Invincible Episode 8’s Staggering Importance for Animation…and for Horror

 (Warning: This article contains season 1 ending spoilers.)

Amazon’s animated production of Invincible has concluded its 8-episode first season and has already been renewed for two more seasons. All this, to the excitement of the comic book’s existing franchise fans and its new viewers.

In 2003, Invincible, the comic book, may have seemed (at first) yet another exercise in updating or taking a mature or “realistic” look at the established superhero concept. Many other comic books over the years have deconstructed the superhero world by colliding decades-old tropes with the physical, ethical and political realities that most mainstream comics always sought to avoid: (E.g. Gruenwald’s Squadron Supreme, Moore’s Watchmen, Waid’s Kingdom Come, and more recently Ennis’ The Boys) -But it was Robert Kirkman’s Invincible that did so through the eyes of an adolescent. Invincible told its coming-of-age story with a harshness, accessibility and violence that seemed all too logical and obvious especially for a world with superheroes. Invincible was at its core, a series of stories about sobering disillusionment, eye-widening/gut-punching disappointments that were only slightly more terrible than the familiar and mercurial world of the American teenager. The animated series has managed to effectively build upon the source material, yet take things further, to the benefit of animation as a whole.
Episode 8 of Invincible is a landmark program in animation, for reasons that founding masters and producers of the animated medium have maintained are key to animation’s worth as an artform.

—The significance of this show, and its episode 8 in particular has to do with its ability to shock audiences in ways that previously only horror movies could manage. The challenge of animation, in regards to scaring or shocking audiences has to do with its innate artificiality. Animation, 2D animation (there are cel-shaded 3D elements in this series) is inherently an other-reality, - a flattened, stylized abstraction and as such, looks “fake” by design. For those creators who have wanted to make an animation as scary as William Friedkin’s The Exorcist, or as explicitly violent and gore-laden as the opening of Saving Private Ryan, animation’s lack of verisimilitude has defeated prior efforts to scare or shock despite some incredible work in Japanese anime in recent years. Live-action horror films themselves will often fall short of the mark if the blood “looks fake” or the stunts and effect work are unconvincing. What then, do traditional animators (who will never approach the texture of reality and don’t intend to) do to affect their audiences with the proper shock required of a story like Invincible?

—In short, they must do what Robert Kirkman did in episode 8: raise the emotional stakes so that the violence that the animation illustrates evokes a shock that exceeds the actual gore and trauma depicted on screen: Episode 8 horrifies and shocks because the viewer is made to care.

Walt Disney is said to have been unconvinced of animation’s legitimacy until he saw his own production of Snow White with an audience and witnessed people crying and reacting uncontrollably to a series of flickering drawings and sounds projected on a screen – the audience reacting as they would to a movie with live actors — reacting as they would to “real” events.

Season 1 Episode 8 of Invincible and its many violent set pieces may indeed be looked upon as the moment wherein 2D animation, both enabled and limited by its inherently abstract nature, finally exercised the ability to horrify in as visceral a way as any scary movie.