In my animation era

Common Side Effects, Scavenger's Reign, and Pantheon

As our days filled with my daughter’s tourettic end of end-of-junior-year high school schedule and our screens flooded with AI cat horrors, Diddy’s baby oil, and Trump’s latest golf swings, my teen and I found ourselves sprawled on the couch one Saturday, exhausted by the week and searching for artistic refuge.

First, we turned to cinema, but after many minutes of searching our Apple TV, we realized we needed a much longer binge than two hours. We needed the whole day. But nothing was looking good. We were lost in streaming service indecision, scrolling and scrolling, clicking and clicking. Then HBO Max recommended the show Common Side Effects, and we fell into the cool arms of contemporary, serial science fiction animation.

Ever since, my appetite for serious animation is insatiable.

By serious, I mean “not comedy” and designed for adults. I’ll always love South Park, but it’s too political and too brash for me right now. Adventure Time—too much for kids. Rick and Morty—too loud and abrasive. Right now, I want only dreamy, beautiful, dramatic, grown-up, thought-provoking, and deep, and I want it animated by humans.

So I wanted to share with you the amazing shows I’ve loved so far in this genre. Maybe you’ll love them too. Pantheon was my favorite. If you have favorites I don’t mention, please share them in the comments, because we need more!

Common Side Effects

Premise: Big pharma fights to destroy the work of a chunky, wook-looking young scientist whose discovery of a blue mushroom that mends all damage to the human body threatens their profit model.

Genre: Magical realism, suspense

Where to watch: HBO Max

Strengths: Quirky, lovable characters

My favorite part: Edge of my seat worry for the cute pet turtle with magical poop

If you liked Dark, The OA, and Stranger Things, then you may like Common Side Effects, because the show is ultimately about ordinary, good guys who discover something magical and must fight to keep it from the corporate bad guys.

Scavenger's Reign

Premise: When a spaceship crashes on an unknown planet, five crew members survive using escape pods, but their landings are scattered. They each journey through unknown territory, confronting the strange and unfamiliar flora and fauna, in an effort to reunite with the main ship in hopes of leaving the planet.

Genre: Soft Sci-Fi Fantasy

Where to watch: HBO Max

Strengths: Imaginative visuals and art

My favorite part: the ginger man living in the belly of a mythical guinea pig with magical powers of demonic possession.

If you liked… Spirited Away, you will probably like Scavengers Reign, because like the mythical bathhouse in Spirited Away, the planet in Scavengers Reign has no understandable logic or ecology, and the creatures of the planet are so creative.

Pantheon

This one was my favorite of the bunch!

Sharing this trailer, but I would only watch a couple of seconds, because, to me, the trailer has spoilers.

Just trust me; go and watch the whole show. Pantheon is one of the most brilliant shows I’ve ever seen in any category, animated or live-action. It’s up there with Star Trek in original creativity. If you like sci-fi, you will love this show.

Premise: The big tech company Logorhythms creates Uploaded Intelligences, or UIs, which are real humans scanned and uploaded to the cloud, where they live forever like Gods in virtual worlds of their choosing; however, in the process, their physical bodies die. Also, Logorhythms hasn’t quite worked out the technology’s kinks or its place in society, so they clone the deceased founder of the company in hopes of figuring out their coding errors.

Genre: Sci-Fi, cyberpunk

Where to watch: Netflix

Strengths: The plot. The premise I’ve shared barely scratches the surface.

My favorite part: Caspian, the Logorhythms’ founders’ clone.

If you liked… The Three-Body Problem, then you will probably like Pantheon. They both push sci-fi ideas to their limits and deeply explore the repercussions of possible future events. In fact, Pantheon is based on a series of short stories written by the English translator of The Three-Body Problem book series, Ken Liu, who has a BA in English Literature and Computer Science from Harvard, and it shows.

The short stories are: The Gods Will Not Be Chained, The Gods Will Not Be Slain, and The Gods Have Not Died in Vain, which can be found in Ken Liu’s sci-fi shorts collection, The Hidden Girl.

So, if you don’t dig animations, but enjoy sci-fi, maybe try this book.

Also, a shoutout!

And speaking of book to screen adaptations, shout out to author Sharon Dukett, a VIPer supporter of this Substack, who earlier in the year saw I was reading The Sailor Who Feel from Grace with the Sea, by Yukio Mishima, (I discuss the book here), and alerted me to the 70s film version, which I finally watched this weekend!

Here is the only decent taste of the film that I could find on YouTube:

Despite pretty negative Letterboxd reviews, I LIKED it! Aside from switching the story’s location from post-World War II Yokohama, Japan, to 70s Devonshire, England, which I would normally take offense to, it was a more faithful novel to film adaptation than most, and it wasn’t watered down; they hit every story beat, even the dark and cringeworthy ones. The changes worked. The movie was raw, beautiful, and disturbing, just like the book.

Thank you, Sharon, for this recommendation!

Now You

Have you watched any of these shows?

What are you watching lately?

Anything to recommend?