Toon In: Animated TV Highlights for November, from Arcane’s Return to An Almost Christmas Story

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. 

Jurassic World: Chaos Theory Season 2 Post Mortem (Aired October 17) 

The second season of Netflix’s Jurassic World: Chaos Theory pushed the “Nublar Six” into a wealth of new situations including having them travel to Africa, cross paths with the Jurassic World Dominion villain Soyona Santos (Dichen Lachman) and reveal that Brooklynn (Kiersten Kelly) isn’t dead but she might be on a very dangerous path she can’t return from. 

Executive producer/co-showrunner Scott Kreamer tells Paste that bringing Brooklynn back from the “dead” was always in the story cards for the show, but it was actually a Netflix note that had them reveal what happened to her in episode, “C13v3rGr186.”

“Interestingly enough, it’s the 13th episode, and the 13th episode of Camp Cretaceous was the episode we did alone with Ben [Sean Giambrone],” Kreamer reveals. “So, we kind of like the symmetry of that.”

Kreamer adds, “Once we decided we were going to tell the story of Brooklynn with an acquired limb difference, we met with a bunch of consultants from Respectability California, and Peter Lee was one of our consultants, who also has a limb difference. We were thinking, ‘We’d love someone with a limb difference to write this episode.’ and then it turns out, Peter is this amazing writer too, so he wrote this episode.”

Kreamer says he and the writers’ room really love how complex Brooklynn has evolved in this morally gray storyline. “She sacrificed her friends. She’s sacrificed part of her arm, and she’s committed to getting to the truth,” he says of her tunnel vision. “Also layered in that, and it’s not specifically stated, but she’s throwing herself into her work so she doesn’t really have to focus on her trauma. If you don’t want to deal with this over here, then throw yourself into that. Whether it’s pushing your friends away, or making them think you’re dead, or losing a limb and you don’t want to think about that, it’s a coping mechanism, to throw yourself into.”

In fact, Brooklynn’s dedication to not dealing with much of anything in her life except getting to the bottom of the illicit international dinosaur black market trade sets her and the series up for a huge season ending cliffhanger when she decides to leave her friends and join Santos.  

“Brooklynn was ready to go back to the ‘Camp Fam,’ and then found out that Biosyn’s involved and that’s a bigger story, a bigger bad guy, and a bigger loose end to chase down,” Kreamer says of her surprising choice. 

“Santos is working with Biosyn, and that’s in Jurassic World Dominion so we’re definitely heading that way,” he says of the connecting feature film canon storyline. “Like we’ve always done, we play in the margins of the features so putting Brooklynn with Santos as we head towards Dominion was something that we were looking forward to doing. And then, it’s figuring out these kids and where do they go from here? They’re not all going to be of the same mind, as usual. In the same way that Brooklynn’s death put cracks in the relationships of the now “Nublar Five,” Brooklynn being alive is probably going to do the same thing. It’s going to have some real shock waves that are going to reverberate through all of their relationships. At least that’s the hope,” he says of continuing the story in a third season. “I think there’s a lot of great character stories to tell, as well as the normal, pulse-pounding action and scaring people because that’s what we’re here for.”

Transformers One Post Mortem (PVOD now) 

Transformers One wasn’t a hit at the box office, but strong reviews and positive word of mouth has since grabbed the eyes and ears of Transformers fans, who have given high marks to this fleshing out of the back story of Cybertron and the former friendship between Optimus Prime (Chris Hemsworth) and Megatron (Brian Tyree Henry).

Now available on all PVOD sites, Transformers One production designer Jason Scheier (Blue Eye Samurai) tells Paste that he and director Josh Cooley wanted this CG animated film to honor the whole spectrum of Transformers storytelling while forging a distinctly colorful visual palette to set it apart. 

“We had a lot of really early conversations about what [Josh] loved and what he was really inspired by,” Scheier says of their foundational conversations about this film. “I wanted to make sure that, not only was I listening to his voice and making sure that that got on screen, but also bringing ideas and opinions from things that I’m inspired by. So we had lots of discussions about Floro Dery, who was the original designer on the 1984 series, as well as the 1986 film. Also, American Golden Age illustrators such as J. C. Leyendecker. And even looking at Tech Deco and cassette futurism, and bringing those two ideas together and marrying them into a visual style for the film.”

Transformers One is also striking because of how bright and colorful it is, which Scheier says was a mandate of Cooley’s. “He was like, ‘I never want this to be this dystopian, Blade Runner, gray ball in space’,” Scheier says Cooley said of their Cybertron aesthetic. “So, I went to the Natural History Museum with my art director, Gerald de Jesus, and we looked at every single type of mineral and rock and geode and everything that’s here on Earth, and saying, ‘What can we be explored here that we can inject visually into the movie and then remix in such a way where it feels like a Cybertronian version of that?’ And so, it’s the colors of iridescence and opalescence and sort of like the rainbow effect that happens on top of a rock when you get a Fresnel effect looking over a lens.”

 Scheier says Cooley ran with those ideas and let it seep into the very atmosphere of this Cybertron. “We had this idea that the world itself is Primus, which is the character that’s inside the core of the planet that created Cybertron,” he explains. “It’s a living, breathing, evolving planet. We had these discussions with Industrial Light Magic about the idea of transforming landscapes. I pitched this idea to Josh early on, that this ancient asteroid has crash landed on the surface of the planet and caused an earth destruction, almost like where a seed of life is being planted. So, you get these impact craters, and you also get this extreme burst of life and flora and fauna in those areas. When you first start our movie, you’re in Iacon City, where it’s been more stable and a bit more square. As you go on to what we call the Fury Road to the end of the movie, to the Decepticon camp which is the Royal Guard outpost, that area is a crash-landed Quintesson ship with impact craters all over it, so it’s like chaos over there. It’s the order versus chaos visual theory. 

“And even though the audience isn’t really thinking about it, they’re feeling it,” he continues. “I’m a firm believer that form follows emotion and not follows function, so when you’re watching something, you go on this visual treat of being underground and sort of being asphyxiated by the top surface. But as soon as you get to the topside on the train through the wild, then you open up that world, and you really show all the bursts of color. So, you have that red light from the sun that’s rising, and so on and so forth. We were thinking about all those things as we were color scripting the movie.”

That sense of color purpose even extends to the Transformer’s fuel of choice, Energon, which flows an almost ocean blue by the film’s end. Scheier says they spent a lot of time giving that substance a visual arc in Transformers One. 

“At the beginning, it’s not flowing. It’s a great drought for Energon,” he explains. “We wanted to show that the miners were in their own class, and they were cultivating and mining out Energon from the ore, from the rock itself. We designed it almost like an amethyst, or a geode. We took that and we put it into the Energon processing machine, and we designed this machine that would basically break it down from like a coal into almost like a liquid state. It goes down this, like martini glass into a funnel, and it becomes a cube. We wanted to make sure that it was something that was transportable and also harkens back to the 1980s when you first see Megatron with the Decepticons drinking Energon. It was totally an homage to the original series, which was a lot of fun to play with.”

Scheier says now that audiences can watch the film at home, he hopes Transformers fans look for the sea of Easter eggs they’ve laid into everything, like Iacon City’s design language. “The patterning and the panel breakups on the buildings and the windows were actually all from Autobot and Decepticon logos,” he reveals. “I actually took the logo design from them and used the same exact angle motifs and the same panel breakups of the logos, and then separated them and made new versions of patterns and breakups from that so the world is designed around the logo design. Inherently, Transformers are sort of art deco by nature.”

He also points out the miner barracks and its hidden secrets. “While they’re in their barracks, in the background we have Teletraan-I there, and you don’t even see it. It’s kind of off camera,” he shares. “We also have pieces of Teletraan-I in the control tower. We wanted to have those [call backs] for the fans that really look deeply. Even the color palettes and the visual style of the oranges and the golds are all harkening back to the original icon, so we were really paying attention to that and making sure we were doing some fan service there.”

Asked what the status of a Transformers One sequel might be, Scheier says, “I would love more than anything to get another crack at this and have more time to develop the world even further. There’s so much more story to tell. I’ve already had early discussions with Josh about it. There’s a trilogy in there. I’m hoping it happens. We don’t know yet, because the box office has been a little soft, so the studio has kind of paused the idea of moving forward with the sequel. But we’ll see if it gets legs in the digital world. I’m hoping this is where it’s going to live the longest, so we’re excited to see the kind of fans that praise it and want to see more of it.”

Invincible Fight Girl (November 2) 

If you’re a fan of anime and/or wrestling, creator/executive producer Juston Gordon-Montgomery’s original Cartoon Network animated series, Invincible Fight Girl, is for you. The show is set in a fictional reality where wrestling superstars are worshiped like gods and exist on their own Wrestling World island. Andy has been obsessed with pro wrestling since she was a kid but to appease her parents she’s pursuing (and not well) a degree in accounting. But when she’s assigned to do the taxes of some of Wrestling World’s biggest heels, Andy’s world changes forever. Energetic, original and relatable for those who aren’t wrestling fans, Invincible Fight Girl is packed with a lot of meaningful and emotional lessons about pursuing your dreams. 

Over the Garden Wall Anniversary Short (November 3)

To celebrate the 10th anniversary of Patrick McHale’s classic autumn vibes animated series, Over the Garden Wall, he and stop-motion studio, Aardman, have collaborated on a two-minute animated short set within the world of the forest of the Unknown. This delightfully brief return to the world has the brothers Wirt and Greg (again voiced by Elijah Wood and Colin Dean) playing in their beloved woods with some familiar faces making an appearance. A modern classic animated miniseries of just 10 episodes, it’s nice to see its legacy honored with this new addition to the mythology that is available on Cartoon Network’s YouTube channel. 

The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror XXXV (November 3)

35 episodes into The Simpson’s “Treehouse of Horror” tradition, it almost feels like Halloween isn’t complete without the annual trilogy of satire and parody short stories lampooning the horror genre. Airing the weekend after Halloween this year, XXXV features a whole new opening animated by Jorge R. Gutiérrez (The Book of Life) and three new segments from long-time series writers Rob LaZebnik, Dan Vebber and Matt Selman. 

LaZebnik tells Paste this is his first “Treehouse” episode contribution since 2000, and his first time helping to show run a Halloween episode. The three stories took shape right after the completion of the 2023 writer’s strike, along with their invitation to Gutiérrez to hand him the keys to their cold open. “He just created this super funny, completely bonkers piece that I think people want to watch frame by frame,” he says. “It’s super fast and just packed with awesome Simpsons/Gutierrez mashups.”

The opening segment is “Information Rage” pitched and written by LaZebnik. “It’s about how cable news and social media whip us all up into these incredible states of fear and rage,” he teases. “In Springfield, all of that psychic rage energy unleashes some Godzilla type kaiju monsters, one red and one blue, who then fight each other and rampage through town, destroying the town. And Bart and Lisa are the town’s last hope, because they are enlisted to control a Pacific Rim type robot to battle these kaiju.”

LaZebnik says the second story, “Fall of the House of Monty,” was born out of the writers mashing up two horror legends. “[Dan] was a fan of these 1960s Hammer movies and he really wanted to do something honoring that style,” he explains. “Also, we and he really loved the Winchester Mystery Mansion in California. It’s this amazing house with secret passages and maze-like rooms. We thought if it’s a mansion, then Mr. Burns should probably own it and can be a Victorian corn syrup magnate in this one. And besides all the fun of being in this crazy mansion, it was all about the jump scares. It’s hard to make cartoons really scary, so we took a lot of time to make these jump scares actually scary.”

Last, but far from least, is “Denim,” which is Selman’s riff on the Venom character where Homer’s body is taken over and controlled by a pair of alien pants. And in a first for the series, those alien pants are actually real denim, stop-motion animation jeans created by Stoopid Buddy Stoodios. Since the regular animation was being overlaid with the stop-motion jeans, LaZebnik says, “We had to really lock in that sequence early and just make sure that our boards were very, very accurate to what the final product was going to be. Then we actually took a field trip over there, which is super cool, to see their modeling and their sets. The jeans are just the cutest thing you could possibly imagine. They’re 20-inches tall and they sewed 20 different pairs of jeans. Actor Kevin Michael Richardson voiced Denim, and I actually think it’s one of the funniest “Treehouse” segments ever.”

Arcane Season 2 (November 9)

After a three year wait, Arcane’s second season, and the final chapter of the Piltover and Zaun storyline based on the League of Legends game and mythology, gets a month-long rollout on Netflix. Broken again into three separate acts, with three episodes each that will be released over three weeks, audiences will finally find out the repercussions of Jinx’s (Ella Purnell) bomb attack on the Council, and what her sister Vi (Hailee Steinfeld) does in the aftermath. 

As animated by France’s Fortiche Animation Studio, Arcane Season 1 was one of the most arresting adult animated series of the last decade, featuring an absorbing story conceived of by League videogame architects Christian Linke and Alex Yee and including a soaring soundtrack written to augment the story themes and visuals. 

At the October 30th world premiere for Season 2 in Hollywood, Linke and animation director/Season 2 director Barth Maunoury shared in a Q&A that after five years of labor on Season 1 establishing their character designs, animation pipeline and story arcs, these new nine episodes afforded them more freedom to outdo their prior work.

Maunoury explained, “The team who worked on Season 2 was the same who worked on Season 1 so it was just like a normal revolution. We just all grew as artists, [Linke], Pascal [Charrue] and Arnaud [Delord], the supervising directors at Fortiche, myself and the team. We may have done stuff more efficiently, but we also pushed the boundaries of what we could do. In the three first episodes, [the look] is not changing a lot, but we are now making longer shots, for instance, because we are more comfortable doing these kinds of shots.”

Charrue and Delord also welcomed Maunoury as an episode director this season which Linke said was a natural leveling up for his creative contributions to the series. Asked how they worked together, Maunoury said, “I think we all have our strengths. You know, Arnaud always comes with crazy ideas. Then, I’m the one who’s able to translate them. Pascal and Jérôme [Combe] are the co-founders of Fortiche and they came up with this style of 2D and 3D animation.” [Come back for our December Arcane post mortem with the show creatives.] 

An Almost Christmas Story (November 15)

When you hear about an impending collab between lauded filmmakers Alfonso Cuarón (Gravity) and David Lowery (The Green Knight), one doesn’t immediately imagine it would be for an animated holiday short. But An Almost Christmas Story is the third in Cuarón’s holiday shorts collection made exclusively for Disney+, and is the first animation project for Lowery. The short is inspired by the true story of an owl rescued from New York City’s Rockefeller Center Christmas tree in 2020, which Cuarón turned into an original script with Jack Thorne that the director then offered to Lowery circa Christmas 2021. 

A self-confessed “Christmas dork,” Lowery tells Paste that he was all-in with the idea, especially getting the chance to make a Christmas movie set in New York City. Originally developed as a live action short, Lowery says that a certain sequence in the script made him rethink the best medium. 

“The script said, ‘we go into a chase sequence that is The French Connection with pigeons’ and I said, ‘This is gonna cost so much money’,” he laughs. “But because I have such a deep love of the Rankin/Bass Christmas specials, I thought that this could be something akin to one of those, where we have everything live action, and then all of the animal characters will be done in stop motion. And that set us on the path to eventually making a completely animated film.”

The end result is a CG animated film that looks like bespoke stop motion animation achieved by the artists at Titmouse and Lowery’s frequent visual effects house, Maere Studios. With a Christmas 2024 deadline looming, Lowery says, “At a certain point, I realized the way to make this movie look the way I want to do it, is to have everything be animated and created by the same team. We’re not going to try to composite live action elements into this animated world. We’re going to do a bespoke, animated project. And it was very clear to me the best way for me to achieve my vision for this is to do it all in a computer and have everything I was obsessed with making sure everything felt as handmade as possible.”

In the aesthetics rules of An Almost Christmas Story, the primary characters, including tiny owl protagonist Moon (Cary Christopher) and his new human friend Luna (Estella Madrigal), look like they’ve been carved from wood, while the myriad bustling humans, their buildings and cars are constructed from cardboard. “When I was little, I used to build cities and castles and spaceships. I built everything out of cardboard,” Lowery shares. “So, I said, ‘We’re gonna make an entire New York City out of cardboard. And that then lent itself to the aesthetic choices in everything else, whether it was the textures of the people, their clothes that they’re wearing, everything in spite of the fact that it’s all pixels.”

Serving as the short’s creative design supervisor, Maere’s Nicholas Bateman spearheaded the final look. Lowery says, “He really led the charge on creating all of that, designing what a New York City made out of cardboard would look like, what grain of paper stock, the width of corrugation, and what scale the corrugation would be at. They did so much R&D figuring out how to actually build this. And it really felt like watching a team of artists do exactly what I used to do as a child in my basement.”

Lowery was also responsible for adding the short’s folk singer narrator character to the script as an homage to what Burl Ives or Fred Astaire did in their Rankin/Bass specials back in the day. Casting director Deb Zane suggested John C. Reilly, and the animators created a character that looked similar to him. “Getting to spend a couple days in the studio with him just recording Christmas music was such a dream,” Lowery shares. “And the song that he sings at the beginning and end of the movie, he brought it into the studio, as an old Scottish folk song that he felt would just be appropriate.”

Thrilled with his experience making An Almost Christmas Story, Lowery says he’s keen to return to the medium for a near future project, incorporating what he learned about refining scenes for the animators into his live action process. He references a scene between Luna and Moon where they see the folk singer break a guitar string as one that defines the project for him. “The way it all came together, I was almost moved to tears,” he says. “It’s a moment that had we done it in live action, it would have been beautiful too. Had we done it in stop motion, it would have been amazing as well. But every single choice that we made along the way, the creative choices, led to something that I feel is a moment in a movie I’ve never seen before. That is one of the scenes I’m most proud of in my filmmaking career.”

The Night Before Christmas in Wonderland (November 15)

Slipping into the holiday season without much fanfare is the follow-up project for director Peter Baynton who won the 2023 Best Animated Short Film Academy Award for the Prime Video animated adaptation of the beloved book, The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse. The Night Before Christmas in Wonderland will air exclusively on Hulu, and is an adaptation of Carys Bexington and illustrator Kate Hindley’s best selling holiday tale of the same name. This one is a full-out musical featuring songs by Guy Chambers and lyricist Amy Wadge, and voice performances by Emilia Clarke, Gerard Butler and Simone Ashley. Animated by Lupus Films in London, this standalone movie carries through the book’s illustrative style and looks like it could be a new holiday classic.

Family Guy Holiday Special (November 25)

It’s taken 23 seasons and 426 episodes, but Seth MacFarlane’s indefatigable Family Guy series gets its first Christmas holiday special which is exclusive to Hulu. “Gift of the White Guy” has family patriarch Peter Griffin in the gifting dog house when he donates  Lois’ Christmas brooch to a White Elephant exchange. Plus, Stewie is in a panic when he finds out he’s been remanded to Santa’s Naughty List.

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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