paste about the bonkers places they go in any given episode. “We try to really push every single story, episode, character, and design to challenge ourselves and make ourselves laugh… or just creep each other out, whichever feels right for that day. The voice of the show is unique, and we try to protect that.”
If you haven’t caught Teenage Euthanasia, its high concept premise centers on “Annie” Fantasy (Jo Firestone), an insecure teen brought up by her grandma Baba (Bebe Neuwirth) and her Uncle Pete (Tim Robinson) in their family-run funeral home, Tender Endings in Fort Gator, Florida. Annie is reunited with the corpse of her narcissist mom, Trophy, in a bizarre revival that brings the family together under one roof.
The rare animated comedy written by women with a woman-centric story, Nutting says they don’t take that for granted. “We really like to write for the teens who are in therapy, or the teens who are lonely, left out or feel like no one gets them and they don’t have a place in the world,” she says. “Annie, our protagonist, has a lot of those qualities at different times. And it’s nice to have a core cast in a show that’s not only three generations of women, but they’re also three generations of women who are all outsiders. They all differ from what we’re told to be as women, both in their generation and also throughout all of time.”
Levy continues, “And while it’s a show that’s really absurd and really crazy, it is also real and about real stuff. Between the characters, there is real emotion and real caring on some level. That interested us, so we’re not just like a joke machine. We are, but there are things we felt like we wanted to talk about in being a mother, being a daughter, and just being a woman.”
The second season finale, “A Very Fantasy Vacation,” ended on an epic road trip that took the Fantasy family out of Florida for the first time, and essentially pulled a Bugs Bunny by forcibly separating the state from the continent. Levy says they wanted to go big just to see how far they could push the boundaries of their own show.
And Nutting says Florida being relentlessly ribbed by the show is done with a lot of love. “Florida is this magical place where it’s sort of all out in the open and even celebrated in some ways of just being the proud train wreck of the United States,” she says with sincerity. “It allows for a lot of social commentary, and I think in a lot of ways, it’s discounted, forgotten, and seen as too tacky for the rest of society, which is exactly how this family and all our characters are seen. The nesting doll of metaphors is so rich.”
As for their finale, it ends on a big twist that implies the series is a fanciful story that’s being told by a gator dad to his gator kids. Done in a more Disney style of animation, Levy says that the whole scene came very late in the episode’s planning. “It came during the animatic, where it just felt like it needed an extra button on it,” she explains. “I think for us, it’s just an acknowledgement of the storytelling of this show. And one of the little alligators is Alissa’s daughters.”
The team is currently in negotiations to make a third season, so they hope people will watch the show on Max and tell their friends. And they thank everyone who watches it live, which makes a big difference. “We have a lot of ideas and ones that we didn’t get to do,” Levy says. “For us, the show goes on forever. I feel like we’ve just barely scratched the surface because the more you know the characters, the funnier and better the show gets.”
Castlevania: Nocturne – Season Finale Post Mortem (Aired September 28)
Castlevania: Nocturne is the latest installment in Netflix’s adaptation of Konami’s Castlevania videogame series into an expanded animation mythology. All eight episodes dropped September 28th, and it has already been renewed for a second season. Nocturne deeply expanded the characters and world of the vampire-killing Belmont family. It’s set during the French Revolution and centers on the vengeance seeking Richter Belmont (Edward Bluemel).
Nocturne is written by Clive Bradley with producer Kevin Kolde serving as co-showrunner. Kolde tells Paste that they decided on Richter as the primary character, and then built the season around him. “Richter and his story, and the time period, which is from the games, came before we settled on this particular story,” he says. “We’re always trying to stick to the heart of what’s come before and what it means to be a Belmont, and what that legacy is in terms of the character. Richter obviously is a very different character than Trevor was,” he says referring to the protagonist of Castlevania. “His life story is different. But the show is very grounded and the characters are very real.”
Co-director Sam Deets says the setting of the series also adds a lot of dimension to this series. “There’s a lot of talk about revolution this season,” he says of the theme that is the through-line. “Clive is a history nerd and he really was wanting to build around that, and build a cast of characters that supported that.”
Fellow co-director Adam Deets adds, “One of the big things that is super interesting and very unique is covering the Haitian Revolution. That is a piece of history that was integral to the French Revolution that is never talked about or touched on. And it isn’t just tacked on. It’s a thing that matters. Stuff like that brings a level of interest that I think is special. And I’m glad that we did it.”
When asked if they had a favorite moment to create this season, Sam says the moment that Richter gets his magic. “It was difficult and very important to land,” he says. “But at the same time, when I was storyboarding it, and then planning out all of the animators and artists to work on it, that all flowed really, really nicely.”
For Adam, it was the eighth episode. “All the stuff with the hell machine getting picked up off the ground and slammed back down with pipes dripping off it was a unique challenge for us,” he explains, because 3D animation is not typically used by the studio. “We use it in very minimalistic ways. So trying to find ways to make that stuff work, on top of all the crowd battle was wild and very difficult. But I’m really proud of the team for what we were able to do.”
And then there’s Alucard (James Callis) showing up in the final seconds of the season finale. Kolde says that was always the planned ending point when they blocked out the right episodes of the season.
“What’s funny is I think that I boarded the little part with Alucard showing up in like two hours,” Sam shares. “It was basically the quickest, ugliest scribbles at the tail end of pre-production. But then after we finished up, there was this nice period where I moved on to animation direction and I got to go in and do all the layouts for everything and make it all pretty. But the whole ending sequence, aside from a handful of shots, was held very close to the chest. I held on to a bunch of the key shots for myself, and handpicked the animators and did corrections myself because the moment had to be perfect.”
Fright Krewe (October 2)
Just in time for the Halloween season, DreamWorks Animation’s Fright Krewe Season 1 is a teen-centric, supernatural mystery series that is set within the contemporary Voodoo culture of New Orleans. Created by horror director Eli Roth and author James Frey, the series itself was developed and showrun by Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts writers Joanna Lewis and Kristine Songco. Featuring an ensemble of local teens who are bound together first by a shared detention, and then by getting imbued by individual Voodoo spirits so they can fight an evil awakened spirit, think of this as an animated The Breakfast Club meets The Monster Squad.
Inspired by the city of New Orleans, Roth and Frey set their original series premise right in the heart of the French Quarter, which thrilled Lewis and Songco. While the pair had never written in the horror genre before, they were drawn more deeply into every discussion they had with Roth and Frey and eventually felt it was a “meant to be” project. “Even though we were a little bit like, ‘How are we going to handle horror?’ We were way too interested to say no,” Lewis tells Paste.
Lewis says the show is very much a “love letter” to the incredibly rich city. “It was really important to us to make sure that we were being very authentic,” she says. “And this is basically about ghost stories, legends and monster stories, so New Orleans was the perfect place to set it.”
The gorgeously animated series incorporates the architecture of the French Quarter, the flora and fauna of the bayou, as well as the color palette of the city and infuses it within the series. Much of the action takes place at night, so there are a lot of jump scares and no holds barred-creatures portrayed too.
“Shane Acker (9) and Peter Markowski were hugely influential in creating the look and the feel of the show,” Lewis says. “We expressed how much we wanted it to be authentic, and to be really heavily inspired by New Orleans. Both of them ran with that, so some of the designs are out-of-control stunning.”
Animated in traditional 2D style, Songco says that was a battle won because of the flexibility that it offered a series like this with an already large ensemble of five core teens, and many support characters of the human and demon derivations. “CG is doable, but you have to really, really think about how many characters you have,” Songco explains. “And even a damaged set counts as a set, even a costume change counts as a character. Plus, the architecture of New Orleans is just so gorgeous and there’s just a lot more detail in making it look old and stuff like that, that is a little bit easier to pull off [in 2D].”
Once Upon a Studio (October 15)
Back in 2021, it struck Dan Abraham and Trent Correy, long-time Disney creatives and co-directors of the short Once Upon a Snowman (2020), that the 100th anniversary of Walt Disney Animation was imminently looming in 2023. As the studio’s CG theatrical release for 2023, Wish, was already in full production, the duo wanted to create something to honor the studio’s rich legacy of characters and 2D animation too.
On their own, they decided to write and storyboard a live-action short that wove in 2D animation and CG, essentially assembling 100-years worth of Disney animation characters for a class picture. They also wanted to feature Disney creative legend “Burny” Mattinson to open the piece while giving the studio founder, Walt Disney, his due too.
“For about eight months, Trent and I worked on it at night and on weekends without anybody knowing about it or asking for anything like this,” Abraham tells Paste. “We thought it could very well be a waste of time. But we were having so much fun doing it, just putting together what we would want to see as Disney fans.”
The two then set up a Zoom meeting with Walt Disney Animation Studios Chief Creative Officer Jennifer Lee and cold pitched her the short via monitors with Abraham presenting the story reel, drawing by drawing, performing all the voices and the music cues. It brought Lee to (happy) tears, and her response was: “I don’t know how, but we have to figure out how to make this.”
About six weeks later, the pair pitched it to the Disney executives and at the end of 2021, they pitched the Animation Studios itself. “The reception that we got…” Abraham remembers with emotion. “All of the artists kept coming up to us saying, ‘I have to be part of this! I have to work on this.’ These characters mean so much to people, and they just wanted to be part of it. It was incredible, so emotional.” The project was officially a go.
Remarkably, after the final storyboard development, Abraham says the short has remained as they envisioned it. “It has the exact same flow of Burny Mattinson walking out at the beginning and it leads to the characters coming out of the artwork on the walls, and then they’re all gathering for this big photo. It ends with Goofy breaking the camera, and then singing ‘When You Wish Upon a Star.’ And that was all there from day one.”
After the short was formally boarded, edited, and the exact characters were decided upon, Trent Correy tells Paste they had a specific plan to assign segments. “We have this amazing in-house, hand-drawn animation team with Eric Wahlberg, Mark Henn, Randy Haycock, just to name a few, along with CG animators that do hand-drawn as well,” he details. “We had the idea to bring [animators] out of retirement from the outside that worked on these characters in the original films.”
They put out the call and got Reuben Aquino, who supervised Ursula in 1989, for The Little Mermaid. James Baxter also came back to do Rafiki, the Hunchback, and Belle. As well as Randy Haycock who had worked on Aladdin and animated Aladdin, and Alex Kupershmidt who supervised Stitch. And in-house, the Heads of Animation for the short were Eric Goldberg and Andrew Feliciano.
For the big Walt and Mickey moment, where his creation addresses a portrait of the studio founder, the pair even managed to bring back legendary Disney songwriter Richard Sherman to play Walt’s favorite song, “Feed the Birds” from Mary Poppins. “We just happened to bump into the head of the music department here at Disney, Matt Walker, and he said, ‘Why don’t we get Richard to play that and record it?’ We said, ‘What?’ And he’s like, ‘Yeah, he’s 94-years old, but he plays and he’s great.’ And we’re like, ‘Oh my God, yes! 1,000 times!’”
They ended up recording Sherman in Walt’s still-preserved office, on the very piano he used to play to pitch his boss songs on Friday afternoons. Composer Dave Meltzer then came in to create the score, stitching classic Disney cues together with Sherman’s recording and a new version of “When You Wish Upon a Star.”
It all culminates in an incredible assemblage of 540 Disney animation characters in front of the Disney Animation building in Burbank, California. “That shot was just gigantic to work on because they’re all singing and moving and doing specific things,” he explains.
Abraham adds, “We had our list of characters who don’t speak, so they wouldn’t be singing and they’d just have to sway. Like Bolt ended up howling because he’s right next to Penny, and if he spoke that would have freaked her out. Whereas Pongo and Perdita could sing because Roger and Anita were way in the back.” Correy deadpans, “And The Headless Horseman is not singing.”
Once Upon a Studio debuts on ABC’s The Wonderful World of Disney: Disney’s 100th Anniversary Celebration on October 15th.
Big Mouth Season 7 (October 20)
The kids of Big Mouth are moving on up to high school in this seventh season, which is also the penultimate for the entire series as it gets closer to winding up its long run on Netflix. The comedian-stuffed, very R-rated comedy continues to tackle everything terrible about growing up in the most frank ways possible. With age and more puberty symptoms popping up comes new Hormone Monsters (including one voiced by Megan thee Stallion) and humiliations for all of the kids growing up in the Westchester County suburbs of New York. The show continues to feature one of the deepest benches of actors, singers, and comedic talent voicing any animated series out there—but the writers also bring the poignant with its potty-mouth too.
It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown (October 21 to October 22)
An animated Halloween tradition since 1966, It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, was a broadcast staple in October for five decades. But Apple is now the shepherd of the Peanuts animation legacy, and owns the rights to all of the classic animated specials. If you have a subscription to Apple TV+, you can binge the Great Pumpkin to your heart’s content all month. And if you don’t, you can stream it for free on Apple TV+ from October 21 to 22.
The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror XXXIV (November 5)
Celebrating the 35th installment of the venerable Treehouse of Horror anthology that’s been an annual The Simpsons tradition since 1990, XXXIV features three standalone stories. One is about Bart getting turned into an NFT, as written by Jeff Westbrook. Then, Lisa Simpson enlists the help of Sideshow Bob (Kelsey Grammer) to track down a gruesome serial killer in a gory tale by Jessica Conrad. And writer Dan Vebber explores a different kind of virus outbreak in Springfield.
Getting his first shot at co-showrunning a Treehouse of Horror, Brian Kelley worked on the nitty gritty of getting the episode made with the writers, under showrunner Matt Selman. Kelley tells Paste this year’s stories were born out of the writers’ room, with the exception of the NFT episode.
“Jim Brooks, who is the boss of all bosses, really wanted to do a segment on NFTs,” Kelley reveals. “We’ve lived through these new technologies that people insist will be the basis of the world economy, even though no one understands them, most of all the people who put their life savings into them. So, we played around with it for a while. You always want to come up with a take on it that feels new. And I will say, without ruining the episode, that we did predict the collapse of NFT’s,” he jokes.
“We ended up marrying it with a parody of Snowpiercer, which is also a movie about a completely bonkers, post-apocalyptic world,” he continues about Westbrook’s episode. “We’re also always looking with Halloween to do animation that we haven’t seen before.” Under the direction of Rob Oliver, Kelley says this segment pushes an animation style used outside the train that looks nothing like a typical The Simpsons episode. “It’s fantastic.”
Kelley says Conrad’s episode features the return of uber-villain, Sideshow Bob, which ended up ticking off a bucket list experience for him, as he’s never worked with Grammer before in his years on the show. “I was so excited to direct him, but there’s not much directing to do because he just knows Sideshow Bob. I had no notes,” Kelley laughs.
As for the story, he says it bloomed from an idea of an episode set in the future, based on a different timeline where audiences could see a future Bob. “Later in the process, we introduced movie tropes into it and what hit on was very David Fincher-esque, and a Seven, kind of thing. It’s also a real powerhouse Lisa Simpson episode.”
Lastly, Kelley says Vebber wanted to do a pandemic-themed episode that then changed when everyone was tapped out on COVID. “So, we came up with a concept that is fun for the actors and lets them stretch a little,” Kelley teases. “It’s more of a viral outbreak story that is really silly.”
Last but not least, Kelley says the MVPs of this episode are Oliver and Richard K. Chung, head of the production team, who landed the episode during the WGA strike. “We had to do our final rewrite of this before the strike, which is months before we normally would have done it,” he explains. “We had only some of the animation and went on strike so I thought, ‘This is my one chance to do a Halloween and now it’s gonna be ruined.’ But we came back at the end of the strike, watched it, and it was great! It looks wonderful and we can’t thank them enough. They’re the reason the episode works.”
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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