Toon In: Animated TV Highlights for October

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. Here are the most interesting animated shows of October.

Gremlins The Wild Batch (October 3) 

The next chapter of Joe Dante and Steven Spielberg’s gremlins mythology unfolds with the second season of the animated Max prequel series, Gremlins: The Wild Batch. Picking up a year after the events of Gremlins: Secrets of the Mogwai, young Sam Wing (Izaac Wang), his parents (Ming-Na Wen and B.D. Wong), his friend Elle (Gabrielle Nevaeh Green) and his Mogwai, Gizmo (A.J. LoCascio), find themselves thrust back into chaos when they have to travel to early San Francisco to stop a gremlin outbreak.  

Showrunner Tze Chun (I’m a Virgo) and executive producer Brendan Hay (Rick and Morty) tell Paste that they’ve only gotten more ambitious with the stakes facing the Wings and little Gizmo who is fritzing out with weird behavior and glowing red eyes. 

“Now that the ground rules have been set, we can run with it more,” Hay says of the supernatural influences and major locale change this season. “It was also our chance to get even a little weirder. Like, can we do an episode that’s from an evil Mogwai point of view the whole way through? Can we put them into even stranger situations? Can we pull from American mythology and can we pull from Chinese mythology? It was our chance to up our game.”

Hay says they also double down on the character building they established in the first season with the Wings, Elle the reformed thief and the Mogwai origins. “One of the things that we saw building in Season 1 and became something we could run with more in Season 2, was the generational aspect of our show,” he says. “So much of it is how the different generations relate to each other, where they really differ, and the conflicts that arise. On the more comedic level, that’s Gizmo and all his spawn. Then we have three generations of the Wing family under one roof, and where they differ on everything. 

“But for Elle, this was our chance to find that for her. Thanks to Tze and [writer] Sarah Nerboso, Elle already has the most tragic backstory possible thanks to Season 1,” he chuckles, referencing her dark origin story in “Don’t Drink the Tea.” “So there was an idea of let’s go further into her. We already know so much about the Wings so let’s really delve into Elle and how she can be a part of this greater theme of generations.”

Animation wise, Tze Chun says they’ve again looked to some of their favorite films to inspire their eclectic storytelling this season. He says astute viewers will see allusions to The Godfather Part II, The Hangover and The Haunting of Hill House in this pack of episodes. 

“We just kept talking about how do we make this as cinematic as possible?” Chun says. “Beyond just the color palette and the mood for the season as a whole, the way that Brendan and I always talked about in the writers’ room, and that led into the directing and the visual look, is we wanted every episode to be its own concept episode. Even within each season, every episode has its own color palette. We’re drawing on different influences, like maybe one is a different horror movie, and one’s a Western, trying to make sure that infuses each episode with its own character so every episode feels a little different.”

Hay adds that transplanting the series to San Francisco’s Chinatown of the past also makes it more challenging for their heroes to keep Gizmo and his kind manageable. “The West immediately gives you another color palette and you’re immediately getting the bright sun. And if you’re leaning into a location that has bright sun, that also gives you an immediate problem to always deal with gremlins and Mogwai. It’s like, here’s a palette that’s going to always create some kind of problem for us to deal with,” he laughs. 

This season will also welcome additional voices to the show like Simu Liu’s charming bootlegger, Chang, and even a distant ancestor of Gremlins 2: The New Batch’s Daniel Clamp who will be voiced by actor John Glover. “It is fun to be able to bring new viewers into the Gremlins world but also have some stuff in there for people who are like, “Oh my God, they’re gonna explain this!” We’re just trying to expand the GCU, the Gremlin Cinematic Universe,” Chun closes with a laugh.

The Legend of Vox Machina Season 3 (October 3)

The Legend of Vox Machina, Prime Video’s hit adult animated adaptation of the web series Critical Role, returns to continue their epic Chroma Conclave arc across 12 new episodes. The entire human cast of the Vox Machina Dungeons and Dragon party returns to voice their animated counterparts, with each of them getting meaty storylines including Sam Riegel as Scanlan Shorthalt and Travis Willingham as Grog Strongjaw, who also do double duty as the showrunners. 

Having set up a lot of the show’s concept and their individual characters in the prior two seasons, Sam Riegel tells Paste that Season 3 has been the most fun for them to write because now they’re starting to experiment with their pacing, finding smaller emotional moments and adding new material.

“We’re pushing the envelope and pushing the edge a little farther and farther in terms of animation and character development and twists and turns,” Riegel explains. “In the first couple seasons, especially, we were trying to cram in so much that people were like, “Ah, the show’s so fast!” But now that we’ve established everything, it’s got a great pace, but we still are able to fit in multiple elements in every scene and find that balance.”

Travis Willingham continues, “Season 3 has really been the culmination, as Sam alluded to, of us starting to diverge from the storyline, just a little bit. It’s a refreshening of things, but also starting to seed things that our fans will see in The Mighty Nein animated series, and that we’ve pulled not just from our first and second campaign, but our third campaign as well. Some of our ExU: Calamity miniseries and just everything that has happened in this world since we played these characters almost 10 years ago. So it’s been really fun to go back and plant the seeds, knowing that they will come to life. And if enough people continue to enjoy the show, then hopefully we get enough seasons to deliver the story to its full potential.”

As this season is all about the dragons, the series has also upped its ambition and visuals in presenting their wide array of flaming, frightening creatures that are brought to life by Titmouse. Acknowledging their level up in visuals, Willingham sings the praises of Titmouse as a “vital, integral” collaborative partner in getting what’s in their brains onto the screen. “We write some crazy stuff in our scripts,” he laughs. “We want to push it to the limit every time and very often, Titmouse looks at us and says, “You got it. We got this.” Every once in a while, they’ll come around and go, “Why do you hate us?” But, it is the best feeling in the world to have an animation partner that can sit there with all of their years of shared experience and say, “If it’s important to you guys as Critical Role creators, it’s important to us and we find that perfect middle of how we deliver what we think we need for the story beats.”

Reigel adds, “Eddie Gonzalez is our dragon whisperer. He’s the computer genius who makes the dragons and the big monsters move, and they really figured out the secret sauce this year. There are a couple of incredible moments in Season 3, like two gigantic creatures fighting each other in the snow, a big kaiju battle while Vox Machina watches on. It’s got pro wrestling moves in it, and it is so exciting to watch. You’ll see in the show some of the characters are just watching the fight going, “Oh my God!” and that was literally our reaction when we saw the animation so we just stuck it in the show. The dragons are all the best they’ve ever looked.”

And for those wondering how the team handled the passing of beloved genre actor Lance Reddick, who voices Thordak, the two confirm that Season 3 was one of the actor’s last jobs and he was able to voice 95% of the season. “We have been in touch with his family, talked to his wife, and she was very supportive about keeping his voice in the show,” Reigel says. “We’re making sure that his legacy continues. And what an honor we got to work with him.”

Curses! (October 4) 

Did you know that John Krasinski produces a DreamWorks Animation series for Apple TV+? Well, Curses! is a real banger, perfect for the Halloween season. Created by Jim Cooper and Jeff Dixon, the second season picks up with the contemporary Vanderhouven family continuing to try and rectify the sins of their ancestors who pillaged a whole lot of antiquities. In Season 1, current family patriarch Alex (Reid Scott) was turned to stone to pay for those past wrongs. Saved by his wife and their two kids, Season 2 has the reunited family continuing their precarious and often chilling work despite the dangers involved to break the family curse. Not only does this series manage to entertain on multi-levels, but Cursed! also boasts a roster of incredible genre actors including James Marsters, Rhys Darby, Robert Englund and McKenna Grace. It’s also one of the most handsome animated series out there right now, with a complex illustration meets CG style that stands out from other offerings. 

Solar Opposites: Halloween Special Part 2 (October 7)

Huluween is back this month with a range of spooky content including the second Solar Opposites Halloween special. As a series, Solar Opposites has unabashedly celebrated the event-ness of a one-off episode tailored to a specific calendar holiday but making four of them. In this second Halloween themed special, “The Hunt for Brown October,” it’s all about torturing Korvo (Dan Stevens) who resists anything related to the season. When a witch arrives and tells him that if he continues to reject Halloween, he’ll pay the price with even more spooky stuff happening, Korvo is besieged. He’s then desperate to reverse the mayhem inflicted upon him by the curse.