Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1505195
HUMAN REMAINS Naturally, adult shows don't have the same restrictions as shows for kids. So it would seem that there would be more offerings in this area. But unlike Japan's long history of horror anime, adult horror animation in the U.S. is still in its infancy. Watson recalls Spawn, HBO's 1997-1999 TV series. Bloody and graphic, it was an outlier. It wasn't until 20 years later that Castlevania came along, kicking open doors for the genre. When he first watched it, Watson says, "I remember saying to someone— okay, finally." The story of Dracula taking revenge after his wife is burned at the stake, Castlevania was made for a mature adult audience. Adam Deats calls the opportunity to do a show like this serendipity. Deats worked on the series as a Compositing Director, Editor, Key Lighting, Assistant Director, and more, while Sam Deats matched his brother in the multiple roles department as Director, Production Designer, Storyboard Artist, Animator, Prop Designer, Character Designer, and more. According to Sam Deats: "It certainly was a combination of the right property [and] the right creative vision, in conjunction with the timing of its release—and the platform it got released on." That platform being Netflix, which was having great success with original programming. Long before the show got off the ground, though, Adam and Sam Deats had been huge fans of the Castlevania video game, and they recall talk in the mid-2000s of a direct-to-DVD series. But direct-to-DVD was dying out, and the project went into hibernation. They kept an eye on it. Fast-forward 10 years. They were working for Powerhouse Animation (recently unionized under The Animation Guild), a studio that did mostly trailers and promotional and educational work. Sam Deats saw an article indicating the project was getting some attention again. He brought it up to Powerhouse CEO Brad Graeber: "Hey, we should work on that." Later, in a meeting, when Graeber mentioned that Castlevania was being discussed as a series the studio might take on, Adam Deats says he gasped "very, very loudly." Not only did the brothers love the video game, they admired the artwork and had wanted to do anime for a long time. They also noted a hunger among Castlevania fans, and animation fans in general, for a more adult style of content. Because Powerhouse had never done series work before, "we wanted to do it right," Adam Deats says. This meant tackling issues of believability. While Artwick believes there can be a strong resonance between the audience and animated characters, and "that's why we cry when [The Lion King's] Mufasa dies," she says, the trick gets harder as viewers rise in age. TAG President Jeanette Moreno King, who was the Supervising Director on Little Demon and is now working on an unannounced comedy-horror pilot, says: "As an animation fan already, when you know and understand that animation language, you're more willing to [believe]. If you're a person who only watches live- action horror, and you're trying animation, that might be a hard thing." Adam Deats thinks that it's "really, really hard for animation to be viscerally horrifying. It might have to do with the level of immersion that animation has versus live-action. Live action can get you to a place where you might fully believe that you're there for a second. Your body feels it." To overcome this challenge, he says, "I think that good character and theme that goes to darker places will start to have the audience buy into things that will get them feeling a certain way. And if the onscreen imagery matches that in some capacity thematically, you'll get there." He explains it's helpful that horror viewers are used to seeing types of imagery in ways that makes them feel scared. "Things like a well-timed rack focus between points of interest, concealing parts of an image with vignetting, lens blurs, flaring, or even clever use of strobe lights can all be useful. Above all else, good monster, color, and location design are obviously huge, and do a lot of the work for you!" Castlevania also used iconography well- known in horror, along with a willingness to dive into very violent adult subject matter. In fact, Castlevania had no limits on what it could do as far as violence was concerned. But the brothers point out that in most cases violence was used for thematic reasons. As an example, Sam Deats notes the show's first episode, which sets up Dracula's meeting and love story with Lisa, who would become his wife. Lisa wants to be a doctor, but her interest in science is mistaken for witchcraft, which results in her death. "There were question marks about—do we want to show the burnt corpse of Lisa after she had been burned at the stake?" says Sam Deats. They decided they did. "It had to be a stark contrast. That gut sinking [feeling] of seeing him lose himself needed to be visceral and needed to have weight to it. I think that going hard on the very unsettling imagery, things that maybe we don't want to look at but we have to for the story—it was important in those cases … even though it made some folks uncomfortable." "Horror has always been a kind of allegory for other things going on. Good horror is rooted in the human experience." –Jeanette Moreno King Castlevania image courtesy of Powerhouse Animation and Frederator. opposite page: "We were fine with dipping stuff way, way down darkness-wise," says Adam Deats of the dark effects used in Castlevania. The series also did not shy away from graphic imagery like a character burning at the stake (middle right) to create emotional resonance. FALL 2023 31