Toon In: Animated TV Highlights for October

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. Here are the most interesting animated shows of October.

Gremlins The Wild Batch (October 3) 

The next chapter of Joe Dante and Steven Spielberg’s gremlins mythology unfolds with the second season of the animated Max prequel series, Gremlins: The Wild Batch. Picking up a year after the events of Gremlins: Secrets of the Mogwai, young Sam Wing (Izaac Wang), his parents (Ming-Na Wen and B.D. Wong), his friend Elle (Gabrielle Nevaeh Green) and his Mogwai, Gizmo (A.J. LoCascio), find themselves thrust back into chaos when they have to travel to early San Francisco to stop a gremlin outbreak.  

Showrunner Tze Chun (I’m a Virgo) and executive producer Brendan Hay (Rick and Morty) tell Paste that they’ve only gotten more ambitious with the stakes facing the Wings and little Gizmo who is fritzing out with weird behavior and glowing red eyes. 

“Now that the ground rules have been set, we can run with it more,” Hay says of the supernatural influences and major locale change this season. “It was also our chance to get even a little weirder. Like, can we do an episode that’s from an evil Mogwai point of view the whole way through? Can we put them into even stranger situations? Can we pull from American mythology and can we pull from Chinese mythology? It was our chance to up our game.”

Hay says they also double down on the character building they established in the first season with the Wings, Elle the reformed thief and the Mogwai origins. “One of the things that we saw building in Season 1 and became something we could run with more in Season 2, was the generational aspect of our show,” he says. “So much of it is how the different generations relate to each other, where they really differ, and the conflicts that arise. On the more comedic level, that’s Gizmo and all his spawn. Then we have three generations of the Wing family under one roof, and where they differ on everything. 

“But for Elle, this was our chance to find that for her. Thanks to Tze and [writer] Sarah Nerboso, Elle already has the most tragic backstory possible thanks to Season 1,” he chuckles, referencing her dark origin story in “Don’t Drink the Tea.” “So there was an idea of let’s go further into her. We already know so much about the Wings so let’s really delve into Elle and how she can be a part of this greater theme of generations.”

Animation wise, Tze Chun says they’ve again looked to some of their favorite films to inspire their eclectic storytelling this season. He says astute viewers will see allusions to The Godfather Part II, The Hangover and The Haunting of Hill House in this pack of episodes. 

“We just kept talking about how do we make this as cinematic as possible?” Chun says. “Beyond just the color palette and the mood for the season as a whole, the way that Brendan and I always talked about in the writers’ room, and that led into the directing and the visual look, is we wanted every episode to be its own concept episode. Even within each season, every episode has its own color palette. We’re drawing on different influences, like maybe one is a different horror movie, and one’s a Western, trying to make sure that infuses each episode with its own character so every episode feels a little different.”

Hay adds that transplanting the series to San Francisco’s Chinatown of the past also makes it more challenging for their heroes to keep Gizmo and his kind manageable. “The West immediately gives you another color palette and you’re immediately getting the bright sun. And if you’re leaning into a location that has bright sun, that also gives you an immediate problem to always deal with gremlins and Mogwai. It’s like, here’s a palette that’s going to always create some kind of problem for us to deal with,” he laughs. 

This season will also welcome additional voices to the show like Simu Liu’s charming bootlegger, Chang, and even a distant ancestor of Gremlins 2: The New Batch’s Daniel Clamp who will be voiced by actor John Glover. “It is fun to be able to bring new viewers into the Gremlins world but also have some stuff in there for people who are like, “Oh my God, they’re gonna explain this!” We’re just trying to expand the GCU, the Gremlin Cinematic Universe,” Chun closes with a laugh.

The Legend of Vox Machina Season 3 (October 3)

The Legend of Vox Machina, Prime Video’s hit adult animated adaptation of the web series Critical Role, returns to continue their epic Chroma Conclave arc across 12 new episodes. The entire human cast of the Vox Machina Dungeons and Dragon party returns to voice their animated counterparts, with each of them getting meaty storylines including Sam Riegel as Scanlan Shorthalt and Travis Willingham as Grog Strongjaw, who also do double duty as the showrunners. 

Having set up a lot of the show’s concept and their individual characters in the prior two seasons, Sam Riegel tells Paste that Season 3 has been the most fun for them to write because now they’re starting to experiment with their pacing, finding smaller emotional moments and adding new material.

“We’re pushing the envelope and pushing the edge a little farther and farther in terms of animation and character development and twists and turns,” Riegel explains. “In the first couple seasons, especially, we were trying to cram in so much that people were like, “Ah, the show’s so fast!” But now that we’ve established everything, it’s got a great pace, but we still are able to fit in multiple elements in every scene and find that balance.”

Travis Willingham continues, “Season 3 has really been the culmination, as Sam alluded to, of us starting to diverge from the storyline, just a little bit. It’s a refreshening of things, but also starting to seed things that our fans will see in The Mighty Nein animated series, and that we’ve pulled not just from our first and second campaign, but our third campaign as well. Some of our ExU: Calamity miniseries and just everything that has happened in this world since we played these characters almost 10 years ago. So it’s been really fun to go back and plant the seeds, knowing that they will come to life. And if enough people continue to enjoy the show, then hopefully we get enough seasons to deliver the story to its full potential.”

As this season is all about the dragons, the series has also upped its ambition and visuals in presenting their wide array of flaming, frightening creatures that are brought to life by Titmouse. Acknowledging their level up in visuals, Willingham sings the praises of Titmouse as a “vital, integral” collaborative partner in getting what’s in their brains onto the screen. “We write some crazy stuff in our scripts,” he laughs. “We want to push it to the limit every time and very often, Titmouse looks at us and says, “You got it. We got this.” Every once in a while, they’ll come around and go, “Why do you hate us?” But, it is the best feeling in the world to have an animation partner that can sit there with all of their years of shared experience and say, “If it’s important to you guys as Critical Role creators, it’s important to us and we find that perfect middle of how we deliver what we think we need for the story beats.”

Reigel adds, “Eddie Gonzalez is our dragon whisperer. He’s the computer genius who makes the dragons and the big monsters move, and they really figured out the secret sauce this year. There are a couple of incredible moments in Season 3, like two gigantic creatures fighting each other in the snow, a big kaiju battle while Vox Machina watches on. It’s got pro wrestling moves in it, and it is so exciting to watch. You’ll see in the show some of the characters are just watching the fight going, “Oh my God!” and that was literally our reaction when we saw the animation so we just stuck it in the show. The dragons are all the best they’ve ever looked.”

And for those wondering how the team handled the passing of beloved genre actor Lance Reddick, who voices Thordak, the two confirm that Season 3 was one of the actor’s last jobs and he was able to voice 95% of the season. “We have been in touch with his family, talked to his wife, and she was very supportive about keeping his voice in the show,” Reigel says. “We’re making sure that his legacy continues. And what an honor we got to work with him.”

Curses! (October 4) 

Did you know that John Krasinski produces a DreamWorks Animation series for Apple TV+? Well, Curses! is a real banger, perfect for the Halloween season. Created by Jim Cooper and Jeff Dixon, the second season picks up with the contemporary Vanderhouven family continuing to try and rectify the sins of their ancestors who pillaged a whole lot of antiquities. In Season 1, current family patriarch Alex (Reid Scott) was turned to stone to pay for those past wrongs. Saved by his wife and their two kids, Season 2 has the reunited family continuing their precarious and often chilling work despite the dangers involved to break the family curse. Not only does this series manage to entertain on multi-levels, but Cursed! also boasts a roster of incredible genre actors including James Marsters, Rhys Darby, Robert Englund and McKenna Grace. It’s also one of the most handsome animated series out there right now, with a complex illustration meets CG style that stands out from other offerings. 

Solar Opposites: Halloween Special Part 2 (October 7)

Huluween is back this month with a range of spooky content including the second Solar Opposites Halloween special. As a series, Solar Opposites has unabashedly celebrated the event-ness of a one-off episode tailored to a specific calendar holiday but making four of them. In this second Halloween themed special, “The Hunt for Brown October,” it’s all about torturing Korvo (Dan Stevens) who resists anything related to the season. When a witch arrives and tells him that if he continues to reject Halloween, he’ll pay the price with even more spooky stuff happening, Korvo is besieged. He’s then desperate to reverse the mayhem inflicted upon him by the curse. 

Arcane Season 1 (October 8)

All hail physical media! Existing as a Netflix exclusive for two years, GKIDS now has the exclusive physical media release for Arcane League of Legends: Season 1, which will be available as a 4K UHD Steelbook and a Blu-ray Collector’s Edition from their website. A tour de force of character based storytelling, innovative animation and use of music integrated into the action, Arcane Season 1 came out of nowhere and raised the bar for streaming series animation. With the long-awaited second (and final) season due in November, it’s the perfect time to finally watch, or invest in this purchase to catch up on the show everyone’s been talking about. 

Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft (October 10) 

For every console gamer who has spent hours adventuring as Lara Croft in any one of her 11 Tomb Raider videogames and wished there were more stories surrounding some of the game’s best cutscenes, then Netflix’s new anime series, Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft, is made for you. 

Created by Tomb Raider gaming aficionado and genre screenwriter Tasha Huo (The Witcher: Blood Origin), she tells Paste that as both a huge fan of the character and a self-labeled “history nerd” this series was a dream scenario to expand the Croft’s world and history beyond the confines of the games. 

“The sandbox was actually pretty big, which surprised me going into it,” Huo said of what videogame developer Crystal Dynamics and Legendary Television allowed her to create in this series. “I think, after speaking with me, and hearing my take and how much I love all the games, they had a big trust in what my vision was for who Lara was, and they’re not afraid to explore a variety of her emotions.”

Taking place after the events in the 2018 Shadow of the Tomb Raider game, Croft is emotionally reeling from a great loss in her life that connects her to a new mystery connected to her father, Richard Croft, and mentor Conrad Roth. Two mystery boxes of Chinese origin will end up taking her around the world, and force her to come to grips with her past. 

“Almost everything in the show is going to be found in some kind of history,” Huo says about her commitment to make the central mystery grounded in reality. “It just makes it feel more real and tangible, so the four perils are something in Chinese mythology that she starts to explore. I always encourage people to Google as they watch the show, because that’s what I do when I play the games. That’s part of the experience of a Tomb Raider game, and it should be a part of the show as well.”

Powerhouse Animation Studios (Castlevania) are the artists responsible for the anime aesthetic and execution of the show which Huo says she wanted to have the feel of an animated ‘90s adventure series. 

“The beauty of the games is sort of unprecedented and the mystery around every corner [vibe], even from the early 90s games,” she explains. “So, right away, the backgrounds we knew had to be really special and feel really big. From the get go, the conversation we had was, this is going to be a travel show. She’s going to change outfits. She’s going to be in a new location every day, which is very difficult in animation. But we were all on board from the beginning to really push those limits as much as we could, and to really make it feel, whenever we could, as cinematic as possible. Because that’s what we’re used to, that’s what we crave, and that’s the elevated storytelling that I think Lara deserves in a show like this.”

Dragon Ball DAIMA (October 11)

Let’s take a moment to feel very old when realizing that this year is the 40th anniversary of the Dragon Ball manga’s serialization. To honor that milestone, Crunchyroll’s all-new original anime series, Dragon Ball DAIMA, launches a new story and character designs from the creator of the Dragon Ball phenomenon, Akira Toriyama. In this series, Goku and his friends are miniaturized and have to escape the mysterious Demon World. This is one of 40 new and returning anime series to drop on the Crunchyroll streaming service in October. 

Jurassic World: Chaos Theory Season 2 (October 17) 

Last May, DreamWorks Animation’s Jurassic World: Chaos Theory, the sequel series to Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous, dropped on Netflix and promptly blew critics and viewers away. Over five seasons, Cretaceous earned a passionate fandom for its ambitious storytelling set within the canon of the new film trilogy and for featuring an engaging ensemble of disparate teens who survived being stranded on Isla Nublar during the events of Jurassic World. But Chaos Theory really outdid itself by aging up the “Nublar Six” into their early twenties and embroiling them in a dark conspiracy thriller that even made us think they killed off Brooklynn (Kiersten Kelly) when she was investigating dinosaur traffickers. 

In Season 2, showrunner and executive producer Scott Kreamer tells Paste that all of that goodwill has just pushed his team to go even farther as Darius (Paul-Mikél Williams), Kenji (Darren Barnet), Ben (Sean Giambrone), Yaz (Kausar Mohammed) and Sammy (Raini Rodriguez) find themselves hiding on a freighter that’s smuggling dinosaurs, hoping they can track down the mysterious Broker who has been trying to take them all out. 

Shifting into adventure mode with these 10 episodes, Kreamer says, “We always knew we weren’t going to be able to sustain just a full-on conspiracy thriller throughout everything. In Season 2, you want to get some more wonder into it. But we really fought to take the franchise to where it’s never been before and that was important to us.”

With the five unsure of where the boat is headed, Kreamer says there will be an element of surprise for audiences as this season unfolds. “We definitely wanted to go to a different locale than we’ve seen in the franchise,” he teases. “They can’t just go home and assume everything’s going to be okay, because nothing is ever just okay for these kids. So, it starts with them taking a leap of faith that they’re heading in the right direction and broadening the scope of the series and the franchise, by heading out there and trying to figure out what the heck is going on.”

Kreamer is also proud that their show continues to push their visuals, lighting and new locales that involve a lot of water. “As always, we’ve got an amazing team of people who are going to leave it all on the floor,” he says of their animators and story team. “We all look at this like this is an iconic franchise and who knows if we’ll get a shot to do something like this again, so let’s just give it our best shot right now. So, we definitely were ambitious from an animation standpoint with different locations, different sets, water interaction and new dinosaurs. We were very excited to introduce some new dinosaurs into it and meet new characters who perhaps have a different relationship with dinosaurs than we’ve really seen in the whole franchise. As always, it’s a lot of painting these kids into a corner and watching them work together, and not always work together, but figuring their way out of it. It’s obstacle after obstacle and setback after setback.”

Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 5 (October 24)

Taking a cue from Boyz II Men, it remains so very hard to say goodbye, especially when it comes to the fifth and final season of the Paramount+ animated series, Star Trek: Lower Decks. The crew of the U.S.S. Cerritos wormed their way into our Trek loving hearts by way of their lower deck misfits including rebellious Mariner (Tawny Newsome), nerdy Boimler (Jack Quaid), human/cyborg Rutherford (Eugene Cordero) and the earnest Orion Tendi (Noël Wells). Over four seasons, these animated characters have inspired the same level of devotion as any of the live action series crews, and they’re definitely leaving us wanting more. 

The same can be said for creator Mike McMahan who tells Paste that he’s still processing how to say goodbye to his creation that has flourished across five seasons of storytelling, both serious and silly. “On day one of the first writers’ room in Season 1, I said, ‘People don’t talk about the original animated series. They leave it out when they’re talking about Star Trek and I think that sucks,’” McMahan remembers. “I said, “Our one goal with this show, whether people hate it or love it, is they have to talk about it. Because even though it’s a comedy, and even though it’s a cartoon, it’s Trek.” And I think we maybe overshot that goal by a little bit, which is great,” he laughs. 

“I love seeing people be like, “Lower Decks is one of my favorite Treks” because Lower Decks is one of our favorite Treks. You don’t make Lower Decks without loving Trek,” McMahan offers. 

Promising a season full of adventures that will both be open-ended and have some soft closure for some of their story arcs, McMahan prefers to look at this fifth season as a bit of an indefinite pause. 

“It’s sad that it’s ending, but at the same time we’ve been doing this show for six years straight,” he explains. “We launched it in the pandemic, and we made it through a lot of cultural shifts, and really stuck together. I know that the team is so good and Titmouse is so good that everybody’s gonna be working. The way I’ve wrapped my head around it is, I’m just hoping that this is a little mini break, where we give ourselves a moment and then come back, hopefully, at some point. If we get picked up again, or if we do a movie, that space gives us time to not only have a moment to just live our lives and not be running against the production timeline, but also get a moment to breathe and then rewatch our favorite episodes and see them with new eyes.”

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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