‘Scavengers Reign’ Creator Joseph Bennett, Producer / Animated Sean Buckelew On the Beauty and Freedom of Animation

Creator Joseph Bennett and producer / animator Sean Buckelew are two of the creative minds behind the animated show Scavengers Reign, originally produced for MAX but now streaming on Netflix. The adult anime series tells the story of the damaged cargo ship Demeter 227 and its survivors who are stranded on the alien planet Vesta. The planet offers many visual splendors, but it’s also incredibly dangerous.

In this Awards Daily interview, Bennett and Buckelew dig into Vesta’s creation and how so many aspects of the production team went into creating the complex ecosystem. They also talk about defining characteristics of being stranded helped shape the many different characters. Also, they reveal how animation became their medium of choice, first from availability and then from the creative freedom it provided.

Awards Daily: I read that this series was based on a short, but I’m curious where the overall idea for the story came from?

Joseph Bennett: So, the short I made for Adult Swim with the show co-creator Charles Huettner. I have been working with Adult Swim prior to that and they asked if I wanted to make something more comedy focused. There was an expectation of that. But I thought it would be a fun challenge to tell something as a visual narrative, with no dialogue. So as we started building that out the planet started to evolve from that, thinking about cause and effect and Rube Goldberg machines and seeing the process of things through nature. Then these main characters utilize the planet to meet certain needs that they have. Then we brought on writers, as well as producers like Sean and James (Merrill), and started to fill out these other character arcs while trying to retain as much from the original short as possible.

Awards Daily: Speaking of the character arcs, while the show is well known for its visual style the human characters are very fascinating, and I’m curious where their personalities came from in creating the show?

Sean Buckelew: I would say there’s a lot of all of us in the different characters that we identify with. When we were thinking about someone like Kamen we were channeling the part of us that was broken, full of self-loathing and regret. That is obviously in a very extreme way. We are having these characters who are approaching the planet in different ways. As a thought experiment we had, if you were stuck on an alien planet would you approach it as my only goal when I wake up every morning is to get off this planet, or would you be, well, this isn’t the life I would have wanted but I’m just going to try to live the most meaningful life I can in this circumstance? Then we would take that and extrapolate who that type of person would be, and what would their thoughts and fears and desires be? Then push the planet through that personality, and that yields different results depending on who’s interacting. So that was a lot of fun.

Awards Daily: You brought up Kamen, and his interaction with the Hollow causes it to basically become the apex predator of the planet by feeding off of Kamen’s depression and self-loathing. Where did the idea of this creature come from?

Joseph Bennett: We talked a lot about the juxtaposition of humans and the things we bring like selfishness, gluttony, and our excessiveness onto this planet that is seemingly neutral. The planet is not perfect but these are things that only a human would bring, which would exasperate and throw off what the Hollow was used to. Its life is very simple and it’s got this hypnotic thing that it does to little tree dwellers so I can eat berries. But injecting the self-loathing, hate, and regret into this animal was really appealing in mutating nature in a way.

Awards Daily: One character that really intrigued me was Kris, the leader of the scavenger group, who comes with a very different mindset about how to survive, and she becomes the first human villain. I was curious about creating her and about placing her later in the show,

Joseph Bennett: It was a couple things. First when we worked with Pollyanna McIntosh that was so inspiring. She brought so much to the table that wasn’t even planned and that helped develop the character quickly. When we looked at Kris one of the things we had to keep reminding ourselves was that she might come off as a little bit of a villain but if you were to sit and talk with her you could empathize with where she is coming from and her agenda. That was something we just kept playing out as the show was developed.

Sean Buckelew: If the show was from her perspective she would be the hero, because she would be, like, I showed up on this planet and my friend got killed and my ship got destroyed and you bet your ass I’m going to get out of here by any means necessary. Kris was a foil for Azi, in that if Azi continued down a certain path she could become more like Kris if she hardened up. It is alluded to that Azi is a rolling stone that doesn’t believe in attachments. Then you encounter the most extreme version of that. That truly doesn’t believe in attachments and only thinks about people in terms of if they are useful to me and would f*** them over the first chance she got. But she’s also smart, clever, and manipulative. There is something animalistic about which animals are collaborative and which are not. It is sort of Darwinian like, why wouldn’t I fight for self-preservation above everything else, what, am I stupid?

Awards Daily: How the humans interact with the planet is a huge aspect of the show. There is an intense ecosystem where you try to figure out how these things have survived, and the human’s relationship to it is incredibly complex so that even if they respect it that doesn’t mean they can’t still be killed by it. What made you want to take on this ecosystem?

Joseph Bennett: A really cool thing was happening in the beginning stages of this show. In the trajectory of making the show we had a lot of time going into production because it was picked up, we made a pilot, then some years passed and we had a lot of time to think and let some stuff marinate. But I would also say there was a cool thing happening when production was starting. We had our design concept team working parallel to the writing room. The writers were focusing on character arcs and story arcs, but we were also seeing what the concept team was coming up with creatures at the same time so we were able to thread it in real time. The writers are getting inspired by what the concept creators were doing and vice versa. It was a very organic process throughout the whole production. That even applied to music and sound design. Our composer would make a song and that would inspire the writers and so on and so forth.

I always bring this up but there is a film called Powaqqatsi by Godfrey Reggio which has no dialogue in the movie, and it is creating a visual narrative. He worked with Philip Glass whose music was throughout the whole film. Their collaboration was interesting where sometimes Philip Glass would have a song that he already had made and Godfrey Reggio would have a cut and Philip Glass would apply music to that. I was thinking about that in a similar fashion where we are all in different departments but there’s a lot of transparency and interweaving. When there was something that was really captivating that came from the design department we would say, how do we wrap a story around this and make this an emphasis in this episode because it is working so well.

Awards Daily: What got you guys interested in animation to begin with?

Sean Buckelew: Dragon Ball Z!

Joseph Bennett: For me, my brother-in-law works in animation, and I met him when I was about 12 years old and he was a big influence. He introduced me to a lot of things at an early age that I had no idea about. I remember he showed me the anthology Memories, specifically the shorts Cannon Fodder and Magnetic Rose. As a kid I thought maybe I’m too young for this because I didn’t totally understand everything but I was so drawn in.

Sean Buckelew: I think also when we were young Miramax put out a dub of Princess Mononoke in theaters, and that was right around the time before it was Adobe you could get Macromedia Flash, and you could get a 2-back version of Flash for like 20 bucks. Ten years before the barrier to get into animation was huge, and now you could use a mouse and teach yourself. That was how I started animating.

Joseph Bennett: I also think because we’re such old guys the technology to make a film was a lot more difficult back in the day. I can’t speak for Sean but for myself animation was an easy means to tell a story. It might have been crude the way I was doing it, but it was a resource that was so accessible I could do it easier. So, just doing it more and more, I became more obsessed with it and fell more in love with it.

Sean Buckelew: The limits of it are just your own time. But you can do anything.

Awards Daily: Final thoughts?

Joseph Bennett: I would say so far the reception of the show has been really exciting and overwhelming. I was a bit surprised to be honest, I was expecting for it to be a little more of a niche fan base. But it has been such an exciting experience, and I would encourage people who haven’t seen it to give it a shot. I think we’re all big fans, especially at Green Street Pictures and myself of things that are in the hand-drawn field, and feels like it’s made by a human. I think that matters more and more these days. We put a lot of love, sweat, tears, and blood into this thing. If you haven’t seen it, please watch it. It’s on Netflix now, please give it a thumbs up. Anything helps.