How Max’s ‘Scavengers Reign’ Created an Animated Series Like “Nothing You’ve Ever Seen”

Fans of science fiction have simultaneously seen something similar to Max‘s new adult animated series Scavengers Reign and absolutely nothing like it before.

It’s a dichotomy that the show’s creative team leaned into when trying to create a world that houses a group of surviving crewmembers from the Demeter, a deep-space freighter ship damaged by a solar flare and stranded on a beautiful but terrifying planet. Separated and unaware the others have survived, each group — and in some cases a single individual — attempts to navigate and survive the hostile planet in hopes of eventual rescue.

Co-created by Joe Bennett and Charles Huettner, the series, based on their 2016 short Scavengers, has been adapted into a 12-episode series by Green Street Pictures. It’s one of the latest examples of how networks and platforms are not only increasingly interested in animated titles that expand genre representation, but ones that have clear live-action impulses, too.

The show has a love of the animated medium, as evidenced by its art styling and major influences like Hayao Miyazaki. But much about the show also bucks animation expectations and the medium’s traditional process. It borrows from visual approaches within live-action projects like Manchester by the Sea and Jurassic Park, leaning into observational humor, offering more textured sound and shots that hold on characters much longer than animation tends to do.

It also bucks the traditional production process, with the team working remotely, allowing them to hire burgeoning talent from countries like Mexico, Spain, Portugal and France. The team of directors — and more untraditionally, writers — also worked directly with voice actors, focusing on getting them to play things as naturally as possible.

The Hollywood Reporter spoke to the show’s team of writers and directors — including Bennett, Benjy Brooke, James Merrill and Green Street Pictures’ co-founder Sean Buckelew — about how they built the stunning and strange world of Scavengers Reign, from its creatures to its colors.

This was based on a short film. How did that help guide you as you moved into a longer form?

BENJY BROOKE The short was extremely helpful. There is a core device in the show, which is the different creatures on the planet that are utilized by our characters in surprising ways. That is just an inherently interesting visual thing every time you see it. The show has this brilliant device that was really set up in the short that we use for the entire series and I think no matter what is happening with the characters, even as a writer, when these things happen, we would call them processes. So if a character takes a creature and uses it as a breathing mask, they have tubes that go up its nose, and it’s converting toxic gases into oxygen. This is just a compelling thing to see out of context, and it’s a real strength of the show, so having that setup in the short was huge. You can see there’s so many ways we could go with this.

Another benefit we had with this show, which a lot of shows don’t have, is we made a pilot. That sounds strange, because everybody assumes everything just has a pilot. But frankly, a lot of shows I’ve worked on just go straight into series. Maybe it gets developed with the scripts, and then on episode one, you’re making the show. Especially in animation, you have to figure out how to make the show as you’re going along. We had the benefit of not only having a short, but a fully produced pilot that got made, went up, and then went dark before the series production started.

When we got into making the series, we went back into the pilot, we did a little bit of rewriting and tweaking to set up some things later on in the series. But both of those things were hugely helpful and really cut the teeth of the content of the show.

JAMES MERRILL In the short, the processes that the characters are interacting with, it’s clear that they’ve already done this many, many times. That’s a cool expositional device that we use in the show itself to show how long these people have been here. How comfortable they are using the aliens — it’s just like, “God, I hate it here,” and then putting the mask back. That’s one of my favorite little moments. I love that throughout the whole show, you use animation as a visual language to tell a story in a way that you can just strip away exposition. It’s such an odd, odd delivery of that kind of exposition that I thought was such an enjoyable thing to produce, and hopefully, is enjoyable to watch.

What I fell in love with in the short was the end of it. It made the whole thing feel like this beautiful haiku. It’s this little contained breath of an idea. It’s these characters building this Rube Goldberg machine out of aliens, and you think they’re building toward something really bombastic because the process is so big, but then it ends up being something really sensitive and mundane. It’s just a glimpse of life in Manhattan on the street, being around people again and being normal on Earth. That idea is the lodestar for the whole show — even though we don’t do that in the series. It’s this feeling of wanting to return to normalcy and to what you lost. It became the bible of how we came to approach the show on a spiritual level.

During your New York Comic Con panel, you mentioned several unexpected live-action influences on the series. Annihilation actually came to mind while watching. Was there anything else you considered?

JOE BENNETT A big inspiration was a YouTube channel called Primitive Technology. It’s basically a guy who lives out in New Zealand, and the whole point of the show is that he builds different things in the woods — a hut or a clay oven. He makes it from scratch, so even when he starts a fire, there’s no process that’s skipped. There’s no talking in the video, it’s just seeing it from beginning to end. It’s so rewarding to see the payoff at the end, when he’s finally done this thing over the course of a few days. That actually was a really big inspiration. That was neither animation nor film. It was just the process, the cause and effect of it all, that was really inspiring.

SEAN BUCKELEW It’s funny, Annihilation came out while we were working on the pilot, so it was already in motion for the episode that screened [at New York Comic Con]. We all saw it together and we were all like, “Oh no.”

BENNETT We loved that movie. I was like, “Oh, this is brilliant. This is amazing.” And then I was like, “What are we doing?” (Laughs.)

BUCKELEW But I think that also opened up for us, when we were doing the series, that you almost want to go hard in the other direction for narrative inspiration. Annihilation is close and similar, and maybe has some overlap. But then it’s like, “Oh, let’s draw [something else].” We [at New York Comic Con] mentioned Manchester by the Sea as a movie that inspired the writers room. We want the grief, guilt and regret to have this flavor. It was trying to move away from science fiction for where you draw inspiration cinematically. We tried to do that as much as possible, because I think that the Annihilations and the Nausicaä [of the Valley of the Wind]s are just in our DNA already.

Some of those live-action influences really emerge and change the viewing experience in unexpected ways. But it might seem almost like a rejection of the animated medium’s rules. Is it for you and if not, how is this expanding it?

BROOKE Animation can often be an attempt to capture what is natural about humans or natural about life, but live-action cinema is our closest thing to capturing people in their natural habitat. Being able to replicate it with animation is a feat. It’s like a magic trick. Joe’s personal work, it’s a lot of extremely delicate, careful observational humor. With this show, he wanted to do a careful observational drama, and stage the camera in a way that just feels natural. That was a big part of what the marching orders from Joe and Charles were — trying to be really delicate about how we pace it and tonally wanting it to be as measured as possible. It was just present something that felt like a love letter to drawing, to human behavior, and the human eye.

MERRILL I certainly don’t see it as a rejection. We’re huge animation fans first and foremost. Like Benjy just said, it’s a love letter to drawing. This is a very animated show and is handmade. Everybody who worked on it is a super-talented artist. I would say, what someone might be feeling when watching is, we’re inspired by say, Akira and Perfect Blue, [Hayao] Miyazaki — so many recent animated television series, a lot of Japanese series and things that we’re just fans of. But in equal measure, we’re also fans of Michael Mann and William Friedkin. Joe talks about The Last of the Mohicans, and in the writers room, we talked a lot about things like 28 Days Later, Jurassic Park and the film Sorcerer. It’s all these little touchstones that, in my mind, live alongside the Perfect Blue inspiration.

BROOKE We wanted audiences to really get lost in the planet and get lost in these stories that Joe, James and Sean wrote. I think that the treatment of the characters and the camera as cinematically as possible was always an attempt to then contrast how the camera is being treated and how staid it is with the extremely weird creatures and extremely strange planet. The creativity that blossoms out of that from all the animators’ work, it just makes that stuff crackle with even more oddness. I think when you have in contrast something more restrained when something is strange — and that was always an interplay we were bouncing back and forth on with the storyboard artists, the animators, the compositing — it just pops out a lot more intensely.

The pacing of this is really specific, and you drop viewers directly into this world without much explanation of what’s happening. Why that approach to pacing and where you start your story?

BUCKELEW In terms of the latter part of the question, it was a fun challenge. Instead of opening with the ship crashing and doing all that exposition, across the board we tried to see how little exposition [we could] give. But I think we also didn’t want it to feel like Lost so much, where you’re holding on to this puzzle box and that’s really what the show is going to be about — revealing. It was trying to walk that line of not purposely trying to be mysterious, because there’s some big answer that’s going to be a revelation, but also, trying to make it feel like you’re just thrown in the deep end with these people already lost and have already been there for several months. That allowed for us to have characters have familiarity with things that the audience doesn’t.

You’re seeing people that are old hands at certain processes, or they’ve been surviving here for x amount of time. So they’re already used to certain things, but other things are escalating. For us, we’ve seen the story about introducing this crash. It was just fun to show how everyone has gotten used to this to some extent, even if it’s in a negative way and you’ve lost your mind. You’re deep into that already. It lets you start off in a place where everyone is set in their ways in this crazy, crazy planet. Then the pacing, Joe did so much editing on the show. He edited all the animatics and storyboards. I think you’ve got such a particular touch with how you edit that draws kind of more from live-action pacing and trying to achieve, in very early stages, these emotional beats and cinematic feelings just with storyboards and temp music.

BENNETT I would say that the idea of holding on a shot on a character, especially in the medium of animation, where you have the opportunity to show a lot of nuance and subtlety in facial expressions, or the pupils moving and things like that — it was really exciting. It always just felt like with live-action versus animation, live action had the ability to hold on shots longer because it was presenting more. Meanwhile, animation would have this kind of stiff look. So it was just a fun challenge to ask, “OK, what if we did hold on it longer? What if there was just a little movement here and there? Suggesting something just through a pensive brow?

The art styling is not necessarily simple, but it can appear less complicated than other styles, and the reason for that choice becomes so much clearer once you see it in action. Had you thought about other styles, and if not, why did this one really lend itself to the kind of story you wanted to tell?

BENNETT It was a thing that Charles and I had developed early on. I know people have been bringing up  Moebius a lot. To what Sean was saying earlier, it’s not that Moebius wasn’t an influence, but that’s another artist that’s in your DNA. You were subconsciously inspired by someone like that. This style lends itself to the texture of the planet and really understanding the volume and how things move, with the contour lines outlining the bark and the different foliage. It felt like with this style, you can get a better grip on the planet. It lent itself to a tactility on the planet that was really nice. That, in combination with the sound design, the ASMR stuff, was what we were really going for. A character in the trailer when you see him rubbing his hand against the tree, I really want to hear that. I want to feel it. As far as the color, we were trying to have a show grounded as much as you can in reality that is not on planet Earth. We were allergic to something that felt too radically different. This is just another hue.

BUCKELEW To make it feel strange, you have to have some elements that feel really grounded, and the style allowed for that, where you could have these imaginative designs. But then there’s familiar things, too, and I think within that, our human characters are just fun to animate. This is a credit to Charles, who was the co-creator and was the art director on the show and really drove a lot about the creatures’ look, but then also how they move and operate within the world. It was getting that to feel married to these characters. It’s about a visceral sense — you can imagine the physics of this thing on Earth, but it’s also totally strange and nothing you’ve ever seen.

BENNETT One last thing I’ll just add is that a funny thing happened when we were doing concept design, and coming up with the organisms and creatures and foliage. It was nearly impossible to come up with something in this world that doesn’t already exist in some form or fashion in the real world or nature that we know. Whether it’s on the micro level, or the macro level, it already exists. So do the sounds these creatures make. So you have to lean into that. Let’s cherry-pick from those things in a big way.

“Strange” is a word you’ve all used — and there are strange moments — but a character putting on a “creature” gas mask and then imagining an intense body horror sequence also feels terrifying. How did the styling and color choices allow you to amp that in a way?

BROOKE Jurassic Park is so terrifying because the colors are so natural. You think about the scenes of the velociraptors in the kitchen. It’s all that shiny chrome, then there’s a gray-brown creature jumping around. If it was a bright blue creature, it would ruin the suspension of disbelief. I think with the fungus growing out of Ursula’s hands, the fact that it just looks like earthly fungus. There’s something about it that makes it like a nightmare you can totally imagine having. It hits on some really subconscious fears that you didn’t even really know you had. I think the lead-up to that point, the audience that is with Ursula is treated in a restrained way. So when that hits, it hits you in your core. If we’d been a lot more broad in our animation style, I feel like that moment might not hit as intensely.

That sequence is a big introduction to the stakes of this universe, where death feels like a serious possibility. Historically, kids’ animation just wouldn’t really touch let alone show that. What were the parameters around how far you were willing to go in this universe?

MERRILL In all things with the show, we didn’t want to have gratuitous violence, we didn’t want to have broad comedy, nudity. If there is nudity, it’s done, hopefully, in a tasteful way. I think in general, we wanted to be careful with our depictions of these things so that it had the most impact. Especially in the context of animation. There’s just so much inundation with violence that the audience is inured to it, and if you pull back a little bit, and then present it in a way that actually does have serious stakes like a lot of live-action TV drama has done in the last 20 years, it can hit an audience in a way that can make them emotional — even cry, potentially. As we were making it, there were scenes in storyboards that were making me well up. I feel like it was critical for us to treat death in the show the same way we treat death in our own lives. We wanted it to be super meaningful for the characters onscreen because they’re a small crew, and each character dynamic is so meaningful because they’re so far away from home.

BROOKE I think that the stakes really drive fear, they drive drama when watching. So going into the writing, naturalism was a big word and realism was a big word when writing the show and making it feel true to life. Great point about kids’ television, and we weren’t aware of any rules in adult television like that until the network needed to tell us you can’t show XYZ. We would retroactively make a change, but that didn’t happen too much. It really was just an attempt to write something that was big and meaningful, had drama and horror and moments of sadness and moments of joy and wonder. We were just reflecting all of our favorite things as storytellers. Certain death is a thing that is reckoned with quite a bit in this show, and it’s part of life. It just seemed true to life to us when writing it that these would be the stakes on a planet like this.