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.
Anne Shirley (Saturdays through September)
With the school year ending and kids looking for something to watch this summer, Crunchyroll’s Anne Shirley, is a delightful anime adaptation of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s classic, Anne of Green Gables. Airing new episodes every Saturday through September, this is perfect for kids who are anime curious and looking for something to take them through the summer break, or for existing fans of the irrepressible orphan who accidentally gets adopted by the Cuthbert siblings of Prince Edward Island.
Phineas and Ferb (June 5)
After a 10-year break, Phineas and Ferb, the beloved Emmy Award-winning and Disney Channel animated series that perennially celebrates summer vacation adventures, has been resurrected by co-creators Dan Povenmire and Jeff “Swampy” Marsh. The entire cast is back along with a whole host of new characters voiced by celebs like Michael Bublé, Alan Cumming and Leslie Jones.
While fans have been anxiously awaiting new Phineas and Ferb anything, Marsh tells Paste that when Disney pitched them the series coming back, both he and Povenmire were already working on other Disney produced animated series.
“We’re like, ‘Yeah, but you do realize that Dan and I are both working on other shows for you already, shows that you ordered,” Marsh laughs about their existing gigs on Hamster and Gretel and Disney Jr.’s Hey AJ, respectively. “We said, ‘Well, as long as you guys are open to working it out, we’ll figure out a way.”
And they have with a two-season order of 40 new episodes that will continue the show’s tradition of summer shenanigans with plenty of original songs and spy asides for Perry the Platypus (Dee Bradley Baker). However, Povenmire says the creative structure is a little different now, based on what they learned from Phineas and Ferb the Movie: Candace Against the Universe, where they have a hybrid story team that includes a writers’ room and storyboard artists still develop gags within a script. “We have the writers and we cycle back through the process so there are moments we can hit and come up with stuff that wasn’t written originally in the script,” Marsh adds.
With so many summer stories already told, you’d think the concept might be tapped out. But Povenmire says that’s not a problem in the Phineas and Ferb writers’ room. “We’re getting pitched really new, wonderful, original ideas for stuff,” he says. “We’ve been playing a lot with breaking the predictability. There’s sort of a formula to the show. But even in the third and fourth season, we started breaking that on a regular basis for humor sake, and we’ve been doing that a lot in this season. But we also want to not feel like it’s going in a completely different direction, so we keep peppering in what we call evergreen episodes, that could have been a second season or first season episode.”
Asked some of their favorites in this revival, Marsh says, “The one that I really love is the one where we follow the emotional journey of a zoetrope. I love that so much,” he laughs. “And then we have another episode where we really get to focus on Buford van Stomm (Bobby Gaylor) and his journey and it’s so weird.” And Povenmire offers, “We went to a place that I never thought we’d be able to go to with the Fireside Girls. I think it’s gonna take people by surprise in a wonderful way. It’s got one of my favorite songs that we’ve ever written.”
Wylde Pak (June 6)
For everyone looking for that next best story idea, make sure you look at your own life. That’s exactly what Kyle Marshall (The Loud House) and Paul Watling (The Tiger’s Apprentice) did as they look to their new experiences as dads to inspire their co-created Nickelodeon series, Wylde Pak.
The series is a vibrantly animated and extremely funny comedy that follows the summer break immersion of the blended Wylde and Pak families. Lily Pak and Jack Wylde are half-siblings who find themselves living together under the same roof for the first time. Usually, Jack is out globe-trotting with his documentarian mom. But the dangers in the field and his lack of kid friends prompts her to ask her ex-husband and his new wife to give Jack a normal summer. The two kids end up making adventures in their small town and navigate their new friendship inside their multicultural, multigenerational household.
Marshall tells Paste that their common stories of being in over their heads as parents sparked bunches of slice of life parenting stories and situations that they blended with the idea of step siblings coming together over a summer. “There was something unique there, but also really universal where the family dynamic could work for everyone,” he explains.
And then Watling says his own blended family coalesced the idea into the Wylde Pak premise of what it looks like to be in a contemporary American and Korean family. “I had recently met [artist] Seonna Hong and we got married, and I got a wonderful twofer, because I got my amazing wife and I got an incredible stepdaughter, Tiger Lily. So, yeah, it was pretty raw putting our life on the page, but it made for some really authentic characters and some authentic storytelling.”
Also an executive producer, Hong contributed to the development of the series and is thrilled that art director Jisoo Kim created an illustrative yet cartoony 2D look for the series that sets it apart from so many of the animated kids shows out there today. “She set the tone for the beauty of the show and the look of it,” Hong enthuses. “She brought home these textured papers from Korea that established even the mood of the show. Like you could see in the painterliness of her choices that all of that stuff was just baked in. Even her set design nodded to elements of being in a multicultural family.”
Marshall says their multicultural crew of animators and story artists also brought their own experiences into the series stories. “We had a very diverse crew, so it’s not only our stories,” he says. “We wanted everyone to bring in other stories as well, to help us populate and make this a really colorful world.”
The series also addresses the real world messiness of blended families and how divorce is part of so many families and it’s a part of a lot of lives to figure out what the new normal looks like afterwards. As a step child himself and now as a stepfather, Watling says, “I realized I never saw that on TV growing up. But there were a lot of stories to mine and experience. And we really wanted to get a little deeper. We didn’t want to tell surface level stories, just kind of buried in comedy. We really worked hard to find a balance of entertainment, for sure, of comedy of heart, but also exploring some of those harder, more emotional themes and stories was really important to us. There’s a lot of specificity to us, but we also wanted to keep it universal to everyone and every family and every person watching this. We wanted everyone to see a little bit of themselves in Wylde Pak.”
Marshall says the 26-episode first season takes place over the course of the summer. “Each episode stands alone but there is an arc over the series,” he says of how they constructed this first summer for the family. We won’t give anything away, but it’s kind of baked into the first season, where it goes, and then where things would go with the second season and beyond.”
Predator: Killer of Killers (June 6)
When it was announced in April that a rumored secret Predator film co-directed by Dan Trachtenberg was an animated feature — a first for the franchise — fans rightly lost their minds. Predator: Killer of Killers is a Hulu exclusive release and was made in parallel with Trachtenberg’s live-action film, Predator: Badlands (out in Nov. 2025). However, Killer of Killers is an anthology of three Predator stories that take place during three distinct eras in human history: the rule of the Vikings, feudal Japan and World War II.
Co-directed by Joshua Wassung of The Third Floor, a digital visualization studio, Killer of Killers is their first feature animated film so they and Trachtenberg were looking to make their mark in this medium.
“Something that Dan and I shared as a passion over years is that we love beautiful concept art,” Wassung tells Paste. “There’s so many crazy talented painters who work in the industry. But oftentimes, it’s so beautiful that it’s unobtainable for a live action film to fully capture. And we were like, ‘Okay, but what if that was the actual shot?’” he says of the concept art look. “So that was the core conceit. We were able to work on our painterly style, our brush strokes and our design language, by leaning into that we wanted the final product to look like it was painted. We wanted to make it so you could pause it at any moment and say, ‘This whole frame, that could have been a painting.’”
Wassung continues, “And that goes from painted backgrounds to painted assets, but also to how we render the characters and how we stylize the lighting to make sure that the characters feel like they’re a part of that world. It was one of the reasons why we did no motion blur, and one reason why we did it in a mixed frame rate, mostly on twos, but also a mixed frame rate because if you have motion blur, that’s traditional [animation]. You’re like, that’s the character and that’s the background. But we really wanted them to really feel the same.”
They also wanted to keep up the action beats expected in a live action Predator film, and that includes the violence and gore. Wassung says they had no pushback on that front from 20th Century Studios. “They felt that that was part of the core IP. The brand has this intense action, so they actually wanted us to lean into it,” he says.
“What was also important to Dan and I both is — and I think it really shows in Prey, and will also show in Killer of Killers — is there’s very much a heart at the center of each of these characters. Even if they’re significantly flawed and are facing very dark things, there’s a journey and something to be able to learn there. I think fans will be pleasantly surprised that it’s not just heads getting separated,” he laughs.
In order to up their action game, Wassung says they brought in combat and stunt consultants for each era of the anthology stories. “It was so important, even in the most intense action scenes, we really wanted to understand what’s going on in this character’s head?” he explains. “Why is he sweeping his leg? Why is he holding the sword here? So, we brought in advisors who actually taught us about the proper way to hold a sword, the etiquette and the culture and the formality of how a samurai holds a sword, versus how a ninja would hold the sword. All those things we got to put into these fights.”
The release of Predator: Killer of Killers is just the beginning for The Third Floor in terms of their feature animation ambitions. If the film lands well that means they can ramp up an intended pipeline of projects that will make them players in this medium.
“Something that’s always been very important to Dan is, for every project, he’s asking, “How can we make the unexpected version of this?” Wassung says. “Prey is a great example of that. And even the structure of this movie, being based as an anthology through history, even that feels refreshing. Hopefully people will feel that we were able to take advantage of the medium and the designs and really open up the world of the Yautja and to see different aspects of these creatures and aliens that people have been imagining for decades.”
KPop Demon Hunters (June 20)
Acknowledging the massive popularity of anime and K-pop now in the west, Netflix’s KPop Demon Hunters celebrates both in this Sony Animation original musical that blends modern sensibilities with the ancient supernatural. The film centers on the girl band trio, Rumi, Mira, and Zoey, who are global K-pop superstars. But they have a shared secret, in truth, they’re demon hunters who use their global travels to hunt down threats to their human fans. So successful at their mission, Demonkind decides to beat them at their own game and manifest a rival demon K-pop boy band that charms their audiences with crowd-pleasing charisma which puts them under their control. The ladies have to stop them with music, equally hot looks and their demon-slaying powers.
Into the Wonderwoods (June 24)
From Shout! Studios (to rent or buy) via digital platforms comes Into the Wonderwoods, the latest animated feature film from acclaimed French filmmakers Vincent Paronnaud (Persepolis) and Alexis Ducord (Zombillenium). Created with CG and 2D animation, the film is an adaptation of Paronnaud’s 2016 comic book In the Dark and Mysterious Forest(or, Dans la forêt sombre et mystérieuse). It follows the adventures of Angelo, a 10-year-old boy who loves to escape into his imagined worlds where he dreams of himself as an unstoppable hero. However in the real world, his beloved grandmother is very ill so he and his family drop everything to visit her for perhaps the last time.
A poignant story about the power of story and the hard lessons of life, co-director Ducord tells Paste that this was a very personal story for both Paronnaud and himself. “For Vincent, because he drew his comic book for his children about the death of his grandmother. But I also lost my grandfather too when I was the same age as Angelo,” he details. “A lot of people have these moments in life and we all have a different approach for these moments, but for all people, it’s difficult.”
Turning the story into a film allowed the pair to use a mixture of styles and animation techniques to expand the story outside of Paronnaud’s sequential art. “We decided if we change the media, we can change other stuff inside and develop certain parts and increase others,” Ducord says of the changes made for the film. “We wanted to do an adventure movie, so we played with the code of adventure. We needed a good bad guy. We don’t have that in the comic books where it’s just an idea and a concept. But in the movie, we totally developed this character with a personality and a lot of things to do. And we added another character, a young girl to mirror Angelo, someone who can understand him.”
In the final film, Angelo’s primary storyline that follows his journey to see his grandmother is all done in CG animation, which is a first for both of them. They used the Unreal Engine tool to render. And then after the fact, they added some homegrown 2D animation sequences to delineate when Angelo goes into his imaginary world full of his own stories and creations.
“We don’t have a very big budget. It’s around 9 million,” Ducord explains. “So we used all the money to make nice [CGI] backgrounds, nice characters, and nice animation. And after production, the [studio] said, “Okay, we can’t do anymore now. You just have that, so use the material to make the movie.” But sometimes we wanted to say something else, so we use some particular technique that we can do by ourselves. We’d create it on the weekends.”
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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