Maxance Vincent
It’s fair to say that Marvel Studios is in a far different place than before the advent of Disney+. Now, the company has churned out not only live-action series that range from all kinds of genres within the superhero world with WandaVision, Loki, Moon Knight, and, most recently, Echo, but it’s also branched out into animation, something that was not thought of before the streaming service appeared.
With What If…?, Marvel opened the door for more animated productions, as Marvel Studios’ Head of Streaming, Television and Animation and Executive Producer Brad Winderbaum tells Awards Radar on Zoom. This led to the development of X-Men ’97, a revival of X-Men: The Animated Series and Marvel Studios’ first-ever mutant-related project, recently nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Animated Program:
“The first idea out of the bag was to revive the original series. When I talked to Kevin Feige about it, he said, ‘If you can get that theme song and the original cast, let’s go for it.’ Then it was a long road of finding like-minded people who understood what we were trying to achieve with the series. We didn’t want to create the 2024 version of X-Men, but the 1997 version of X-Men, which is easier said than done because everybody wants to bring their own thing to it, including me and every single person that touched it.”
And how does one create the 1997 version of X-Men? Winderbaum states, “You have to create a very strict code of ethics around the aesthetic and storytelling to drive towards an emulation of that original source material, especially now with infinite technology at our disposal. Anything we can dream up, we can create on screen: it’s very limitless. However, to create that look and tell stories that way, you have to create artificial limitations for yourself. That was why, from the beginning, it was so important to bring on Eric Lewald, Julia Lewald, and Larry Houston to help guide us.
They could educate us on the limitations of making the original show in terms of storytelling, how they moved around the characters and the camera, and how they designed things to address the limitations they were working with at the time. We were putting these parameters on ourselves to stay in a flat space and kept the designs more curved and less angular, especially as an animation fan and so many of the creators on the show. We’re fans of anime. There’s a significant Japanese influence on our work, which drives you to a very angular place aesthetically. We brought it back to that Jim Lee era of the 90s with those soft curves and circular forms. Regarding moving the camera, we can fly things through the Z-axis and move things in three dimensions. We were very strict about staying on the flat plane and cracking it only when we needed to know that we were intentionally breaking our aesthetic values for a certain dramatic purpose.”
There was much to unpack in our conversation, not only discussing the process of bringing back the original actors to reprise their roles or voice new characters for the series, the pressure of delivering and meeting expectations on the first mutant-related project for the Marvel Studios, and how long it took to get the show animated and released.
We also discussed the evolution of animation and how Marvel Studios plans to use the medium as a way to tell stories that can’t be translated into live-action and develop a different style for each series they undertake, including the upcoming Eyes of Wakanda and Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man.
You can check out my interview with Brad below and stream all episodes of X-Men ’97 on Disney+ today:
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