TV Animation roundtable: ‘Blue Eye Samurai,’ ‘Hazbin Hotel,’ ‘In the Know,’ ‘Scott Pilgrim Takes Off’ [Exclusive Video Interview]

The minds behind several of the best animated shows that are also seeking to be players in the upcoming Emmy race sat down with Gold Derby to talk about several different topics including the entertainment that made them want to work in animation, the most recent piece of animation to blow them away and what their ideal walk-up music would be at an awards show. This was all part of Gold Derby’s Meet the Experts panel on TV Animation that included Jane Wu (“Blue Eye Samurai”), Vivienne Medrano (“Hazbin Hotel”), Brian Leif Hansen (“In the Know”) and Bryan Lee O’Malley and BenDavid Grabinski (“Scott Pilgrim Takes Off”).

You can watch the television animation group panel above with the people behind these four shows. Click on each person’s name above to be taken to each exclusive individual interview.

When it came to what animation influenced her, Medrano says that it was the movie “Bambi” that took her to that level but at the time it wasn’t because it was her favorite movie. “I was very outdoorsy and I love animals. When I was a kid I really wanted to potentially go into something like a zookeeper or an animal trainer.” When she became aware of what animation, she became fascinated with seeing how the deer move in the movie and the thought occurred that she could draw that. Grabinski cited both “Batman: Mask of the Phantasm” and “Akira” as his biggest influences. “Those are the two things that just shredded my brain to a point where I felt like my love of movies       , the mediums are just completely equal to me. Those made it feel like everything is a level playing field.”

When it came to the most recent piece of animation that took their breath away, most of the panelists cited the recent “Spider-Verse” movies as their choice. “I love seeing something that’s taking something that we all know and just changing into something completely new and nobody could have thought about that before they actually see it. It’s pretty exhilarating,” says Hansen. Wu chose a Gobelins student film with an incredible hybrid style of animation. “You can tell that the characters are CG but they drew over it and it was so astonishingly sensitive and what students are able to do now with the technology.”

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