Giant Robots vs. Alien Monsters!

Polygon Pictures and Boom!’s new show Mech Cadets promises to take sci-fi animation to new heights this summer.

- By Ramin Zahed -

This summer, sci-fi and fantasy fans have a real treat in store for them in Mech Cadets, the new animated series based on the popular Boom! Studios comic series. Animated by top Japanese studio Polygon Pictures for Netflix, the 10-part CG show follows the adventures of teenager Stanford Yu (Brandon Soo Hoo) who works as a janitor at the Sky Corps Military Academy and dreams of piloting a giant robot. When he finally gets his shot, Stanford and his classmates must put aside all personal differences and work together as a team to defend humanity against a new alien invasion. Sounds like a great premise, right?

Executive producers Jack Liang and Stephen

Christy, supervising director Tohru Patrick Awa (The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Blade Runner: Black Lotus) and head writer/exec producer Aaron Lam (Ash vs. the Evil Dead) were kind enough to give us the scoop on their hot new show, which also features the voices of Daniel Dae Kim, Ming-Na Wen and Debra Wilson.

A Perfect Partnership

“We’ve known Stephen and Boom! Studios for a quite a while and have been big fans of each other for many years,” says Liang. “We always talked about collaborating on something. We both also had a relationship with Netflix, so when the idea of adapting Mech Cadet Yu into a possible animated series was brought up, we felt the chemistry and relationship that we all had with each other was serendipitous. Also, the vision and direction we wanted to take Mech Cadets was very aligned with one another.”

Christy agrees, “When Jane Lee [manager of original animation at Netflix] approached us about doing the show and told us that Polygon was interested, it was like a dream coming true. Thanks to the whole team and especially our chief creatives, director Patrick Awa and showrunner Aaron Lam, we’ve managed to build something that is a fusion of Japanese and American approaches that feels unlike anything I’ve seen on TV before. Mech Cadets was one where we all really bonded as a team, and everyone brought their best work to the table.”

He adds, “I love that the show is in the six to 11 demographic but aims at the upper age of that — we have some truly emotional moments in the series and I think managed to make the stakes for the characters feel real, and I think that’s rare in kids’ animation.”

Supervising director Awa says giant robots fighting alien monsters is a no-brainer for fun and that he was instantly captivated when he read the original comic by Greg Pak and Takeshi Miyazawa. “But Mech Cadets is also a sincere, coming-of-age drama with diverse characters," Awa notes. "They came from different cultural backgrounds, families and personal reasons to become pilots. Although the story is set in the future, the problems the characters face daily are similar to our teenage issues, struggling to learn how to fly to see the world from a different perspective, which is universally compelling.”

Liang says the team at Polygon Pictures were excited to bring their expertise in creating topnotch animation to the show. “Our mission statement is ‘to do what no other has done, in unparalleled quality, for all the world to see and enjoy,’” he explains. “We always want to try and reinvent ourselves and do something creatively and visually different if the opportunity arises. Patrick was an instrumental key piece on the art direction of where this series should go visually. He and our brilliant artists and designers all came together with that same vision and direction, and we feel we created something very unique. We used a few in-house proprietary shaders to implement into the production of the series to be able to execute the art direction into the production.”

Most of the production was done at Polygon, including overseas studios Polygon Pictures Malaysia and Polygon Studios India. The production also employed many talented artists from around Europe, the Americas and Asia. “Polygon has always been a very open culture and wanting to learn and build friendships with many talented artists and this project was no different,” says Liang. “I think at a given time and during peak, we might have had over 120 artists working at a given time. Everybody was instrumental in the production from the writing team to the Netflix and the Boom! sides. We’re very fortunate that everyone that was involved was so passionately vested into our story. If you include everyone that was involved, not just the animation side, the team had over 170 people.”

Liang admits that one of the biggest challenges was that they had to begin production slowly during the pandemic. “There were many things we had to adjust based on our original plans,” he says. “We planned on having some artists come to Japan to work directly with us for a bit, but due to challenges of traveling, this was all handled over Zoom. Since we had brilliant talent from Europe and the Americas, managing the time zones was a bit challenging since we are based in Japan. I think once we got used to the remote and video call meetings, things began to synch back into motion.”

Taking Robots to the Next Level

Awa says he’s proud of the international talent that came together to make the show a reality. “We leapt and flew the journey to its destination as the animated series with the dedication of many great talents from many countries,” he concludes. “Making an animated show is a group effort and takes a long time to create: It could feel like relocating a whole galaxy by moving each star one by one. Still, the essence remained the same from the original comic book, because we were all once teenagers"

The team is quite excited to deliver the show to giant robot and animation fans this summer. Supervising producer Lam says he knows the audience will be totally mesmerized by the beautiful imagery, the direction and the music. “What Polygon has crafted is out of this world!” he says. “I hope the audience will fall in love with the characters and that they’re entertained by the story. I hope they jump on this roller-coaster ride with us — to cheer together, to laugh together and to cry together. Ultimately, I hope the audience will see a piece of themselves in each of the characters. Finding that human connection within the artistry of the visuals, the realism of the character designs, the heart of the story … that’s the magic of animation!”