I’ve put together a post rounding up my thoughts on Scavengers Reign, the acclaimed animated science-fiction/survival-horror story now airing on Netflix after Warner Bros. bobbled it over on Max. (It should be an Adult Swim show, insanity that it isn’t.) You can read them at my Patreon. I’m going to try to do this more often when I’m inspired to say a lot about something I wasn’t hired to watch.

What Shows and Movies Will It Remind You Of? Pull up a chair, this is gonna take a minute. The pastel wonder of the all-ages series Adventure Time and Steven Universe, the beautifully creepy sci-fi psychedelia of the French animation landmark Fantastic Planet, the weird techno-organic symbiosis of G.I. Joe: The Movie, the grotesque fungal infections of The Last of Us, the adorable and improbable bio-psychic critters of James Cameron’s Avatar, the beauty and danger and environmentalism of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, the futuristic motorcycles and gloopy expanding blobs of Akira, the weird-new-thing-every-four-minutes imagination and pacing of Raised by Wolves, the working-stiffs-get-stranded-among-xenomorphs-by-an-uncaring-Company idea of Alien, the hey-we’re-just-folks-trying-our-best-in-the-wasteland vibe of Station Eleven…but wait, there’s more! Beyond films and TV, the biggest touchstone of all is the comics and art of French cartoonist Moebius, and the Moebius-indebted wave of underground science-fantasy comics that peaked around 10-15 years ago (and spawned the. If you’re a gamer, you’ll be reminded of virtually every exploration-based science-fantasy game of recent years: No Man’s Sky, Astroneer, Subnautica (the plot is virtually identical), even The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and its weirdly lovely Depths. 

Our Take: Reread that last paragraph. Think you can guess the problem here? Scavengers Reign is exceedingly well-executed psychedelic science-fiction animation for adults and teens; co-creators, co-writers (with Sean Buckelew and James Merrill), and co-directors Joseph Bennett and Charles Huettner are very obviously both huge aficionados and skilled practitioners of the genre. But if you, like me, are steeped in this stuff, you’ll react one of two ways: “Oh boy, more of this!” or “Oh boy, more of this?” I’m more in the latter camp myself.

But that doesn’t take away from the talent on display in the creature concepts and designs. Again, these are mostly attempts to reinvent a pretty reliable wheel — How can we make an alien parasite, but different? — but they’ll have you saying cool/gross/ooh/eww throughout. Considering that this is a survival adventure, that’s half the battle.

I took a look at Scavengers Reign, the vibey, gloopy new Max sci-fi animated series, for Decider.