originally posted at https://canmom.tumblr.com/post/756010...
So…
In distant 2016, Joseph Bennett and Charles Huettner directed a short film titled Scavengers at Titmouse for the ‘Toonami’ block on American TV channel Adult Swim. The largely wordless short depicts a pretty classic scifi premise - a spacecraft stranded on a lush alien world, the survivors of the crash surviving by interacting with the strange alien lifeforms - with a spectacular amount of style and imagination.
It’s an absolute riot of squishy, surreal spec bio: a montage of scenes of extremely weird bugs and little guys being cut up and stuck together and fed to each other for mysterious but somehow logical-feeling reasons. It all feels terribly French in style to my eye - a style that is realist but with simplified faces, impassive expressions, a psychic trip at the end, a trust that we can follow a surreal and wordless story. We could also think of the work of Busifan. Whatever the comparison, this short had a vibe you rarely encounter Stateside.
You can watch it here:
Nearly a decade later, this show was followed up with a whole series, animated once again by the madlads at Titmouse.
Scavengers Reign drastically expands on the premise of the original short into a 12 episode series, fleshing out the characters and their weird telepathic world as another ship full of crashed survivors attempt to link up with their crewmates, only to be pulled further and further into the strange ecosystem they now inhabit.
Rave reviews on all fronts, so naturally it got cancelled on its original network Max… but was picked up again by Netflix, with the possibility of a second season dangled in front of us if it debuts hard enough. This is exactly the kind of thing I wanna see more of in American animation (or hell, animation in general), so tonight on Animation Night, we’ll be taking a a sojourn to the strange planet of Vesta.
Aaand I will have to elaborate more later, since we’re already pretty late! If you’re interested - whether a first watch or to watch again with friends - come tune in to twitch.tv/canmom !
We have watched the first six episodes. Also: that fucking ruled. They handled the transition to more dramatic, character-driven storytelling so well. The alien biology is even cooler. The animation is absolutely fantastic. We’ll be back next week to watch the rest, so, see you then!
So far we’ve been introduced to… (big spoilers for the first half of the show!)
Sam and Ursula, stranded together, who have managed to adapt somewhat to the strange ecosystems of Vesta and call their ship down to land. Sam is the commander of the ship, and Ursula’s skill at navigating the alien ecosystem has kept them alive. Travelling to try to find their way back to the ship, they encountered all sorts of strange wildlife and tight scrapes, but managed to pull through… until at last they met a shape-copying creature with a Cordyceps-like lifecycle and Sam was fatally infected, leaving Ursula alone…
Azi and Levi - Levi being a robot who seems to have become sapient after infection with an alien fungus, and Azi an introverted member of the crew who gradually grows to accept Levi’s personhood (also our resident space lesbian). They have a relatively good time of things, encountering a relatively friendly side of the wildlife, until they run into, well… we’ll get to that. Levi has the voice of Fiona, the ship’s roboticist, which is significant because…
Kamen and this freaky little alien guy who has been feeding Kamen psychic visions of his wife Fiona in order to get him to act as a useful human pet who can use his rock-throwing skills to feed the alien. Through flashbacks we learn that Kamen is the one who is responsible for the accident, and about his broken relationship with Fiona, and what motivated him to overrule Sam and redirect the ship. After slaughtering a lot of animals and even one unfortunate human Kamen eventually gives up and finds himself physically incorporated into the creatures body… which leads it to attack and destroy Levi.
So now Levi is (seemingly) dead, as is Sam; Azi is without a body; Kamen is now an organ… things are looking rough!
And of course we can’t forget DJ Piss Foetus (as we call him after the original Scavengers short) appeared in a strange spiritual encounter as Ursula traversed a forest of weird spikes, interacting with the glowing plants and then, as far as we can tell, dying. It was a gig to remember, I’ll tell you that much.
We’re only half way through the show and things are looking grim. Will the fungus inside Levi somehow resurrect her? What will Kamen ruin next? What freaky shit will they come up with in the weird alien biology?
I can’t wait to find out, this show fucking rules.
Animation Night 185.5 is starting now at twitch.tv/canmom ! We’ll be watching episodes 7-12 of Scavengers Reign - if you came last week, hope to see you for the grand finale!
Scavengers Reign delivered. Holy shit. I won’t summarise the entire plot, but it truly brings together the disparate strands into a satisfying confrontation, introducing new and fascinating characters, more fucked up parasite shit happens, it’s just generally an absolute experience.
Of course, we must mention the incredible animation in the final episode in which Kamen makes contact with the spirit of the entire ecosystem incarnated in Levi…
Animation Obsessive magazine has a fantastic interview with writer/exec producer Sean Buckelew here which goes into the inspirations and process behind the show. I mostly credited Titmouse above, but it seems like a small studio called Green Street were the main creative force:
It was founded in the pandemic — Joe Bennett, James Merrill, Benjy Brooke and I are the four founding partners, and each one of us played a different role. James and I were both co-executive producers on Scavengers, and writers. Then Joe, obviously, is the co-creator, and Benjy was the supervising director.
It was born out of the fact that we all made work in a similar way, and we were all responding to the same work that was coming out around the world. With the stuff we really loved, we felt like those people were siloed away from LA TV animation. Our feeling was, “There are all these people we’re friends with who, if given a shot in this world, would really thrive and create the kind of work that everyone says they want to see.” It was a simple premise.
With Scavengers, we were making it, obviously, with Titmouse, but we got latitude to build the pipeline and create a team Green Street-style. It’s a little atypical for TV animation. We were standing on the shoulders of shows like Primal and Castlevania that paved the way for getting this really insane, bespoke animation and integrating it into a TV pipeline.
It is perhaps no surprise to learn that Greet Street Pictures, the small studio which oversaw the creation of the show, brought a number of French animators on board for this project. Buckelew talks about hiring the Gobelins students behind Louise (2021) and Vincent Tsui, as well as indie animator Jonathan Djob Nkondo. No wonder it felt French lol.
It’s great that, in a time when the state of animation is so precarious, a passion project like this can be made! …less great that it got cancelled, but at least we get one really good season out of it. This is really what it’s all about—best American animation there’s been since Aeon Flux, for real.
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