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.