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A New Home for Grown-Up Animation Magical Girl Friendship Squad and Wild Life are the promising new kids on SYFY’s TZGZ late-night block.
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f you’ve been paying attention to the adult animation scene, you already know that SYFY channel has made a big jump into the arena by beefing up its late-night animation block, TZGZ. The cabler, which began its foray into animation by airing reruns of fan favorite Futurama in 2019, introduced its first two original shows Magical Girl Friendship Squad and Wild Life in September. As Jon Cotton, SYFY’s VP of short-form animation and alternative formats, tells us, “Animation allows us to tell so many great sci-fi stories in cool and original ways, so it was really a natural fit for our network. We kicked off our soft launch with Futurama and followed it with a couple of new acquisitions. We are also introducing more shows in the next few months. This late-night block allows us to focus on shorter-format content created by emerging talents as well as some established creative forces.” Cotton says he and his team are looking for the best comedies from the most unique voices they can find for TZGZ (which is named after the letters in the alphabet that come right after SYFY). “We are proud of the roster of writing, animating and producing talent that we have put together,” he notes. “It’s a cool collection of young talent, many of which are creating their first TV shows, which are really funny and entertaining science fiction projects.”
Sailor Moon Meets Broad City One of TZGZ’s promising new titles is Magical Girl Friendship Squad, which is created by Kelsey Stephanides, who is also the showrunner. Produced by Brooklyn-based Cartuna studio, the series centers on the adventures of a little red panda named Nut (voiced by Ana Gasteyer) who joins forces with two directionless 20-somethings and gives them magical powers to save the universe. The voice cast includes Quinta Brunson, Anna Akana, Matteo Lane, Christine Baranski, Eric Bauza and Helen Hong. Stephanides, who worked on Adult Swim’s Ballmastrz: 9009, before her show was picked up by Cartuna, says she was heavily inspired by one of her favorite anime shows, Sailor Moon, www.animationmagazine.net
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Magical Girl Friendship Squad
‘Animation allows me to work with these amazing artists that I love, and it’s a limitless medium. If you can think of it, you can draw it.’ — Kelsey Stephanides, creator, Magical Girl Friendship Squad
as well as Comedy Central’s acclaimed comedy series Broad City. “The origins of the show go back about five years ago, when I was taking a production class and we had to pitch our own show,” she recalls. “My professor at New York University was James Belfer, who is the CEO of Cartuna. He liked my pilot pitch and we ended up making the show Origins, which eventually evolved into the SYFY series.” The move to SYFY allowed Stephanides to envision the show as a 15-minute format (six episodes are featured in the first season). “We had more production time and a full crew to develop more characters and take the artwork to the next level,” she explains. “We now have a show with about a hundred people working on it, while in the Origins show we had less than 20. We can take more time to punch things up, and deliver more fully realized stories and art style.” The team at Cartuna uses Adobe Animate to produce the storyboards and animation, while the backgrounds are done in Photoshop, character design is produced via Photoshop and Animate, and compositing is done in After Ef-
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fects. While the studio is based in Brooklyn, the animation team comes from all different parts of the world and they all work remotely. “We thought we had a lot of challenges before, but then the pandemic happened, and we had to change the way we worked and adjust to working remotely from our homes,” Stephanides admits. “We faced the same problems as everyone else and had to learn as we went along: The computers weren’t fast enough, or sometimes your Internet blanks out, or your voice suddenly turns into a robot voice during a Zoom call and it screeches into people’s ears! But all the challenges endeared us to each other as we were going through a hard time together.” Stephanides says she always knew she wanted to work in television, but never considered animation. “I knew that I could draw, and my brother was really into animation,” she says. “Then, it just clicked. I knew the process and I could do it. Animation allows me to work with these amazing artists that I love, and it’s a limitless medium. If you can think of it, you can draw it.” november 20
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