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 at 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.
Dan Da DanSeason 2 (July 3)
The hugely popular anime adaptation of Yukinobu Tatsu’s manga of the same name returns this month to Crunchyroll for a much-anticipated second season. If you’ve never heard of Dan Da Dan, it’s like a mashup of The X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer as the story centers on teens Momo Ayase and Ken “Okarun” Takakura who are beefing about the existence of ghosts versus aliens. And surprise!, turns out both exist.
Season 1 had the pair imbued with supernatural powers from entities opposite of what they believe in, and a simmering romance building between the two. Animated by the legendary Science Saru, this is a visually creative series that includes a fun ensemble of characters around the duo and ever-expanding mythology.
As Crunchyroll’s summer season begins this July, one of the most anticipated premieres is the dark, dystopian murder mystery Gachiakuta. An adaptation of the 2022 manga of the same name by manga artist Kei Urana and graffiti designer Hideyoshi Andou, the series is produced by Bones Film (My Hero Academia) and follows the dire situation of anti-hero Rudo (voiced by Bryson Baugus). He’s been framed for murder and sent to “The Pit,” which he aims to escape and return to his home to seek vengeance. This certainly resides in the darker spectrum of anime but it’s an absorbing mystery.
Sakamoto Days Season 1, Part 2 (July 14)
With summer comes the next chapter of Sakamoto Days, Season 1, Part 2, an animated series about Taro Sakamoto, a legendary ex-hitman just trying to live a normal life as a family man and convenience store owner. Netflix is streaming the series worldwide simultaneously with its weekly Japanese broadcast, so latent spoilers won’t be an issue.
In the Part 1 cliffhanger, “Casino Battle,” four serial killers were released by Slur and sent to take out Sakamoto which sets up Part 2 with plenty of stakes. Killers Dump, Saw, Apart, and Minimalist will each have their own approach to taking out Sakamoto with plenty of action and some dark comedy.
Digman! Season 2 (July 23)
After a two-year break due to the 2023 strikes and the animation production cycle, Comedy Central’s archaeological comedy Digman! finally returns to resolve its huge Season 1 cliffhanger and send Rip Digman (Andy Samberg) and his ever patient research assistant, Saltine (Mitra Jouhari), on new adventures.
Co-created by Samberg (Palm Springs) and showrunner Neil Campbell (Brooklyn Nine-Nine), Digman! takes place in an alt-universe where archeologists (a la Indiana Jones) are society’s celebrities. One of the biggest personalities was Digman, a former worldly adventurer who retired after the tragic death of his wife Bella (Melissa Fumero) 12-years ago. However, a tip about the whereabouts of the Holy Grail brings Digman back into the scene, as it might be able to resurrect his wife. In the season finale, “The Grail,” Rip instead discovers the Unholy Grail which allows him to resurrect — by accident — the evil versions of Bella and billionaire benefactor Quail Eegan’s (Tim Meadows) father into the supervillains, Auntie and Uncle Christ.
Campbell tells Paste that the series returns with the continuation of that story, and plenty of one-off adventures for Rip to screw up. “There’s always that thing where you have a cliffhanger in a TV show and it feels a little bit of a cheat if you just in one episode, wrap it all up and you’re like, ‘…anyway, it’s back to normal!’” he laughs. “But it can also feel like, if you drag it on for too long, is this show this one story arc? I feel like we found a good balance between those two things for the Auntie Christ/Rip/Bella stuff. Then I would say the Season 2 arc is focused a little more on Rip trying to train Saltine to become a full blown “arky” and elevate up from an assistant.”
Having never showrun an animated series before, Campbell says the first season of Digman! was about learning how to integrate their storyboard artists into the writing process more fluidly in Season 2. “This time, we had at least a first draft of every script before we got picked up, so the production was not as much overlapping with the writing. We were able to focus a little more on the animation process over the last year and a half,” he details.
He confirms that supervising director Mike L. Mayfield is back this season and was their facilitator between the series directors and animation team at Titmouse. “It was always important to us to not be like, ‘Here’s a live action script, and now just animate a sitcom,’” he clarifies. “We wanted the board artists to feel like, where can I take this and how can this be something fun and exciting? Sometimes that’s an action sequence, or a big chase, but sometimes it’s just like doing something that we would have never put into a script, like the aspect ratio changing for a shot or a moment.”
In terms of their comedy and genre foundations, Campbell says, “Above all, we were always like, we just want this to be really funny. We want to be the kind of thing we would watch. And so, exploring a bunch of different genres opened that up for us. When we’re breaking stories, we ask what is going on with Rip? What’s going on with Saltine? What’s something that might be personal to them, that then could get explored through some sort of genre story? And sometimes we start with, what’s a crazy artifact they could be looking for and then what would that tell us about Rip or Saltine or another character.” And he adds that in Season 2, they got 10 more writing weeks post the strikes to do a second pass on the scripts to seed them with more foreshadowing and strengthen the arcs overall.
Teasing the voice guest cast for Season 2, Campbell is thrilled his friend Beck Bennett is joining them this season, while Samberg got his Lee co-star Kate Winslet to voice a character. Legends John Waters and Nathan Lane both join the fun, and Campbell teases Episode 7 as one of his favorites of the season. “Geraldine Viswanathan is so funny so her episode which I am really excited for and that’s the same episode with Stephanie Beatriz, who obviously we worked with on Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and is also an amazing voice actress.”
Campbell says the incredible rolling talent coming in to guest star and the richness of their core characters getting developed more emotionally makes for an even better season of Digman! for viewers. “I feel like that was something we took advantage of being in a second season and getting to push that in a way that still feels true to Digman!, and still feels it’s a comedy at its heart, but that there’s a little bit of some poignancy at times too.”
The Wonderfully Weird World of Gumball (July 28)
Way back in 2019, The Amazing World of Gumball creator Ben Bocquelet finished the sixth season of his beloved multimedia Cartoon Network series to work on a Gumball movie that became a victim of the HBOMax reshuffling of their animation priorities away from kids programming. Delayed indefinitely, Bocquelet was then commissioned to create an animated revival series with a new name, The Wonderfully Weird World of Gumball, and a new home at Hulu.
However, Bocquelet promises Paste that the misadventures of Gumball Watterson and his adopted brother, Darwin the goldfish, will be just as weird as before. “It’s a really easy thing to get back into, to be honest. It’s almost like a bad habit,” he says of returning to the world. “You just start talking about it and immediately, we start noodling on new, stupid things to talk about. What was new and fresh was the addition of people like Matt Layzell who’s our showrunner this season, and Erik Fountain as our supervising director and episode director. And there were new writers. We changed the name, did the new title sequence. It’s more of the same, but fresher.”
As a newbie to the Gumball world, Fountain (Gravity Falls) says the appeal was being able to jump into a sandbox where everything is on the table. “For me, my job on the show is to execute these things and having a show with very limited pipelines, I was very curious to see how does a show with the same budget make itself so diverse? It’s been really cool to learn and see behind the curtain and how all that’s done, I still don’t fully understand,” he laughs. “It requires a lot of trust from the people with the purse strings that are like, “You want to do that? Okay, that’s normal. Go ahead.” I was trying to meet the standard. My first season on Gumball is trying to uphold that quality. Obviously, technology advances, so some of the techniques that maybe were more of a struggle now aren’t as difficult, so we could spend some effort in other areas. But we were trying to make this feel to returning fans like it feels really authentically Gumball, and they’re picking up where they left off.”
Bocquelet says in their writers’ room, Matt Layzell identified that Gumball episodes slot into one of three categories. “One comes from a kernel of truth, like a story that happened to someone and basically where we would turn trauma into comedy,” the creator chuckles. “Then there’s the comedy idea where we just start from something stupid, like Banana Joe has decided to wear pants and it bothers Gumball because it’s unnatural, and we just fiddle with this and take it as far as we can. And then there are episodes where there’s a desire to just explore something visually and it comes through like special sequences. Quite often, we integrate this into a story where we make it a twist, of sorts, and those are great because we get to collaborate with really interesting artists that we always wanted to work with.”
While the bulk of the series animation is being done by Hanna-Barbera Studios Europe, Bocquelet and Fountain say they were able to fold in fringe artists into the show during the development and boarding phases. Fountain invited graffiti artist Neck Face to contribute because they skate together and he loves Gumball. And then they have collaborations with Germany’s Studio Soi and France’s BobbyPills.
Fountain says he’s loved being able to meet and exceed the high bar of previous Gumball seasons with a team who are always working for the best outcome. “For the sake of a joke, what Gumball has always done is push it to the best possible version of that joke, whether it be with writing or visuals,” he assesses. “It’s being able to have producers support the idea of a joke that’s going to cost a lot more, but if we reach out to this particular artist, it’ll be the funniest version of the joke. And the producer — whose job it is to swat your hand and say, “Don’t be stupid” — instead they say, “That’s a good idea. Let’s do that.” It’s pretty incredible.”
Asked what episodes have particularly tickled them in this return season, Fountain says the episode featuring Neck Face’s work is special. And Bocquelet teases the season finale which plugs into what happened in the Season 6 cliffhanger where a Void swallows Rob. “We’re making everyone earn it,” the creator says with an evil laugh. “It’s a really lovely episode and I think it puts a twist on things that’s quite exciting.”
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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