There has been less discussion of the animated series Scavengers Reign on my social media feeds than there should be. In fact, there’s been close to none. The show is absolutely beautiful, riffing as it does on the comics work of Moebius, in particular, as well as that of Katsuhiro Otomo, Geof Darrow, and Ted McKeever, among others — and making good on those influences. It mixes off-world adventure with personal stories in a way that threads them together until they’re inseparable: trying to keep oneself alive on an alien planet turns out to be a great way to sort out what makes humans human. And the series has a fantastic score, one that balances narrative, sound design, and character point-of-view in equal parts.
The sound of Scavengers Reign is especially important because so much of the series is near-silent, just people (and machines, one in particular) against a landscape. And I mean truly “against” a landscape, as in pitted against. Scavengers Reign concerns itself considerably with the complex ecosystem of a planet on which human survivors of a spaceship mishap find themselves stranded. By the time we meet the characters, many have learned, no doubt the hard way, which local life forms are edible, which can serve a functional purpose (flashlight, salve, matchstick, luggage), and which are predatory or otherwise life-threatening.
The sequence in this video occurs when a botanist named Ursula witnesses a strange, brief cycle of life in a dense forest. The music begins as a droning bit of fantasy scene setting: as much the music of the moment as a depiction of the dreamy state in which Ursula finds herself. (The Shakespearean sense of forest transformation becomes more evident in a subsequent episode.) The initial whirring might as well be the sound of the plant gestating the odd little, short-lived character whom we encounter. By the time a vocal part arises, the audience is as fixated as Ursula is, and there is no disconnect between the operatic singing and the tiny life we watch play out its solitary purpose (an intricate act of pollination) in almost an instant. This is one such bit among countless on Scavengers Reign. About midway through the series there is a duet, sung between one of the humans and an increasingly sentient robot, that is quite special. It’s a great moment when a show this sonically astute makes music part of the story. Highly recommended.