In the Flesh: Scavengers Reign

How often do you get to watch a medium evolve right in front of you? Before Joseph Bennett and Charles Huettner’s Scavengers Reign, adult genre animation in America hadn’t so much as twitched a limb in years. Now, like the myriad tenacious life forms which inhabit the alien planet Vesta, it feels alive with unknown potential. Clearly influenced by sources as diverse as Jean “Moebius” Girard, nature documentaries, psychedelic film, Ursula K. le Guin, the Jim Henson Workshop, Simon Roy’s work on Prophet, Hayao Miyazaki, and Katsuhiro Otomo, Scavengers Reign is a staggering accomplishment. Even where its voice acting and animation sometimes falter, the world it conjures and the simple fact that something so outlandish and creative can exist at all in the current media landscape is more than enough to sustain a sense of wonder. It’s enthralling. A masterpiece. A demonstration that adult lovers of animation don't have to content themselves with the occasional French or Japanese import or the microwaved dregs of animated sitcoms.

More than any other factor it’s the show’s focus on Vesta’s vibrant, dangerous, and mysterious ecosystem that propels it to such impressive heights. From the psychic frog-lemur that possesses isolated and self-loathing loner Kamen (Ted Travelstead) to the tiny being the entire accelerated life cycle of which Ursula (Sunita Mani) watches in captivated wonder, everything on Vesta carries its story with it. The characters often play second fiddle to the world around them, reacting or simply observing as natural dramas play out in their environments. It might be a problem if the show’s natural world weren’t so captivating. You could cut out virtually all human elements and still be left with something wondrous. Mushroom-like striders loping across windswept plains. Flying organisms with bodies as thin as paper which flatten themselves against sun-bleached stone for camouflage. Parasitic crustaceans adapted to resemble their host species’ eggs in order to navigate their unique internal anatomy.

The story itself? You’ve seen it before. Colonists stranded on a hostile planet. Tensions among the survivors. Kill-or-be-killed ruthlessness. It doesn’t matter. Execution, not originality, is where Scavengers Reign scores its points. Sure a few of the voice performances fall a little flat, (though Azi (Wunmi Mosaku) and Levi (Alia Shawkat) deliver consistently engrossing work), sure the facial expressions can feel a little stilted and halting, but it’s small potatoes next to the pure pleasure of seeing this world come to life, of watching Levi transition from service robot to independent living being and himself begin to cultivate life, of seeing Kamen’s petty grievances and inferiority complex bloom into mind-breaking horror again and again, his weakness of character transforming into a horrible inverted strength. There’’s nothing else like Scavengers Reign on TV. Maybe there never will be again, but just the possibility is enough to make me feel excited about things I’d only ever idly dreamed of seeing on the screen.