Toon In: Animated TV Highlights for September, from Haunted Hotel to Marvel Zombies

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.

Snoopy Presents: A Summer Musical  Post Mortem (Aired August 15)

In August, Paste spoke with Snoopy Presents: A Summer Musical writer Craig Schulz and director Erik Weise about creating the first animated Peanuts musical in 35 years for Apple TV+. As promised, this month we dig into some of the scenes and animation choices that make this special so grounded in Charles M. Schulz’s comic strip art, especially in how they honor his evolving art style with his Peanuts characters in this story. 

“That was the very risky thing to do, we felt, because when you talked to my dad, he actually didn’t like his art that he created in the 1950s and he never wanted to go back to that,” Craig Schulz explains. “However, when we had done [Snoopy Presents: One-of-a-Kind Marcie], we had the kindergarten kids in there and little caddie kid Carlin that I totally loved. [For this], Bryan [Schulz] brought up the idea of having this classic tree that had grown up at the camp and all the kids had been there, with the idea of seeing Charlie Brown literally grow up in the camp. He threw out the idea to put in the old characters.

“I was really hesitant at first,” Schulz says of the sequence that has Charlie looking at all of the collected annual camp photos that express his dad’s evolved drawing styles. “Once I saw them, I just had tears in my eyes. It’s a scene I’ll never forget. The pictures of them with their tie dye shirts on the wall, and the whole idea of flashing back to that is amazing. I think it’s one of the all-time great scenes ever done in any Peanuts animation, if you ask me. I think it was just wonderful the way that came together. The hard part’s gonna be trying to control it because now everybody’s gonna want to do more of the old kids. But I was so happy how that came out.”

For Weise, as an animator who has worked with many classic animation characters, including the Looney Tunes, Rugrats, SpongeBob and Sonic the Hedgehog, getting to express the legacy of the Peanuts by animating their visual evolution through the characters in this special was beyond exciting.  

“The story really starts from wanting to protect these things that really need protecting and honoring legacy,” Weise says. “There’s something beautiful about that, the evolution of something, and here we have the evolution of Charlie Brown. Like all of us, I grew up with the original Bill Melendez [specials]. As a little kid, you gravitate towards Snoopy a little bit. Then in high school and in college, you start reading the comics, becoming more mature, and you see more depth, not only in what he’s writing, but there are times in the staging that really informs how you’re supposed to feel.”

Weise says that’s why he specifically carried Schulz’s sequential art blocking into the frame composition for this special. “There are a lot of times where I would line up the staging where they’re all just standing together in a profile, and it sort of disarms you for when you’re going to do something else that’s more cinematic,” he explains. “I do that with all the characters, including Snoopy. But then there’s also times where you get behind [Snoopy] and you’re not used to seeing, like when he does a parachute drop and we come back out with the camera.”

Circling back to the camp history photo sequence, Weise shares that initially, it didn’t play as much of an important role in the arc of the story. “But we kept coming back to it in our discussions. It became, in a way, a time machine. It became almost this magic thing for us to go in and out of, to see the comparisons and to have Sally finally understand what this place means to everybody. In a way, there’s also the issue of individuality. She finds her love of this camp her way, even when Charlie Brown kept trying to impose his way on her. It’s there that they make the connection and all of that comes together. It’s the thing that holds that whole episode together, too. It was just natural to go, ‘We need to put in the original Charlie Brown, the first one, and the original Snoopy. It’s going to land.’ And then when we go up the tree to see some of the evolution, as an artist, I grew up with those strips and I collected the early ones as well, so I appreciate those equally.”

The Bad Guys 2 (Digital – Now, Physical – October 7)

This summer, Dreamworks Animation and French director Pierre Perifel served up The Bad Guys 2, the second chapter in their CG animated feature adaptations of author Aaron Blabey’s popular books of the same name. It’s now available for digital rental or purchase, and as a piece, it is a reminder of what the studio is doing to help shake up CG animation in general. 

After 2022’s The Bad Guys, Perifel returned to Dreamworks Animation able to do a little bit of a victory lap in proving that changing up CG house styles is something audiences will embrace and show up for in theatrical animated movies. Coming up in traditional animation, Perifel tells Paste that he’s extremely proud that The Bad Guys, and now its sequel, helped to trigger an industry shift in diversifying CG animation styles. 

“I could see the different styles coming from Europe, coming from Japan and from America but I couldn’t find these very different styles in CG animation,” Perifel says of his overall frustrations with CG studio feature releases of the last decade. “Honestly, before Spider-Verse and The Bad Guys, it was the Illumination style and the Pixar style. Dreamworks was drawing different styles, but it was still very CG. The Spider-Verse obviously opened all these doors, and it kind of corresponded at Dreamworks with the arrival of new leadership.”

Perifel took a chance pitching them a film that had more of an illustrative aesthetic with 2D overlays to the CG, and he was thrilled they were up for it. “I think from their point of view, they were like, if we’re inheriting the leadership of the studio, let’s make an imprint. What is Dreamworks 2.0, you know?,” the director assesses. “And they really have been embracing this direction since then. I mean, this is luck and timing for me. It was also me wanting to try and push something different for a while, and having my own vision for this and my own desires. I think The Bad Guys is the result of that in a great way. And what has been built after with Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, The Wild Robot, Orion in the Dark, and Dog Man is like a testament to this desire that we all have.”

With The Bad Guys 2, Perifel got to expand his ensemble of characters with a female gang of thieves and further their action cinema aspirations with side missions involving luchadores and a trip to space with zero gravity fights. 

“I think the studio has been really good at letting us also explore what we wanted to explore with these characters,” Perifel says. “Of course, every now and then, you take a route that’s not exactly the right one, so you course-correct a little bit. But overall, they’ve been really encouraging and really supportive to see this vision that I had for this second movie, which is basically what you see on screen. The goal was to make something bigger than the first one, always to make something very cinematic as well. And for me it was playing with the genre that I wanted to play a bit with in the first one, but couldn’t really because it was the first movie. 

“We’re really expanding to an action blockbuster adventure and we had so much fun getting there,” he continues. “It was an itch that I wanted to scratch and everybody was down for it. I think we managed to do it in a very cool way. It’s honestly been like a dream come true, this sequel. It’s been tough, too. It’s been long, it’s been difficult. Making a sequel is never easy, and you feel like there is more pressure when it’s a sequel. Sequels are awesome, but they also can be treacherous, where you can get trapped into something that doesn’t quite fit the tone of the first one. But with all these elements, the same actors, deepening the characters, and having the same team, it was really a good way to execute that sequel. And I think we did great.”

As for what he hopes for the industry, Perifel says there’s so much more to explore with the boundaries of CG feature films. “Right now, everybody’s going in that direction but maybe there’s an opportunity to go somewhere else, and that’s great too,” he says of the popular illustrative spate of releases. “At least I can see CG going in a direction that 2D used to be going for, and that’s incredibly exciting because it is opening the doors to many, many different visuals. It’s an offering for the audience to also educate them to different visual styles and that’s incredibly exciting for me.”

Futurama Season 13 (September 15)

Half a century after it debuted in 1999, Futurama continues to skewer and satire humans today, and in the future, at its new home on Hulu. Season 13 drops this month with 10 new episodes that cover everything from Leela (voiced by Katey Sagal) and Fry’s (voiced by Billy West) now established couple-dom, Kaiju attacks in New New York, Zoidberg’s (voiced by Billy West) family ties, and math!

Co-creator and showrunner David X. Cohen tells Paste that this season represents the “juicy sweet spot” of their story freedom. “We’re in that rare moment for Futurama where we’re actually in the middle of a not insignificant order of episodes, so that’s a different experience than when you’re at the very beginning, or the very end,” he says of this third season of four ordered by Hulu. “We don’t feel much obligation to do anything other than entertain ourselves, so I think this season has a lot of big adventures and a lot of really funny, almost pure comedy episodes mixed in as well.”

Cohen wrote the season opener, “Destroy Tall Monsters,” which has Bender enabling a taller version of himself, which opens the door for some other monsters to come to town. “We ask, are Leela and Fry compatible enough to operate a Kaiju, and it turns out that they’re not in many ways, but they work through it,” he laughs. 

Co-creator Matt Groening is responsible for their geekiest episode of the season, “The Numberland Gap,” which was inspired by his rewatching of the 1959 Disney short, “Donald in Mathmagic Land.” Cohen says he challenged the writers’ room with the brief: “Can we do that but get some actual math in there like you nerdy writers are always talking about?” We said, ‘We’ll give that a try.’ And we did, so the crew adventures into a very abstract world inhabited by numbers. I think we made it accessible, but it also touches on some pretty hardcore math. It’s a real juggling act and I feel proud of those kinds of episodes because when you say a big swing, I don’t think any other cartoon would try it.”

He also wants animation aficionados to look for some changes in their 3D animation produced by Rough Draft Studios. “They have designed more of the show environments in 3D so we can do much fancier exterior shots now than we used to be able to do,” Cohen explains. “We can do moving establishing shots, rotating shots and shots that go from outside through the window into the building. They’ve designed a lot of the inside of the [Planet Express] building in 3D now. You wouldn’t know the difference from any individual freeze frame, but when you see the movement, it’s actually quite incredible.”

Ghost in The Shell: SAC_2045 Season 2 (September 16)

For the first time this month, North American anime fans of director Kenji Kamiyama and Production I.G.’s Ghost in The Shell: SAC_2045 can get their mitts on a physical copy of the second season. Based on the ‘80s manga Ghost in the Shell by Masamune Shirow, this spin-off anime series revisits the universe in the future where never-ending cybercrimes and global threats are combatted by Major Motoko Kusanagi and Section 9.

The limited edition, slipcased collector’s set is distributed by Shout! Studios and comes with a 100-page artbook, four art cards, a poster, and bonus features. 

LEGO Star Wars™: Rebuild the Galaxy – Pieces of the Past (September 19)

With the success of 2024’s Lego Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy, the four-part Disney+ miniseries that scrambles Star Wars canon and characters into new adventures made with Lego minifigs, more adventures await this month in the sequel, Pieces of the Past.  

Screenwriters Dan Hernandez & Benji Samit return to expand the story of their original sibling characters, Force user Sig Greebling (Gaten Matarazzo) and Sith Lord Dev Greebling (Tony Revolori). The “building blocks” of the galaxy remain remixed in the wake of Sig’s accidental actions in the first season, and now they have to reunite to battle the dark powers of Solitus (voiced by Dan Stevens). 

Samit tells Paste that Season 1 was a “true love letter” to the entire Lego and Star Wars fandom, and they were thrilled that it was received that way by audiences. “We had a whole list of things that we wanted to see and asked, what would we want to see?” he says of their initial idea. “Then when it came time to do this second [series], we asked, what are more areas we want to see? We did Dark JarJar, but how can we go deeper now that you’re on board with this wild thing?”

Hernandez continues, “I think the expectation for a sequel is to go further and to surprise more. Sometimes, where you run into trouble is when you do things that don’t feel organic to what you’ve created before. Or, you try to get cute on some level. It’s not that we’re afraid to be cute, but you try to be surprising in the right way. For me, one of my overriding philosophies on this one is, what are the ends of the pool of both Lego and Star Wars that we didn’t get to in the first one? And at the end of this, we can say we truly tried to hit as many parts of both galaxies as best we possibly could.”

They’re both excited to have an incredible villain in Solitus who has powers that threaten to bring down the whole galaxy. “When we put our dream wish list together, Dan Stevens was at the top of it,” Samit shares. “We didn’t know if he was gonna say yes, but luckily he loves Star Wars and Lego. He was so game to come in and play. And he’s just incredible. I can’t wait for people to hear him.”

Samit is also thrilled that Mark Hamill wanted to return as podracer Luke. “We had such a great time with him in the first set that we wanted to keep that going. We thought up a really fun thing that we wanted to do with him. You’ll get to see more of him as the episodes go on. He was totally game to play with it.”

Hernandez adds, “A lot of Mark’s improvs ended up in the show as well because he’s just brilliant at it. And of course, he’s one of the greatest voice actors of all time. So when Mark has an instinct, you trust it.”

Haunted Hotel (September 19)

Just in time for the autumn spooky season, Netflix debuts its latest original, adult animated comedy series, Haunted Hotel. Created by Matt Roller (Krapopolis), think of the show as a ghost-filled, dysfunctional family comedy. Set in a haunted upstate New York hotel, it’s run by adult siblings Katherine (Eliza Coupe) and her recently deceased brother, Nathan (Will Forte). At odds in life, the family hotel gives them an unexpected second chance to get their relationship right with the help of her quirky kids, Ben (Skyler Gisondo) and Esther (Natalie Palamides), and the resident hotel child demon, Abbadon (Jimmi Simpson).

A fan of set-piece horror, Roller tells Paste that the hotel was conceived to give the writers a seemingly endless number of spaces and rooms to tell stories involving the family, and the many, many ghosts and demons that will reveal themselves. “I personally like the lock-in that Nathan can’t leave this place. It kind of makes the show exist because at a certain point, if he wasn’t there, they would just stop and move,” Roller jokes. “No hotel is worth all this. But because their brother/uncle is here, they want to make it work. That is always going to be a core component of the show, this brother and sister with opposing personalities. He believes everyone is good, and she believes everyone is out to get her and that head-butting is always going to be interesting.”

Roller says the other siblings, Ben and Esther, are there to add to the comedy and react to the horrors of the hotel. “Esther always thinks she can take advantage of what’s there and use it, not quite for evil, but to her advantage. And Ben is just a shill who will fall for anything that anyone tells him to,” he laughs. 

The character he’s most excited for audiences to meet is Abbadon, the demon somehow attached to this family. “I think every show, and especially animated shows, just benefit from having a chaos character who is like the sprinkles on top of the sundae,” Roller posits. “For a lot of Season 1, that’s what Abbedon kind of felt like. But the way Jimmi was embodying him made him feel a lot more sympathetic than I expected at first. He kind of drifts into being the accidental hero of a few episodes, so I’m interested in Abaddon’s drive, like what he really wants because I think he’s still discovering it. Something we talked about in the room is that emotionally, he’s just a toddler. And I am channeling my toddlers into him.”

Unlike other adult animated series out there, Roller says Haunted Hotel is really his attempt to make a timeless and evergreen family comedy with a supernatural twist. “We get that by not having something be super referential, and also by telling jokes that are based on the wants and emotions of our characters.” 

It’s also not serialized, which means audiences can jump in and out at their leisure without story arc confusion. “I like to raise questions that invite speculation and let people wonder about the world, but personally, I don’t have a lot of interest in serialized elements,” Roller explains. “I really like this type of comedy show where you could watch any one of these and you would know what’s going on.”

Marvel Zombies (September 24)

Bryan Andrews, the long-time Marvel Studios storyboard artist, Genndy Tartakovsky collaborator, and most-recently director/executive producer of Marvel Studios’ What If…?, is the gonzo creative behind Marvel Studios Animation’s first TV-MA series, Marvel Zombies. 

The Disney+ exclusive is a four-episode spin-off expansion of the 2021 “What If… Zombies?!” episode. Set in an alternate dystopian timeline during a zombie plague, there will be an all-star lineup of alt versions of major MCU characters, including Shang-Chi, Red Guardian, Wanda Maximoff, Yelena Belova, Ant-Man, and Kamala Khan, to name just a few. And like What If…?, Marvel Zombies will feature voice performances by the live-action cast from the MCU. Expect superpowered survivors having to decimate superpowered zombies in very gory battles, providing an edge that audiences haven’t seen before in a Marvel Studios Animation series, much less the larger MCU. 

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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