Some of the most interesting moments at any edition of the Annecy Animation Festival come from cross-pollination – seeing the tangible influences of international animation. One such example is “Dragon Striker,” an upcoming series from Disney EMEA produced by Chouette Studios. In a Studio Focus session at MIFA, the creative team behind the series spoke plainly about the show’s heavy anime influence.
Co-creator and producer Sylvain Dos Santos was upfront about this influence, not just on “Dragon Striker” but on all of Chouette’s work. He described the studio, with 200 artists, 75 of them animators, as having been founded by people who adored Japanese animation and comics and dreamed of making something in that style.
“Dragon Striker,” first announced in 2022, is emblematic of that desire, a 2D animated project born from a grab bag of influences. The series, set for 22 20-minute episodes, is essentially about soccer – or at least a combat version of it. With just five players on each side, they use magical abilities like time-altering force fields, clones and spectral dragons to crush their opponents and score goals.
Variety has been given exclusive access to an early look at one of the show’s teams, seen below.
Credit: Chouette Studios
In the world of the show, it’s a national pastime, set in elaborate and bespoke stadiums reflecting the nature of each home team. Much of “Dragon Striker” is set within a prestigious school dedicated to training children in the skills needed to succeed at it. The two main characters are Ssyelle, a goalkeeper, and Key, a striker. Ssyelle already understands her power; Key doesn’t even know he has one at the beginning of the series. His power–or “tama” in the show’s terminology–connects back to his late mother, a star player herself.
Some footage from episode one depicted the frenetic action of the game, which unfolded with the visual cues that one might expect from action anime. Not just in the stylization of the characters but also in the timing and rhythm with which they moved and the accompanying onscreen effects. It’s not just the style either: later in the session, the team spoke about how their process was inspired in part by the Japanese animation pipeline, adapted to the process as undertaken in France.
The show’s other co-creator, Charles Lefebvre, who also co-founded Chouette after working at its parent La Chouette Co., highlighted that some of the team had worked on anime such as “My Hero Academia” and “One Piece” while showing off some key poses and describing how on the show, the animator was fully in charge of their shots.
The anime industry connections continue, as the team talked about recruiting composer Kevin Penkin for the series. Penkin, known for work on anime like “Made in Abyss,” worked with an 80-person orchestra in Japan to record music for “Dragon Striker.”
Before sharing a scene where Ssyelle and Key first meet, the team broke down the development process into segments. Dos Santos talked about previous iterations of the show. “It wasn’t even a soccer show,” he admitted when talking about the first kernels of the idea. It evolved from being a rugby show in an Arthurian setting called “Ovalon.” Gerardo Orlando, a producer on the show from Disney EMEA, spoke on the changes. First, it went from rugby to football, then they dropped the Arthurian legend part as he wanted the team to “build [their] own myths.”
In creating those myths, the anime influences are very apparent upfront, the show coming complete with the fast-paced montage of opening credits associated with Japanese series. The influences go beyond that medium, of course. Lefebvre listed a few: a little bit of “The Vision of Escaflowne,” “Final Fantasy IX” and “Chrono Trigger” guided the main fictional setting of Kal Asterock as much as real cities like Rio de Janeiro did.
The visual makeup of these environments wasn’t just tied to referencing other beloved stories but also tied into the team’s philosophy around visual storytelling. Concept artist Claire Sun said, “We often think of writing and visuals as different entities but they’re two sides of the same coin.” They continued to underline that in an embrace of a goal to “show and don’t tell,” they put as much of the worldbuilding straight into the art whenever they could.
Focusing on the concepts of the setting, writer Paul McKeown highlighted the “sweeping character arcs” provoked by a sport that has a lot of brutality and desperation. “It’s a kid’s show and it’s funny, but I think we’ve really pushed the boundaries in some places,” McKeown said. When asked by the audience if the team had written beyond a first season, they said that there was enough material to go beyond, and Dos Santos chimed in with a quip that it was enough for “15 seasons of writing!”
Beyond the character writing, the cast themselves are also drawn with a lot of breadth – a mixture of diverse styles was shown off, from costuming which mixed influences from ancient garments and contemporary streetwear to a range of different hairstyles, all intended to create a world that felt vibrant and lived-in.
The players themselves showed off a lot of enthusiasm for those little details, to the extent of already having their own fan art being created by artists in their off time, showing off embroidery, dolls and stickers. Concept artist Sun was jokingly titled the “first president of the official Dragon Striker fan club” for the hundreds of pages of comics and art she has already produced about side characters. One can only imagine how much there would be if the show got the 15 seasons its co-creator joked about.