Like Scavengers Reign? Here’s some of the show’s influences to explore
Scavengers Reign is an animated sci-fi show like no other. Where so many sci-fi shows are drilling down into characters through bits and multiversal hijinks, Scavengers Reign moves with gradual ferocity, constantly pulling back to remind us these characters are just one small speck in the wider, weird world of Vesta — a singular world they are decidedly stuck in. The flora and fauna of the alien planet are at once indifferent to their presence and a constant threat, always squelching and globbing and growing around them with untamed abandon.
That neat and fearsome world, for all its distinctiveness, does evoke other works. As co-creator Joe Bennett tells Polygon, the goal was always to not mirror those influences so much as let them inform something weird and new. “[They] were almost kind of subconscious,” Bennett says. “You’re going to be influenced by it no matter what, so we try to make a conscious effort to [separate] — we’ve been drawing like that our whole lives.”
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Still, the names he cites are a great place to head if you’re eager for a season 2 of Scavengers Reign and itching for more like it. Here are some other works Bennett said provided some fodder for the look and feel of Scavengers Reign.
It’s no surprise that the GOAT, Hayao Miyazaki, is someone Bennett says inspired the vibes of Scavengers Reign. The anime legend has long woven themes of environmentalism into his work, and, like some of the aliens on Vesta, isn’t always so fond of humanity. Miyazaki’s landscapes background his stories — shifting and breathing with a heartbeat of their own, chock-full of vivid colors and whimsical details — and seem totally in keeping with the feel of the series.
Still, it’s the way Scavengers Reign challenges us to rethink our relationship with nature as something beyond a friend-or-adversary binary that feels the most relevant to Miyazaki’s influence on the show. Movies like Nausicaä or Princess Mononoke encourage the same impulse that Scavengers does,
Read more on polygon.com
