It’s been about 15 months since I’ve refused to shut up about Final Space.
The 7-minute animated pilot aired on Youtuber Olan Rogers’s channel in April 2016 and was quickly picked up for production by Conan O’Brien’s production firm, Conaco. Before long, Rogers had pitched and sold the first 10-episode season to TBS.
This past weekend, Final Space netted a panel and preview at New York Comic Con. And let me tell you: the pilot was good, but the series looks even better.
For one thing, it’s got a killer cast. TV bigwigs Fred Armisen, David Tennant, Gina Torres, Tom Kenny, Steven Yeun, and even O’Brien himself play a large part in the elevated caliber of Final Space as a series.
Series antagonist Lord Commander is a strong example of this. In the pilot, Rogers voices the baddie as comedically puny. Even when he wins, he loses, as his celebratory balloons turn out to be more like “shriveled carcasses of depression.”
In the sneak peek screened in the Hammerstein Ballroom, Lord Commander was scary. Yes, the new voice actor, Tennant, retains LC’s original foibles in certain comedic beats. Overall, though, Tennant imbues the role with a villainous intensity—and other actors will also be able to put their own spins on the cast, rather than leaving Rogers to pull all that weight. (Rogers still voices the show’s protagonist, Gary Space, and Mooncake, a small adorable alien of unknowable power, but is happily turning over the rest of the characters he originally voiced himself.)
Once the requisite nerding out over the voice lineup was concluded, I was struck by the sheer amount of work put into the show’s artistic development. The animation is largely 2D with well-integrated 3D effects, giving the show a deep and dynamic feel. Real NASA satellite photos are used in the background designs. Lens flares were made from scratch. On this, supervising director Mike Roberts was clear: “No one in sci-fi ever gets mad about too many lens flares.”
But it’s really the storytelling that seems to be the most promising and exciting element of the show. The 2016 pilot shows the end of the Final Space story: Gary’s ship self-destructing, his best friend Avocato dead, and Gary hurtling himself towards the jaws of a temporal worm. Season 1 will tell the story of how he got there, and each episode will be structured the same way—beginning at the end.
Over the course of the panel, Rogers and Roberts used the word “cinematic” to describe the direction: quick shots, extensively boarded, and more camera angles than you would typically find in an animated series. The story is decidedly serialized: Rogers describes it as a “Pixar film in 10 episodes.”
We can only hope—and wait to find out. Final Space will air on TBS in early 2018.
Thanks for reading The Dot and Line, where we talk about animation of all kinds. Don’t forget to ❤ this article and follow us on Twitter and Facebook.
