Toon In: Animated TV Highlights for March, from Plankton: The Movie to BE@RBRICK

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 best new animated shows of March, but we’ve also collected some of the finest creators and voice talents in the medium to give updates, or introductions, to their series. 

Lil Kev (March 6) 

BET+ is getting into the adult animation game with Lil Kev. The series revolves around the memories of comedian Kevin Hart as a 12-year-old growing up in North Philadelphia with his mom (Wanda Sykes), uncle (Deon Cole) and his older brother. Hart will voice his younger self and the expanded cast features comedy greats including Loretta Devine, Cree Summer and Mo Collins. Episodes are inspired by Kevin’s real-life experiences, which is akin to The CW’s recent animated series, Everybody Still Hates Chris, which continued stories about Chris Rock’s youth in Bed-Stuy. Animation for Lil Kev is led by ShadowMachine. 

Plankton: The Movie (March 7)

Netflix’s Plankton: The Movie is a sweet, sweet victory for all of us Plankton fans who have patiently waited for a fitting cinematic spectacular worthy of the tiny terror who first appeared in the 1999 SpongeBob SquarePants episode “Plankton!” As directed by Dave Needham (The Loud House Movie) and written by Mr. Lawrence, Kaz and Chris Viscardi, Plankton: The Movie, in a nutshell, is Marriage Story, just set in Bikini Bottom. After two decades of their unconventional romance, Sheldon J. Plankton (Mr. Lawrence) and Karen Plankton the Computer (Jill Talley) find their marriage at an impasse only because he’s become a myopic, selfish jerk and she’s finally had enough.

As a long-time fan of the franchise, Needham tells Paste that he came aboard the movie immediately when offered. “Not only do I love Plankton and Spongebob, but I love villains,” he says. “I think doing a villain movie can be super fun so it was a privilege to be asked to do that sort of thing.”

The marital strife idea at the heart of the movie was born some time ago by Doug Lawrence (a.k.a. Mr. Lawrence/Plankton’s voice) when he was developing a SpongeBob special tentatively called “Karen Takes Over.” 

“I would get annoyed sometimes when there wasn’t enough between Plankton and Karen,” Lawrence tells Paste about what inspired that Plankton and Karen breakup story. “I’d say, ‘Ah, it’s just this one little joke,’ and then we’re on to the next thing. In the last few years, it’s been me trying to get Karen to be more part of the stories. So, we created the Gal Pals [Sandy, Karen, Mrs. Puff, and Pearl Krabs] where we took her away from Plankton so she exists on her own. She doesn’t need Plankton to be funny because we all know who she is now, and she’s fun. She’s got her own problems and her own things.”

“[Their story] is a more epic concept that I don’t think we would have been able to do the kind of emotional stuff we do in this [movie] in an 11 minute, or even a 22 minute episode,” Lawrence says. “So when all of a sudden Netflix popped up saying, ‘We’re thinking about a Sandy Cheeks movie and a Plankton movie,’ I went, ‘Yeah, it’s that.’ What else will we do? It’s an idea we haven’t done on the show yet, and the potential for it, we saw it right away.”

Needham says the script allows them to dive into the emotional core of the two characters, with Karen’s rage transforming her into a hydra made out of her three composite parts. “And we get to explore what Plankton might be like when he’s not evil, so that’s a whole new thing for him,” he teases. “We have both hilarious moments and tender moments too. And it feels like when you get to one of those tender moments, we have to earn it. I always love giving a character a choice, and we know what Plankton wants, the secret formula, so we knew we had to have certain moments where he’s got to make these tough choices, and what’s he going to do?”

The finished screenplay also pulls back the kelp on Plankton’s complex back story of how he came to reside in Bikini Bottom as the proprietor of The Chum Bucket and husband of Karen. Needham decided to portray the various chapters of Plankton’s life—from baby to college student to Krabby Patty secret formula failure—in different animation styles.

“Plankton, as far back as you go with him, has always been Plankton,” Needham says of the pint-sized thief. “So, it’s very deliberate that the idea was, the further you go back in his timeline, the further you go back in animation style. I wanted to do something rubber hose style for him as a kid, and then maybe something ‘50s or ‘70s for him at college, and then maybe something more ‘80s and Transformer-y for another sequence.”

Just as ambitious were the original musical stylings that would let Plankton and Karen sing out their frustrations. Bret McKenzie, Linda Perry and Mark and Robert Mothersbaugh were tasked with crafting several original epics that Needham says were a thrill to animate, including their Bond song homage “I’m Plankton,” the power ballad “I’m a Jerky Jerk,” and Karen’s big number, “Say My Name.”

For both Lawrence and Talley who have voiced the pair from their first appearances in the show, Plankton: The Movie allowed them to stretch in ways they never could have imagined. 

For Talley, it was getting to strut Karen’s evil self and sing her own villain song. “We’re very protective of this show and the characters, and you want to do a good job, and you want to stay true to the character. So, there’s a little bit of processing in your brain of, how can I do these different parts of Karen?” she says. “How can I be Evil Karen but still stay true to the Karen I’ve been playing for 25 years? That stuff was all a little challenging in the beginning, but then it became a blast to do.”

Lawrence agrees and adds that he got over the stage fright of singing in front of their esteemed songwriters in the recording booth as he belted out a version of “I’m Plankton” that literally made the Mothersbaughs sit up in their chairs. “I’m going, ‘Oh, what is happening?’ And they said, ‘We had no idea you were going to sing it like that.’ I probably sounded like Ethel Merman,” he laughs.

Oh My God…Yes! A Series of Extremely Relatable Circumstances (March 9) 

Images: https://warnerbros.ent.box.com/s/8xht0ho5q46tenqwtpnyexyv8co1vxr5/folder/306131728667

Adult Swim’s latest adult animated comedy, Oh My God…Yes! A Series of Extremely Relatable Circumstances, is the first series created by Adele “Supreme” Williams (My Dad the Bounty Hunter). It’s a raucous, sci-fi story about three friends—Sunny, Tulip, and Ladi—who are trying to navigate life, love and tech weirdness in the not-so-distant future of South Central LA. 

The show takes the messiness of being a human trying to find love and to be honest about your trauma and mixes it with high concept, sci-fi metaphors like rampaging demon robot babies and bad boyfriends we hang onto long known as CODS, or cyborgian operative decoys. 

“The landscape allowed for room to get a bit wacky with the storytelling in the world of sci-fi,” Williams tells Paste about her genre mixing. “As on the nose as some of the exposition and stories are, I try my best to avoid being too didactic with the messages and commentary. I knew that with sci-fi, I could use certain hyper realistic devices to communicate a much bigger idea.”

It’s through her trio of heroines, and their extended circle of friends and enemies, that Williams explores all facets of her own complex psyche. “Yeah, you’re right,” Williams acknowledges. “Each of them are a part of me. Sunny represents the part of me that does a really good job of intellectualizing my bullshit. I’m really good at making nonsense make sense,” she offers.

“Tulip represents the spiritual part of me that sees meaning in everything, sees the silver lining in everything, and who is just an extreme optimist. She’s the kind-hearted one who is always open and willing to give anything and everyone a chance, which has gotten me into so much trouble,” Williams laughs. “And Ladi represents the part of me that is no nonsense and will go there if I have to go there. She’s the voice of reason and represents the part of me that my brother taught how to fight, so to speak.”

As an accomplished painter, single panel comics artist and pop up art exhibit curator herself, Williams says she actually walked into developing the series with only the idea of how her trio of lead characters should look, and then kept an open mind to the contributions of the character designers and animators at Six Point Harness and Look Mom! Productions. “What’s important to me is literally the facial expressions,” she explains. “Something I loved doing when I was drawing comics is drawing faces and just making my characters as expressive as possible. And they did a really good job with that, an incredible job. That was a big deal for me and they hit the nail on the head.”

Another major thing to note about Oh My God…Yes! is that it’s the very first series on the network created by a Black woman. When Williams was made aware of that, she says she recognized that “this is some trailblazing type shit” and then it sunk in more. 

“As we got closer to wrapping and got into marketing for the show, I started to feel the pressure of that,” Williams shares. “It collided with the excitement, like this amalgam of excitement and gratitude, but also intimidation and little anxiety. It means a lot to be in this position. There’s a hope and a dream to open up the realm of possibilities and to say, like, ‘Hey, you can too!’ Yeah, it’s a boy’s club and I’m hoping, and I’m believing, that me being here will open doors for other creators like myself.”

Yolo: Rainbow Trinity (March 9) 

It’s been two years since party besties Sarah Dale (Sarah Bishop) and Rachel (Todor Manojlovic) of Adult Swim’s adult animated series YOLO closed out the Silver Destiny quasi fantasy season by retiring as a gardener and a dark empress, respectively. This month, creator Michael Cusack (Smiling Friends) has brought the ladies back for a third season of far more grounded adventures in YOLO: Rainbow Trinity. 

“With Season 2 of YOLO, I was in a bit of a bizarre, experimental mindset, and I just wanted to see what it was like to serialize [the stories] a little bit more,” Cusack tells Paste. “Experimenting with that was fun, but ultimately, I felt like after getting that out of my system, I was ready to just go back to the silliness because I realized that’s really what the core of this is: quick story adventures. With this season, it was really, really fun and such a joy to just go back to basics and really try to have episodes stand on their own.”

This season Sarah and Rachel, friends who are pretty much opposites except for their ambition to party, will attend a music festival, travel to Winery Crawl World, get stuck in a gaming basement with Lucas the Magnificent and reunite with Peleeken for a violent birthday surprise at Bubble Gum Park.

Laughing about the show’s surreal brand of comedy and recurring characters, Cusack muses, “This show couldn’t have existed on any other platform, because these characters are almost not exciting enough to have a TV show, if that makes sense?  And that’s the joke, in a way. It’s making a show out of something that feels like it shouldn’t, because it’s just two girls going out and partying. But the joke’s how elevated you can do that.

“I still love coming back to them because I really like that duo that’s been slowly crystallized over these years,” he continues. “It’s a really fun playground. It’s always fun and exciting to start a season of a show, but there’s something super comforting about coming into it in Season 3 because it is like a little sandbox now. We really know the characters, and you can just have fun and just play around with what different circumstances they can be in.”

He cites “The Wollongong Santa Pub Crawl!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! RAWR!!!” as an upcoming favorite that he wrote with art director Catriona Drummond. “We kind of ping-ponged back and forth, and something really interesting and weird came out of it, because it was quite visually driven in a different way that I wouldn’t have done,” he teases. “I love it. It’s really weird. That episode is probably my favorite, next to the musical episode.”

And yes, Season 3 will end with a completely original YOLO musical episode, “The Cozy Backyard Afternoon Musical.” Cusack laughs, “We made a whole musical in this room with me and Tod who would be on that piano behind me. I don’t know how we did it. It was kind of like lighting in a bottle. I was singing lyrics and he just played a piano melody, then we quickly came up with the whole musical. Very much a fluke, but I’m super proud that we made, like a whole Les Misérables musical.”

Disney’s Kiff Season 2  (March 15) 

One of Disney Channel and Disney XD’s original animated series delights is Kiff, the witty and energetic adventures of best friends Kiff the squirrel and Barry the bunny. Returning this month for a second season of new episodes, the kids are back for a plethora of adventures in their weird little animal burgh called Table Town. 

Creators Lucy Heavens and Nic Smal’s world has become such a hit with kids and parents around the globe that a third season is already in production. Every other episode features ear-worm worthy original songs by Smal and stories that incorporate the sly wit of the creative team that appeals to adults just as much as their younger audience. 

Season 2 will also have 30 episodes, split into 11 minute stories, which means that’s a lot of adventures for the world to generate. But Smal tells Paste that finding inspiration hasn’t slowed a bit for their creative team.

“When we got to the end of Season 1, we had these documents and all these post-its on the wall for stories that we never got to because we ran out,” Smals explains. “There’s always a story to be told in the writers room. There’s always something fun that’s happened on the weekend, or a memory that comes from childhood. The show is constantly drawing on real experiences, the truth of life and the experience of being alive so we find that we’re never short of ideas. We can have something that’s so simple that just takes place in one location, and then we can have another story that sets them up on a wild adventure. And that’s the joy of the show. And, we are continuing it as we go into Season 3.”

Smal says that also goes for the songs which he writes for the episodes. “There’s so much enjoyment in finding the right space for the song, finding how it fits into the story, the style, and the genre of the song,” he says. “You start piecing it together as the story is also forming, more and more. I’ll always be working on more than one song at one point in time but it’s such a joy and so much fun to do. I haven’t run out of steam yet.”

Having established their large ensemble of Table Town anthropomorphic animal citizens in the first season, Heavens says they’ll be introducing “new friends and scallywags” into the world to keep the show feeling fresh. But they’ll also be expanding the deep bench of hilarious characters that impact Kiff and Barry day-to-day. That includes more appearances by Trollie (voiced by Rhys Darby) and a visit to his hometown, that weird Season 1 fairy who now works in the DMB, the Department for Magical Beings, and a bad wizard who arrives to make trouble.

Wolf King (March 20) 

Based on the Wereworld novels by British writer/illustrator Curtis Jobling, Wolf King takes place in a mythical world ruled by wolves and lions. The animated movie follows 16-year-old Drew Ferran (Ceallach Spellman) who discovers that he’s the last of a long line of Werewolves and is their rightful leader. However King Leopold (Ralph Ineson) of the Lionlords has subjugated the lands and is bent on thwarting the rightful successor… Drew. An epic fantasy for teens and up, Wolf King is animated by  Jellyfish Pictures in London and Assemblage Entertainment in Mumbai.

BE@RBRICK (March 21) 

Fans of designer toy art know exactly what a Bearbrick is. First introduced in 2001 by the Japanese MediCom Toy, these plastic collectibles in fixed sizes come in the shape of a cartoon bear and all share the same basic silhouette. What makes them so highly coveted are all of the unique collaborations MediCom has coordinated over the years with fine artists, pop artists, fashion designers and major apparel brands to create bespoke designs on the bears for limited release sales. 

Now, Apple TV+ is taking the concept a big step forward by giving Bearbricks personalities and a world to exist together in their new animated musical series, BE@RBRICK. Developed and executive produced by Meghan McCarthy (My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic) with original music from producer Timbaland, BE@RBRICK charts the underdog adventures of five quirky teen Bearbricks who desperately want to make it as a successful band in VinylVille. 

DreamWorks Animation first approached McCarthy who tells Paste that she really responded to the idea that the collectibles become interesting and unique based on what they’re painted to look like, which in turn inspired the premise of this show which says how you’re painted determines who you are in this world.

“And what’s the worst version of that, where you don’t choose and it isn’t about self expression? Where you are placed into this one space that you can’t get out of,” McCarthy says of the main conflict of the show. “I was like that’s a show and an interesting place to explore. And music is so integral to this too as it’s such a powerful form of self expression. Having that be denied would create such a conflict that it led to a main character.”

The enthusiastic singer and band leader at the heart of the series is big-time dreamer Jasmine Finch (Brianna Bryan) who encourages her high school besties, Holly (Skyla I’Lece), Nick (Isaiah Crews), Ada (Alison Jaye), and Klaus (Noah Bentley), to break out of their prescribed molds too and chase their music ambitions together. 

Featuring an ambitious library of original songs, McCarthy says they developed the scripts with music in mind from the start. “As we mapped it out, we had a sense of a song every episode, or every other episode,” she details. “Then, as we were writing the scripts, we knew there might be a theme within an episode and then I would come in with lyrics that I felt fit. We would send those out and they would come back with these demos that were just way better than I ever imagined,” she laughs. 

The series directors and storyboard artists then boarded out the mini music video sequences within each episode, giving the audience an opportunity to fall in love with the characters and their talents as an aspiring band throughout the season. “Some are kind of fantasy, or some feel like live performances,” McCarthy says of the music video sequences. “But it’s not a musical where they’re walking down the street and they just break into songs to express their emotions. It’s pretty much just performances of the band. We wanted the musical sequences to really express all the things we were trying to say in the show.”

Animated by DreamWorks Animation and Dentsu Inc., McCarthy says an important stylistic choice within the show is that the Bearbrick characters all retain the classic shape and limited mobility of the designer toys. “I think our art director did a fantastic job of [establishing] how we distinguish how they’re painted,” she says of every character’s uniqueness. “Then our animation teams figured out ways, even with those limitations, where they all have different walk cycles. They all have different movements and speeds so that you know the individual characters, even if they weren’t painted, there’s certain things that they do and how they move that make them feel really different. You want them to feel like they’re cartoon characters, but you really want to connect with them through the expressiveness of their faces.”

Across the 10 episodes of the season, McCarthy says audiences will follow the progress of this tight band working to convince their parents to let them break society’s mold and play their music for the world. And she promises, there will be a resolution to this first chapter. 

“I really wanted it to feel like there was an ending to these episodes, just because you want your audience to feel like they’re going somewhere and there’s something satisfying,” she teases of the season finale. “While it’s fun to have a cliffhanger at the end of things, I also think it’s really nice just to feel there’s a nice bow on this. Part of the creative process is, what do we do next? So, it was really important to me that you feel like this particular journey had reached its very, very satisfying conclusion.”

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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