Perhaps the biggest news out of today’s Netflix Animation’s press presentation in Hollywood is that a new Ghostbusters animated series is on the way.
Described by Netflix’s John Derderian as “an exciting new take” that will “really surprise audiences,” it looks, based on the preproduction art shown, like it has familiar iconography, though it uses the unlimited location and scale of animation to great effect, with a larger containment unit and kaiju-sized ghosts. It looks to be a team of four in an Ecto-1 style car, but the characters as shown were indistinct, so there’s no immediate way to tell if they’re new characters or pre-existing ones.
Not much was shown of Terminator Zero — a brief moment of the Terminator’s face peeling off during a shootout — but we learned that Timothy Olyphant will be voicing the primary Terminator of the series. As there was no dialogue played, it’s unclear if he’ll try for an Austrian accent or not.
Sizzle First, Then Steak
Christopher Sean, the upcoming voice of Ultraman, hosted the panel, which kicked off with a sizzle reel of past, present, and future:
Nick Kroll followed, with a brief reminiscence on Big Mouth and its upcoming eighth and final season. Applauding Netflix for the fact that, “we had unbelievable freedom to create exactly the show we wanted to make,” he recalls saying, “We’re gonna make a show about kids masturbating — you okay with that?” A sizzle reel of the final table read that followed triumphantly declared the show only got three notes from the studio in ten years and wondered if Netflix executives ever actually read the scripts.
Brief mentions of the preschool lineup followed, along with highlights of adult-skewing animated spin-off shows like Tomb Raider, Arcane, Castlevania, and of course the Terminator…all leading into the introduction of Zack and Deborah Snyder, there to show the first footage from Twilight of the Gods. Four years in the making, it indulges Snyder’s obsession with mythology, and both of them took pains to call it sexy. The footage looks pretty much exactly what you’d expect a Zack Snyder animated series to look like — imagine the artwork style of Nimona in the service of slo-mo battles like in 300 and Justice League.
Yes, Norse mythology is public domain, but one has to imagine Snyder thrills to writing lines like “I am Thor! And I want blood!” and making Loki into an anime dark elf. Does he secretly imagine he’s gotten more murder, sex, and nudity into a Marvel universe of his own? It’s possible.
Ali Wong V. The (Under) World
Ali Wong stars in and produces Jentry Chau vs the Underworld, a show about, “a Chinese-American teen living in a small Texas town who must fight an entire underworld’s worth of monsters while balancing the horrors of high school.” It looks like an anime version of Disney’s American-Born Chinese.
Sony will collaborate on several projects with Netflix, and they include not just Ghostbusters, but Minecraft (a quick tease showed it looking as cubist as the game) and Motel Transylvania, which sees Adam Sandler’s Dracula move to Southern California. And of course, Netflix’s most marketable IP, Stranger Things, will get what looks like a 3D cel-shaded style animated series too.
In addition, there’ll be a Sony Animation feature with the temporary working title of K-Pop: Demon Hunters. A proof of concept reel showed a three girl band who leap into action when another girl becomes a demon — it’s a real mix of fully 3D animation combined with vintage anime effects like the mid-air freeze while action lines move in the background.
Anime Advances
Future anime projects include Tokyo Override, a futuristic story about motorbike messengers who get paid to do illegal work on the side. Visually, think Speed Racer meets the Spider-Verse. Leviathan adapts Scott Westerfield’s novels about an alternate-history World War I, in a very classic anime style.
Popular recent theatrical anime features like Suzume and The Boy and the Heron will stream on Netflix, while The Imaginary, a collaboration with Studio Ponoc, will debut this summer. It will include 17 different language dubs, and today they announced the English-language voice cast will feature the likes of Hayley Atwell, Sky Katz, Kal Penn, and LeVar Burton.
Craig Robinson came out to announce two animated features he’ll be in. First, he plays Sandy Cheeks’ dad in the Spongebob spin-off movie Saving Bikini Bottom: A Sandy Cheeks movie. He showed a brief clip, in which Sandy’s whole family are driving a human-sized RV, using multiple Rube Goldberg-like devices to compensate for their tiny size. they’re frantically fleeing the cops, and eventually drive off a cliff. It’s a 3D animation style like the last Spongebob film.
The next one, coming in 2025, will be The Plankton Movie. Robinson is not in that one.
Laser Farts
However, he is in In Your Dreams, in which he plays a plush giraffe named Baloney Tony, who “can shoot laser farts.” He says, “I was told by the filmmakers, ‘You were our first and only choice.'” Simu Liu, appearing by video, revealed he plays the father of the two main kids, and he researched the role by sleeping and dreaming a lot. The kids are named Stevie and Elliott, and they’re on a quest through dreamland to find the Sandman (no, not the Neil Gaiman version who’s also on Netflix) because they believe that “If they can find him, he promises to make their dreams come true.”
A clip showed Stevie awakening in the dreamworld, inside a giant, full cereal bowl, as a living Cheerio wonders if she’s dead. She wakes, up, and finds herself in a place familiar from her dreams — a town inhabited by sentient breakfast foods. They all have tiny smiles that look exactly like the ones on Squishmallow plushes; can a barrage of huggable versions in stores be far behind?
Her brother Elliott descends into the dream on his bed, knocking her in the head. Somehow they’re in a shared dream, and he has trained his bed to act like a pet dog. Where to next? Robinson’s voice booms out: “I know the Sandman!”
Unfridged
It’s coming from behind a giant fridge. They venture back there, amid nasty fridge gunk, an old retainer, and an insane, moldy cupcake named Delilah who wears the retainer as a tiara while screaming, “I’m a perfect princess!” Then they see Tony’s legs, stuck underneath. They pull him out, and he does a spin around, glittering while “Hungry Eyes” plays on the soundtrack. Tony is armed with slices of bologna, and he tosses one right into Elliott’s mouth, and even though Stevie motions that she does not want one, she gets one anyway. “My man Smelliott!” he declares. End clip.
Love, Actually’s Richard Curtis cowrites the holiday film That Christmas, with a brief clip shown of a sad kid named Danny, and Brian Cox narrating about how Christmas is a mood amplifier, whether the mood is good or bad.
A video promo for Roald Dahl’s The Twits featured actors Emilia Clarke (who plays a bedbug) and Natalie Portman (Mugglewump mother) acting like they were tricked into doing the role. A clip of the main characters, Mr. and Mrs. Twit (Margo Martindale and Johnny Vegas), showed one of the most memorable scenes from the book, as the practical joke-loving couple prepare for dinner, and Mrs. Twit feeds her husband “a special new kind of spaghetti,” which of course is worms. Mr. Twit has a Scottish accent, while the Missus is American.
Cracking Comeback, Gromit!
The new Wallace and Gromit movie will be subtitled Vengeance Most Fowl, and feature the return of Feathers McGraw, the evil penguin. A too-brief clip showed his release from prison, cracking his neck in anticipation of new evil deeds. Could this be Aardman’s Wrath of Khan? No audio yet of Wallace’s new voice, since the death of Peter Sallis.
Skydance animation, run by the absolutely not-mentioned-by-name inappropriate hugger John Lasseter, will partner with Netflix for at least two features. There’s Spellbound, about a princess whose parents accidentally turn into monsters, and Pookoo, about a small woodland creature who looks vaguely like a baby porcupine. The clip shown of that one was super-cute, with Pookoo trying to craft himself a scuba mask, venturing underwater (marching into the pond the way toddlers playing army do), having trouble breathing, then emerging to modify the mask and add a snorkel. He does this a few times before getting it right and seeing a wondrous underwater world ahead — including some new potential friends.
Shhhh!
The Spellbound trailer was under super-duper additional embargo, but we can quote cast member Nathan Lane, as he introduced it with some news: “The cast also includes some other great actors: Rachel Zegler, Nicole Kidman, Javier Bardem, John Lithgow, and Jenifer Lewis. It also has music by Academy Award winning composer Alan Menken. The film is directed by Vicky Jensen, who also directed a little movie you may have heard of called Shrek.”
The panel ended with a new Arcane trailer, which was also under double-plus extra embargo TBD.
