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Scavengers Reign is an animated series created by Joseph Bennett and Charles Huettner for Max, based on their original short.
It's like something out of my notebooks, mixed with the artwork of Moebius and an old comic by Paul Chadwick called The World Below, which itself was a throwback to Challengers of the Unknown comics, and not least, inspired by Studio Ghibli's amazing wide shots. How did I mix myself into all that? A number of my vignettes are about space travel and survival on strange worlds, but it felt like something I could have spun off into during one of my dream influenced stream of consciousness writing sessions.
The interstellar cargo ship Demeter 227 is heavily damaged and much of the crew escapes in pods that fall down to an unknown, uncharted planet Vesta. Most pods are destroyed. An unknown time later, there are three groups of survivors: pilot Sam and Ursula, on a journey back to the damaged Demeter which they program to land from orbit, Azi and robot Levi who have learned to live with the strange environment, and Kamen, initially trapped inside his pod, high in the trees, but then freed by a strange telekinetic creature and they become co-dependent.
The other main character of this story is the planet itself, and its ecosystem. Everything about this planet is bizarre; it just teems with life, but life unlike anything we would know. Much of the strangely relaxing show focuses on depicting how that various creatures of the planet interact with each other, and the human interlopers, and their technology. It often feels like a nature show, where you watch a beautiful interaction between rain and wind and plant and animal, except there are tentacles, and massive walking towers, and parasitic bugs, and carnivorous beach balls, whirly gigs and countless blobby things. Normally scifi is sparse in its depiction of ecosystems, usually smattering our experience with a few things, like a bug on a leaf, or a wolf-creature they have to run from. But Vesta doesn't have a human-like species to knock back the wildlife, so its utterly over-full with life, dangerous and wondrous.
The show is a road story, as the three "main character" groups converge on the fallen Demeter. There are a smattering of other survivor stories, but they exist to ... well, be devoured or killed by the planet. Like Australia, something that will kill you is around every bend. There is an underlying mystery to be solved -- what caused Demeter to become so damaged -- and there are human, and robot, stories to tell, but really, I was there for the planet.
This is going on the list.
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