Toon In: Animated TV Highlights for June, from Ultraman Rising to Zombies: The Re-Animated Series

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 Post Mortem (Aired May 24)

In May, we teased what a huge surprise Netflix and DreamWorks Animation’s canon sequel series, Jurassic World: Chaos Theory, turned out to be. To get more specific answers on how they were able to age up the characters and mythology so satisfyingly, co-showrunners Scott Kreamer and Aaron Hammersley return to dive into the spoilers of Season 1. 

Kreamer admits to Paste that he wasn’t sure if head writer Bethany Armstrong Johnson would get his idea of a conspiracy thriller continuation. “I took Aaron out to ramen and convinced him to give it a try,” Kreamer laughs. “I didn’t necessarily know where we were heading. Even in the writers’ room, as we’re deepening the mystery, it all started leading to the Department of Prehistoric Wildlife. We do start a few months before Jurassic World Dominion, so we are sort of heading towards that timeline. We’re telling more of a ‘boots on the ground’ story of what it’s like for people to live alongside dinosaurs. But as far as the mystery goes, we always knew that this DPW was going to be the key into what would turn out to be the global trade that they talked about in Dominion.”

One of the creepiest additions to this series is The Handler character, who chases the friends around the southwest until they finally square off in the season finale, “The End of the Beginning.” 

Kreamer says she bloomed out of the idea that there was a character more comfortable with raptors than with humans. “An Anton Chigurh type where they’re doing a job but they care about the raptors,” Kreamer says, referencing the chilling villain of No Country for Old Men. 

But it was Hammersley who really developed her. “I used to watch Twin Peaks and it was always just odd and uncomfortable,” Hammersley says. “So I think I was just borrowing a lot of the design aesthetic from that. Giving us a character where we don’t ever feel comfortable sitting in a room with her, and hopefully that comes across.”

Both writers give a lot of praise to finale director Michael Mullen for featuring The Handler and her Atrociraptors so well, along with a whole compound full of dinos on the loose. “Mike did an amazing job,” Kreamer says. “He has a way of making dinosaur mayhem and has a structure to it to really give it a good feel. And he added an explosion, and I love an explosion.”

The episode does end with two major cliffhangers. One, with the five friends getting on the boat to get answers about who is behind the dinosaur black market. And two, that Brooklynn shocker. “You find out that maybe Cabrera wasn’t as smart as he thought he was,” Kreamer teases about the big brains of the operation. “So, who is The Handler working for? It was a fun way to bring this season to a close while also giving us some direction about where we’re headed.”

As for the Brooklynn reveal—minus most of her arm—Kreamer praises supervising producer Zesung Kang for the idea. “We were literally trying to solve what keeps the stakes real, where it doesn’t feel like an ’80s episode of The A-Team when they get shot up with machine guns, and everyone’s like, ‘Oh, boy, that was close!’ We wanted the stakes to be real. Once he pitched the idea, we just went, ‘Oh, this is great. This is actually perfect. It opens us up, hopefully moving forward, to tell a whole ‘nother story that you wouldn’t normally get to tell.” 

Ultraman Rising (June 14)

One of the summer’s most anticipated animated movies isn’t in theaters, but on Netflix. Shannon Tindle and John Aoshima co-direct the streamer’s first original movie featuring the classic character in Ultraman: Rising. It’s based on a story that Tindle’s been percolating in his head for two decades. While a lifelong fan of the Japanese superhero, Tindle actually adapted his original story, Made in Japan, into an Ultraman tale when Netflix got the rights from Tsuburaya Productions to make exclusive Ultraman adventures for an anime series and this film. 

Tindle tells Paste that he and Aoshima’s collaboration history goes back to their days at CalArts, and then extended to working together on Tindle’s Kubo and the Two Strings at Laika. Their long established shorthand came into play with Ultraman: Rising, when it was greenlit while Tindle was already working on Lost Ollie. He enlisted Aoshima to co-direct for all of those reasons and because they shared similar fish-out-of-water experience as Ultraman: Rising’s protagonist, baseball phenom (and secret Ultraman) Ken Sato (Christopher Sean). Originally, the Sato character was Japanese born and raised. During development at Sony, it was suggested he be a swaggery U.S. baseball player. Production supervisor Makiko Wakita suggested Sato be born in Japan and moved to America. He then returns to his home country for dual purposes. 

“It was really incredible to have John and Makiko, and our head of story, Rie Koga, who could weigh in,” he says of their own experiences as transplants from Japan. “They could say, ‘These things are important,’ because if you’re going to be seen, you want to be seen in a thoughtful way.”

Tindle also wooed ILM, who worked on Ollie with him, to animate Rising. “They actually came out for a visit and we had a room filled with artwork,” he explains. “At that time, [visual effects  producer] Stefan Drury was like, ‘I don’t know if we are going to be doing animated features, or not.’ But we brought him into the room. They saw the artwork and they were blown away by it. Not long after that, they were amongst the people bidding to do the work.” 

“The benefit of having worked with them already on [Ollie] is there becomes a shorthand,” Tindle continues. “From day one, we got along. I’ll usually give a brief to everybody in terms of style, and what I want to do in terms of music. They understood that brief immediately. From that point, to the test, to the time we actually made the deal for them to do it, it was just heaven. Everything I do now is like, ‘How can I involve these guys?’ I like working with good people who treat their teams in a humane, thoughtful way. These guys are a combo of that and they’re just brilliant at what they do.”

But maybe most important was licensor Tsuburaya Productions being very open to Tindle’s unexpected approach to telling a contemporary Ultraman story. “We had such incredible partners at Tsuburaya with Takayuki Tsukagoshi and Kei Minamitani and Masahiro Onda,” Tindle explains. “They supported our big swings.”

Tindle says they let him play with longstanding elements like the Science Team, turning it into the KDF, which has familial ties to Ken. And overall, they let him tell a parental story of Sato/Ultraman coming into his own potential when he’s forced into reluctantly parenting a baby kaiju named Emi.

“In terms of just keeping it global, even if we’re not parents, we’re children. We have those relationships that we can all understand and connect with,” he says of the film’s universal experiential themes. “Like, sometimes I don’t want to talk to my dad, or sometimes I don’t want to talk to mom. Sometimes they don’t want to talk to me. And that’s okay, as long as we can work and talk through it and find a way through it, which is really, for me, what I’m trying to make the movie about.”

He adds, “You can throw all the nostalgia at me that you want in a film or TV show. But if I don’t care, I don’t care,” Tindle says of why he wanted an unconventional father/daughter story at the heart of the film. “Anytime I’m asked questions about references to [Ultraman shows], that is cool and fun. And we have plenty of references like that, but I don’t care about it. What I care about is are you going to connect with the characters? Our role was always that we want this to feel like an Ultraman film to fans. And, yes, we want to have references to things that they would recognize, but never at the expense of story or character.”

Hopefully, western audiences will connect with their version of Ultraman and his work/life dilemma as a kaiju fighter and overwhelmed parent. If they do, Tindle is ready with a potential trilogy. “I’ve already shared the ideas with Tsuburaya and Netflix for films two and three. They’re all tied together,” he confirms. “I have known what I wanted to do with the characters for quite a long time. I want to get into the histories and a deeper nuance. As you get older, your relationships change with your parents and they evolve. Same thing with your kids too. So in the next films, it’s really the evolution of that, understanding what Ken’s parents went through. All I’ll say is stay past the main end credits. You get Alicia Creti’s amazing song. But just after that, you’re going to see a little surprise.”

Camp Snoopy (June 14)

Apple TV+ continues to foster their Peanuts license with their latest animated series, Camp Snoopy. Directed by Rob Boutilier (The Snoopy Show) and animated by WildBrain Studios, Camp Snoopy is based on the comic strips by Charles M. Schulz. The 10-episode season follows the outdoor adventures of Snoopy and the Beagle Scouts as they try to save their troop from being disbanded. Meanwhile, Charlie Brown and his friends spend the summer at Camp Spring Lake. The streamer has done a great job of producing worthy series and films using the beloved characters, even giving minor players like Marcie and Franklin their own vehicles. Of course, anything that features Snoopy makes it extra special, so consider this series a summer camp for your eyes as the weekly drops will help get us through those dog days of summer. 

Mars Express (June 18)

If you love dense sci-fi and noir, then make a point to see director Jérémie Périn’s Mars Express, which arrives on all major digital platforms and Blu-Ray this month. Smart, conceptually compelling, and morally challenging, Périn presents audiences with not only a gorgeously animated film, but one that introduces layer upon layer of ingenious future tech that draws you into the frame just as much as the mystery to be solved. 

Set in 2200, humanity has left the underclass to live on Earth while the rich and elite inhabit Mars. Their every need is serviced by highly controlled robots who are getting tired of how they’re treated. The disappearance of a cybernetics student brings that tech-versus-human disparity to the fore as troubled detectives Aline Ruby (Léa Drucker) and her once-human cyborg partner, Carlos Rivera (Daniel Njo Lobé), uncover corruption and future tech they shouldn’t know about. 

French director Périn tells Paste that the premise for Mars Express came out of identifying what he found was missing in the landscape of movies and stories. “At that time, I felt that what was missing was high science sci-fi, and a PI story mixed with a buddy movie. We tried to mix all those elements all together. And in fact, it’s not really new. And that’s why I think a lot of people are comparing Mars Express with Blade Runner or Ghost in the Shell, because it’s a formula that already proved that it works.”

Express is also a film that shows rather than tells, and takes advantage of using the animation medium to present some incredible future tech. “First, we really wanted to depict this universe and this world, in the point of view of people who would live there at that time,” Périn says. “That’s why, in the movie, you have not so much explanation of what you’re seeing. People are never talking about the technology they are using because they know it. I wanted to try to find a way to explain stuff without words. It was my first challenge to be consistent and to be understood, and for the audience to feel there’s something solid underneath. Indeed, we had to make rules, really solid ones.”

Périn says to do so they went to actual futurists and scientists to find out where on Mars humans might create a functioning society, and then to programmers and other experts to posit how hacking and future robotics ethics might play out. 

“We found out that, when you’re on Mars, you have to avoid the radiation because the atmosphere is thinner than the atmosphere on Earth,” he details. “So you have to avoid the radiation. You would need to be underground first and inside the canyons would be safest. Progressively, the robots would build a dome. Then, we could go out little by little. Also, because there are canyons, you just have to build a roof instead of building a concrete structure. Starting from there, we knew that the closer you are to the canyon, the lower in the social class you are. When you are in the center, far from the wall, you’re in the upper class. And so we built the organization of the society based on those elements they gave us.”

Ingeniously, Périn also uses two animation techniques to differentiate between humans and robots to further deepen humanity’s goal of separating themselves from them. “Humans are drawn by humans, so they are in 2D, hand drawn animation, and robots are in 3D,” he explains. “That way, their nature is different in the animation itself, and to express the fact they are not exactly from the same nature. At the same time, 3D is imitating 2D. It’s cel shading and special rendering. And for me, it talks about how humans conceive robots, making them close to them, yet they are not exactly ourselves. Another benefit from that is, I could work on weird design and spatial design that would have been way too difficult to animate hand drawn.”

Périn says the sequence that he feels best represents the mixed styles, and the complexity of the making of the film is the car accident that puts Aline and Carlos in mortal danger. “I like it because it was very difficult to make,” he says. “It’s the sequence where all the studios had to work together. The movie was made with five different studios. For this, we had one studio for the background in 3D, another for the cars and the robot in 3D, and there was also 2D animation in it. All the pipelines of those studios were very different so we had to work all together with different timelines and pacing. It was a real puzzle.”

The Boy and the Heron (June 25)

The Boy and the Heron, this year’s winner of the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature by legendary director Hayao Miyazaki, finally hits digital 4K VOD on all on-demand streaming platforms. Here at Paste, we’re big fans of the master and this film in particular. His first film in a decade, Heron was also rumored to be the director’s swansong project. But per the news from Studio Ghibl, Miyazaki is already working on his next animated project. Thank goodness for us! In the meantime, dive into this gorgeous film that is Miyazaki’s deeply personal mediation on post war trauma and an exploration of life and death. A little more heady than his other films, it feels like a culmination of everything the brilliant director has toyed with in the medium for his entire career. And good news for those who want a physical copy in 4K or steelbook, look for The Boy and the Heron at all major retailers on July 9.

Zombies: The Re-Animated Series (June 28)

For the last six years, one of Disney Channel’s biggest teen-centric hits has been the supernatural musical movie series, Zombies. Set at Seabrook High, this particular student body is a very strange mix of zombies, humans, werewolves, and aliens. In Zombies 3, cheerleader Addison (Meg Donnelly), zombie football star Zed (Milo Manheim), and their eclectic friends made it through high school and will move onto college in Zombies 4. But what if there were more high school stories to tell?

With animation you can do anything, like redo a supernatural senior year with more granular stories that focus on the large ensemble of characters who didn’t always get serviced equally in the movies due to time. Enter Zombies: The Re-Animated Series, which reunites the live action cast to voice their CG character selves in an alternate timeline do-over of their last year of high school.

Executive producers Jack Ferraiolo (Amphibia) and Aliki Theofilopoulos (Descendants: Wicked World) were tasked with creating a series of animated shorts that ended up being very successful with the fanbase. 

“It was a place where we could see how the translation would work,” Ferraiolo tells Paste. “We really thought the characters were great. We had a concept for the show of basically ‘a day in the life’ and we just wanted to see if it would work.”

Work it did, and now a 10-episode season carries through with the CG aesthetics of the shorts, along with the songs, dancing, and character relationships established in the live-action iterations. However, getting younger audiences obsessed with real-people actors to embrace animation isn’t always successful. 

“We have a certain responsibility and because of that, we really did pay very close [attention] to making sure these characters looked and felt like the characters,” Theofilopoulos explains. “But also wanted to honor that they were being animated, and we were bringing this into an animated world. So, we also wanted to take responsibility for that and make sure that we push them. And we did have the original cast, so that really helps because we use their performances first for deciding how we bring them to life. And the thing with the short was, for us, we were really lucky that we got to do them because we got to figure out what works and what doesn’t work on every level. By the time we’ve now gotten to the longer format of the series, we’ve already learned so much.”

Unlike the films, where there’s a major threat or rivalry to vanquish by the end, Ferraiolo says The Re-Animated Series doesn’t have to service a larger plot at all. “We wanted to take away a big concept. It’s just these kids in high school that you’ve met in the movies and you fell in love with. Here, we get to see them in their daily lives and the stuff that happens to them. It’s every day in a zombie world. And we wanted to go deeper into characters, so we pushed the actors to go a little deeper into their characters and stretch the boundaries of them without breaking them. And that was a task in and of itself. How far can we go? How crazy can we get? And it’s worked out really well.”

As a long-time animator who started at Walt Disney Feature Animation and then moved to Disney series animation, Theofilopoulos says for this series she wanted to lean more into comedy and performance. “We wanted to have this great mix of feeling like we’re sometimes in a sitcom, and sometimes in some sort of great monster action sequence. But that it felt like Disney animation,” she emphasizes. “And CG was great because it gave us that feeling of being a little bit grounded in a three dimensional world, having come from live action. But then again, coming back to the Disney traditional way of approaching animation where we’ve got squash and stretch, they’re snappy with subtle acting in their faces. We can push surrealism with music sequences. I feel really proud of it. We’ve been given the space and the support from our team at Disney to push and do these kinds of things, which has just been a complete dream for us.”

Tara Bennett is a Los Angeles-based writer covering film, television and pop culture for publications such as SFX Magazine, NBC Insider, SYFY Wire 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 upcoming The Art of Ryan Meinerding. You can follow her on Twitter @TaraDBennett or Instagram @TaraDBen

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