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Stories   >   How Max's 'Scavengers Reign' created an animated series like nothing you've ever seen / The Hollywood Reporter

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How Max's 'Scavengers Reign' created an animated series like nothing you've ever seen / The Hollywood Reporter

Posted: October 27, 2023

Co-creator Joe Bennett, along with writers and directors Benjy Brooke, James Merrill and Green Street Pictures co-founder Sean Buckelew, unpack how 'Jurassic Park,' 'Manchester by the Sea,' '28 Days Later' and more inspired their visual "haiku" about wanting to "return to normalcy and to what you lost."

The Hollywood Reporter's ABBEY WHITE writes…..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.

READ The Hollywood Reporter Q&A