Toon In: Animated TV Highlights for February, from Invincible to Pixar’s Win or Lose

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 shows to check out in February, but we’ve also collected some of the finest creators and voice talents in the medium to give updates, or introductions, to their series. 

Common Side Effects (February 2)

Animation fans don’t get many thriller/black comedies gifted to them in the episodic medium but Adult Swim has served up a real corker with Common Side Effects. The brain child of Joseph Bennett (Scavenger’s Reign) and Steve Hely (Veep), the series follows schlubby researcher Marshall Cuso’s (voiced by Dave King) increasingly dangerous adventures in science during his hunt for a “blue mushroom” that is rumored to cure all diseases. 

In the first episode, Cuso crashed a Reutical Pharmaceutical meeting to publicly decry their environmental impact on Peruvian land near their plant and is unexpectedly reunited with his high school friend, Frances (voiced by Emily Pendergast), who now works for the company. Their renewed connection will kickstart a crazy series of events that will have audiences on the edge of their seats. Told in Bennett’s signature artistic style with Hely’s smart writing, the pair tells Paste that from the start they wanted to make an animated series with the tone of a Coen Brothers movie, or Adaptation by Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman.

“Or Michael Clayton and Erin Brockovich where something unravels and unfolds,” Bennett says of the real world storytelling at their core. “That’s so exciting, the idea of these characters that are investigating a certain thing, but when they discover and reveal the truth to certain things, you’re making it as exciting as you can for the audience.”

“We also wanted Marshall to not be a superhero, and to be just a regular guy who’s caught up in an intense situation,” Hely continues about their very quirky lead character. “We drew on a lot of ’90s action, Grisham movies, or JFK and The Fugitive, where somebody’s caught up in something that just keeps getting bigger and bigger, and is too much for them to handle.”

Asked who inspired Cuso, Hely lists, “There are real life people like Paul Stamets, or Wade Davis, who’s this Canadian ethnobotanist going down the Amazon finding these weird plants. And then Terence McKenna, who is a mushroom guy of the ’60s and ’70s, who had all these weird theories. There’s speeches he gives on YouTube. It was a lot of these fringe people who are desperate to get a message out and the world isn’t quite ready for it, that was something that we wanted to get at.

“Then it seemed fun to add Frances to it,” Hely continues about Cuso’s conflicted friend. “This a woman who maybe isn’t sure what her moral beliefs are and how far she’s prepared to take it. She’s kind of caught up in something. She’s not a bad person, but she’s maybe a little bit dishonest with Marshall. And what are the repercussions of that going to be? It just seemed like a cool relationship you had never seen before, that could come alive.”

Calling the show “very real and earthy,” Hely says Bennett and the animators at Green Street Pictures and Le Cube in Argentina have leaned into the small moments that often get left out in the edit. “We have a little more freedom to get real, even though a lot of what’s cool about the show is this fantastical, wonderful animation. But to really express something about the USA in this time that we’re living in, and what it’s actually like to live in, has been very cool.”

Bennett continues, “I come from making animated shorts which is always really fun. You can kind of move through and bounce around different ideas. But this process, as well as on Scavenger’s, the new and really exciting feeling was that when you’re with characters for this long, this new thing can happen and develop where you have a different feeling about these characters. You really feel for them, and you can empathize in a way that I don’t think that shorts can afford. So that was a nice feeling. The way I feel about Marshall in episode five is different than when I saw the pilot. You’re rolling with that, leaning into that, which was so refreshing and felt very new and exciting.”

And that even extends to the jokes and vocal performances. Bennett adds, “The jokes aren’t even necessarily written in the script. There are funny things written in the script, but a lot of it is about the performance, or how they say it. When Steve and I were recording the actors, we wanted this to feel natural. We didn’t want this to feel rehearsed, so it’s a blend. It was the visual animation stuff, but the idea of let’s write this as though it’s not necessarily for animation. Let’s not think about animation as the medium, but think of it as just a show. We want to make a high quality, prestige, cool, fun, and interesting show. That’s the goal.”

Asked if this season was planned as one total story, or just a first chapter, Hely says, “We’re prepared to keep telling this story. We don’t have it mapped out in like a certain number of seasons. But to us, it seems like it just keeps getting richer and deeper, and the longer we can go, the better.”

Invincible Season 3 (February 6)

One of the most consistently well-rated comic book adaptations on streaming right now is Prime Video’s adaptation of the equally lauded comic book Invincible. The series of the same name is based on the Eisner award-winning series created by Robert Kirkman, which came to its own story completion in 2018. This R-rated animated series is also guided by Kirkman and showrunner Simon Racioppa (Fangbone!) who like to keep things surprising. 

Season 3 drops this month with eight new episodes and promises a much darker turn for now-19-year-old superhero-in-training Mark Grayson (voiced by Steven Yeun). He’s been summoned back to Earth by handler Cecil Stedman (voiced by Walton Goggins) to deal with an impending invasion and the mess left behind by his lying superhero father, Omni-Man (voiced by J. K. Simmons). Kirkman and Racioppa tell Paste that Grayson will experience a lot of pain in this chapter, both physical and emotional. 

“For me, the thing that’s the most important for the show is that you always get this sense of heightening danger, increasing scale, and there’s got to be a narrative progression,” Kirkman says of their approach to this adaptation. “I want to make sure that every season of Invincible is bigger, better, louder, more memorable. So when Simon and I sit down to figure out what the season is going to be, it’s really a matter of looking back on Season 2 and thinking about what it is that we accomplished. And sitting down with the comics and going, ‘How can we take what’s in the comics and craft it in a way that is a natural progression of what came before, but continues to raise the stakes and heighten all the elements that we’ve set up? And really just try to surprise the audience as much as we possibly can?’ We want the audience to never expect what they’re getting, and always to, hopefully, be blown away with what they actually see. My main thing about Season 3 is blowing Season 2 out of the water.”

As for specifics, Racioppa says, “There’s a lot of things that happen in Season 3 that are reverberations of things that maybe started in episode 102 or 101 at the very start of the series, and are now coming to a head again in a different way. For Mark’s journey, honestly, one of the things that drew me to the books, even before I started the show, was that it’s one story. It never resets. It’s one story, so I think that’s the promise of this show is to do that as well.”

Always aware they have a very story savvy audience to please, Kirkman says he looks at every series script as a “second draft of a comic” and the opportunity to improve what he did with the comics. 

“On the episodes that I’m writing, specifically, I’m always trying to look at the scenes from the comic and going, ‘How can I make this worse? How can I make this more effective? How can I make this more disturbing? How can I plus this up with the addition of motion and sound?’ which is going to change things inherently,” Kirkman says of his process. “How can I also use that to wring more impact, wring more emotion, wring more drama out of what we’re doing? There’s little things like that that myself, Simon, Helen [Leigh] and all the writers on the show are actively trying to do.”

The result this season is that Mark’s mom, Debbie (voiced by Sandra Oh), who didn’t get a lot of story in the comics, will continue to do so in the animated series. “To give Simon credit, he’s the Chief Debbie officer, who is always going, ‘We’ve got to make sure we give Sandra Oh some cool stuff!’ We’re really beefing up what’s in the comic and finding sometimes entirely new plot lines for her, which are great.”

The Jeffrey Donovan-voiced Machine Head is also taking a very different path here. “That character is getting way more attention than he ever got in the comics, mostly because we all love Jeffrey and we just want to make his recording sessions as long as possible,” Kirkman laughs. “I feel like no one in that process, including him, wants those to end.”

Where all of this puts Grayson and company by the end of the season, Racioppa says ominously that it will be surprising. “In the world of Invincible, what happens to Mark is that just because he’s a good guy doesn’t mean he gets a break. We want to keep that going, because that’s what keeps our audience on the edge of their seat a little bit because you don’t know what’s going to happen next. Just because someone’s innocent doesn’t mean they’re not going to get killed in our show.”

Pokémon Horizons: The Series Season 2 (February 7)

The new season of Pokemon: Horizons on Netflix continues where Season 1 left off with the next phase of the journey, “The Search for Laqua.” In this 22-episode arc, “Terastal Debut,” trainers Liko and Roy undergo Tera Training, and continue to pursue their overarching quest to find the Six Hero Pokémon on the legendary land of Laqua. Directed by Saori Den (Pokémon Generations) and produced by OLM studio, this next gen animated Pokemon series seems to have overcome the concerns of the legions of trainer Ash Ketchum stans who didn’t want to like this fresh approach to the mythology. But the characters, monsters and anime animation seem to have won over the masses. It’s a great family-friendly watch that serves to hook kids into serialized storytelling. 

Pixar’s Win or Lose (February 19)

When you think of Pixar, you immediately conjure up their vast library of computer-animated feature films and their short films. In its whole 39 years of existence, Pixar had never released a television series until this past December, when the Inside Out spin-off Dream Productions launched on Disney+. And now they’re back again with Win or Lose, which was originally intended to be their first series. 

Win or Lose actually finished production in 2024, but its streaming premiere was moved to this month so that Dream Productions could take advantage of Inside Out 2’s box office dominance. Conceived of by Pixar story artist veterans Carrie Hobson and Michael Yates, the two shared with Paste that their intertwined story premise for Win or Lose came out of their shared office conversations during the making of Toy Story 4. They were often struck by how multiple perspectives could really change the core of how they talked about a subject in the office. And that sparked the pitch.

“We had the conceptual idea, then Carrie brought in her past of playing softball,” Yates says of how their idea evolved. “We really liked that because it was so specific. It also allowed this really fertile playground of characters and situations to build up from there. Then that allowed us to really explore both of our own lives, and find different stories we wanted to tell, or different parts of ourselves we wanted to put into it.”

Pixar executives green lit the concept to become the studio’s first streaming series, and Hobson and Yates were handed the exciting responsibility of writing, directing and executive producing what would become Win or Lose. 

“I was just really hungry to try something new, and also stretch and try to move beyond just story artists into the director seat,” Yates says of what the opportunity afforded him as a storyteller. “It was a great opportunity. I think it also allowed us to try things we wouldn’t necessarily be able to try in a feature, like tonally, as well as format wise, the look and all of that, which was a really fun territory to explore.”

The eight episodes of the season feature eight different characters—some are Pickles team players, some are coaches and even parents—as they each gear up for the local championship softball game. 

Asked how they whittled down their core eight characters, Hobson says, “In terms of those early days, nailing down who our main characters would be, that came out of whose stories spoke the loudest, and the cream of the crop rose. We like to say that anyone in the background could be a main character, because they all have a backstory, so to say. But in terms of following the kids and adults, just like in life, everyone has more going on than meets the eye. And that’s not limited to children. Because of that, I think our show is not aimed just for children. We just made something that we ourselves find entertaining, and we hope that others do too.”

As for how they approached making the show together, Hobson says they worked in tandem as co-directors through the whole process of making all eight episodes, instead of splitting episodes between them. “I know some co-directors split up, or take on a different process, but we found we worked best when we could really build off of each other,” she details. “Then it allowed our crew to also build off of those conversations, because we had to live discuss the pros and cons of a certain design decision like, ‘Should Lena [Erin Keif] have a nose? Should she not have a nose? Did we forget her nose?’” she jokes, about the barista character in the trailer. 

Since this is the first episodically planned Pixar series, it was produced slightly differently because of its structure, and the two definitely say they got to experience a deeper way of telling stories, even for Pixar.

“I think Win or Lose is about walking a mile in someone else’s shoes,” Yates muses.  “Us making this show, it felt like we were able to explore characters that may not be the ones you would see in a feature film because there’s just so many different ones we can explore that we felt like were worthy of it. This gave us the opportunity to dig deep into those other layers and show those lives in a way that only animation can.”

Hobson adds, “The bottom line of what Win or Lose does is it sets up a character one way, and then it challenges your assumption when you watch their episode of what you had initially thought of them, possibly. And that experience on the show itself was really enjoyable, because even internally on the team, people would have strong takes, like, ‘I really don’t like this character,’ and then they’d watch the episode, or they’d contribute to that episode in flipping your opinion.”

While most animated series get picked up with a multiple season order for budget reasons, due to major changes at Pixar in the last two years, that wasn’t the case for Win or Lose. However, Hobson is hopeful that if audiences show up in large numbers for the series on Disney+ that there could be future seasons involving this large ensemble of characters they really love. 

“As the filmmaker, I know the world is definitely rich enough for more stories to be told,” she says with hope.

Pantheon Season 2 (February 21)

Way back in 2022, AMC debuted Craig Silverstein’s (The Old Man) animated sci-fi series, Pantheon, to strong reviews. It’s a contemporary story that follows teenager Maddie Kim’s grief (Katie Chang) in the wake of her father, David Kim’s (Daniel Dae Kim) death via terminal illness. A coder trained by her dad, Maddie escapes into a virtual reality space where she ends up communicating with an enigmatic user who only uses emojis (just like everyone only three years later). She discovers that before her father died, he transferred his human consciousness into the cloud server of his former employer, Logorhythms, and is able to reach out to his daughter. 

An exploration of the moral and ethical questions that come from the unfettered development of technology, Pantheon left audiences on a cliffhanger concerning a copy of David’s existence… and then nothing. Well, if you lived in Australia and New Zealand, Prime Video licensed the streaming rights to Season 2 and they got to see how it all ended. With Netflix picking up the global streaming rights for Pantheon Season 2, now everyone (who didn’t pirate the episodes) will get to see what happens to Maddie, her mother Ellen (Rosemarie DeWitt) and the small circle of plugged-in friends who know what happened to her father. Featuring beautiful animation by Titmouse, Patheon is a rare opportunity for lovers of cancelled shows: a chance to get some story closure.

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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