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Although many fans believe that the new animated take on Bryan Lee O’Malley’s beloved Scott Pilgrim comic-book series is a more faithful adaptation than the 2010 Edgar Wright film, the new series is anything but a retread.
Created, written and executive produced by O’Malley and BenDavid Grabinski (Wright also serves as an executive producer) and directed by Abel Góngora (Star Wars: Visions) with animation produced by Science SARU (Inu-Oh, Heike Monogatari), Scott Pilgrim Takes Off is probably best described as a remix — especially with the original cast of the movie back on board as voice actors.
O’Malley cites SARU, the Tokyo studio founded by auteur director Masaaki Yuasa and producer Eunyoung Choi, as his reason for returning to the series. “It was something that was too big to be even a dream of mine,” he says. “The next crucial piece of the puzzle, other than Edgar and talking about it with him, was that I had dinner with BenDavid one night. I was just moaning about what I was going to do if I did a show of Scott Pilgrim, what would it even be?”
A Fresh Approach
Grabinski says one of the true appeals of the project was making something new. “I love all of it to pieces, but it was what it was. And I’ve known Bryan forever, and we were on the same page, which is that the idea of doing the exact same story again just felt like a huge waste of everyone’s time.”
He highlights this fresh start as a chance to focus more on Ramona (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and, in his words, “not have her just sort of be a prize to be won or something.” It also proved a chance to reimagine this cast of characters, giving them an early chance to mature. “Hopefully, I’m a tiny bit older, wiser and have more objectivity,” says O’Malley on returning to his 20-year-old creations. “With the Evil Exes in particular, I mostly treated them as a joke in the original series. But now I have enough maturity to see different sides of them and find some empathy.” He continues, “It was nice to finally give a bit more of Ramona’s backstory with Roxie [Mae Whitman] and the Twins [Julian Cihi], which I always intended for the books but ended up not using at the time. It was fun to use Robot-01.”
‘Hopefully, I’m a tiny bit older, wiser and have more objectivity. With the Evil Exes in particular, I mostly treated them as a joke in the original series. But now I have enough maturity to see different sides of them and find some empathy.’
— Creator Bryan Lee O’Malley
Both O’Malley and Grabinski were excited about the collaboration with Science Saru, the latter highlighting their inaugural work, the “Food Chain” episode of Cartoon Network’s Adventure Time. “I found that so inspiring, Adventure Time is a show that feels like there are no rules anyway, and they somehow broke its rules anyway”. Takes Off operates in hopes of similar results, O’Malley saying “they’re the studio that’s going to go in and blow shit up. So that is a signal from us to the viewer that this show might not be straightforward.”
There was a lot of trust between Science SARU and O’Malley and Grabinski, right down to their approach to character design. Under Shūhei Handa (Little Witch Academia, Spriggan), they had license to tweak them as they saw fit, O’Malley says. “We didn’t work directly with the design team — and we barely had to give notes, because we were loving everything they showed us. Our job was to work on the story and emotion and trust Science SARU to create the look of everything. I particularly love the way they handled Lucas’ physique. I love the addition of Roxie’s mask and kimono. And fans already noticed the cool lightning bolt motif on Scott and Ramona’s hair.”
O’Malley muses, “One of the keys to working with artists successfully is to let them draw the things that they’re obsessed with and just see where they take things, because you have to be excited in order to draw exciting animation.” In that sense, it was valuable not to be too precious about the exact nature of how the story unfolded.
In the spirit of the comics, Scott Pilgrim Takes Off is full of loving nods to the pop culture that inspired it. Anime fans will note references to Neon Genesis Evangelion, but also similarities with its “Rebuild” tetralogy of films. After O’Malley describes the series as “peak high school” for him, both O’Malley and Grabinski note the similarities with the Rebuild films, pointing out that both are instances of a creator returning to a work and “shaking things up, knowing that the other version still exists.” O’Malley notes, “The Rebuilds just ended up being a really easy way for us to explain what we were doing. So, now when I tell people what I’m doing, I could say it’s a Scott Pilgrim ‘rebuild.’ But was that our intention when we did our outlines? No. But it is a very similar thing.”
Grabinski recalls his past work with composer Joseph Trapanese: “He has done all my stuff. He’s a close friend of mine, he understands my taste and I have a good shorthand with him. I love Anamanaguchi, seen them live a bunch. I loved the soundtrack to the video game. And I think at one point, I just mentioned — sort of an organic conversation talking about how he [Trapanese] did a score with Daft Punk [for TRON: Legacy] and with Mike Shinoda for The Raid. So, I thought, ‘What if they collaborated on this?’”
Harmonious Collaborators
Aside from practical reasons, due to the scope of the show’s music between its score and original songs, the collaboration was simply exciting to consider. There was a clear division in oversight between the show creators on the soundtrack. “Bryan put most of his brain into the songs and then I put most of my brain into the score. And score is one of my favorite things in the world to do. I sometimes say I just make things to put music in it.”
In the same sense, the music in Scott Pilgrim Takes Off also operates as a way to see new angles on familiar characters. One such angle can be seen with Knives Chau (Ellen Wong), a supporting character who gets to express herself better than in the film. Grabinski says: “I think my favorite music thing in the whole season is Kim [Alison Pill] and Knives in Episode Three, their jam session. And I had nothing to do with that, except I do think at one point Bryan said, ‘I want it to go cosmic.’ And I agreed!”
O’Malley acknowledges that the diegetic music sequences comprised the more difficult sequences in Takes Off. “You want it [to] feel like it grows out of nothing into something. It’s just what I envisioned when I was writing the script originally. And then on other songs, I got to work on demos and stuff. I got to kind of flex my musical creative muscles a little bit, which was nice. And I’m just really happy with how it all came together.”
The first eight-episode season of Scott Pilgrim Takes Off is now streaming on Netflix.
