There’s a running joke in Scott Pilgrim Takes Off about all the different ways (and all the different forms of media) in which Scott Pilgrim and Ramona Flowers’ story can be told and retold. Even with all its deviations from its source material, the new Netflix series still captures the butterflies of a really good first kiss, the rush of hearing a new favorite song, and the stomach-dropping sensation of running into an old girlfriend. A spirit of discovery runs through the series – it’s not just a desire to find something novel in a nearly 20-year-old comic, but an investigation into why it and its characters resonated in the first place. Its guts, heart, and funny bone prevent the whole endeavor from disappearing up its own butt – so does creator Bryan Lee O’Malley’s unmistakable personal stake in the project. It’s more than the allusions to vintage games, music, and bits of Canadiana laced throughout all eight episodes – there’s a sense that revisiting Scott Pilgrim at this stage is almost a form of therapy.
If you’re a Scott Pilgrim fan, Takes Off deserves to be watched as soon as possible. This is an avid endorsement, as well as a public service announcement: The animated series based on O’Malley’s beloved graphic novels is just that good – but it’s also a reinvented story of boy-meets-girl, boy-fights-girl’s-exes-in-an-escalating-series-of-video-game-boss-battles, and its surprises ought to be experienced firsthand. Neither direct translation nor traditional follow-up, it represents a new evolution of a saga that’s already been successfully adapted into a live-action Edgar Wright movie and a side-scrolling beat-’em-up. It should come as no shock that there are unexplored corners within a fictional universe inspired by life-or-death anime spectacle, catchy turn-of-the-century indie rock, 8-bit nostalgia, and the giddy anxiety of young love. What’s astonishing is the fearlessness with which O’Malley – alongside co-writer BenDavid Grabinski, director Abel Góngora, and animation studio Science SARU – remixes his signature creation.
Same as it ever was: Scott Pilgrim is a 23-year-old Torontonian of negligible ambition who, in a neat-and-early sign of the series’ heightened reality, finds himself drawn to Ramona Flowers, the American expat with the Day-Glo locks who Rollerblades through his dreams. As they were in the movie, Scott is played by Michael Cera and Ramona is played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead; as they were midway through the comics’ run, Scott, Ramona, and friends are rendered in a rounded, bug-eyed style that lends itself well to exaggerated reactions and the sense that they’re all a bunch of overgrown children dodging “real life,” playing in bands, trading quips, and working dead-end jobs until external factors shove them to the next level of responsibility and accountability. For our Super Star-crossed lovers, that external factor is the idea that binds all incarnations of Scott Pilgrim, for better and worse: The League of Evil Exes, the gauntlet of former flames that Scott and Ramona must brave in order to live happily ever after.
With the added elbow room of a streaming TV series, the league’s members – played by the returning likes of super-recognizable voices Chris Evans, Jason Schwartzman, and Mae Whitman – can take on dimensions that were only hinted at in digest-sized melees. In part, this feels like a nod to the seemingly clairvoyant casting of Wright’s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: It’s a much bigger deal that Evans is grunting out the words of skater-turned-action star Lucas Lee in 2023, so he gets a larger role to play – ditto for Kieran Culkin (now a big name after making audiences fall in love with the worst person on Succession) as Scott’s roommate Wallace, or Aubrey Plaza as his frenemy Julie Powers. It’s also in tune with an increased focus on Ramona, who winds up in a storyline akin to a different classic of circa-2000s music-snob-adjacent heartache – High Fidelity – whose advancing chapters are framed by their own low-key, magical girl transformation: a hypnotic, foley-enhanced depiction of her hair-coloring routine.
Animation and Scott Pilgrim are a no-brainer, chocolate-and-peanut-butter pairing. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is essentially a live-action cartoon, but even that execution had its limitations, which Scott Pilgrim Takes Off gleefully breaks free of. Obviously, that’s a boon for the fights, which detour into exchanges of energy blasts in a Dragon Ball-esque wasteland and a flight of fancy indebted to the vintage Looney Tunes short “Book Revue” (and its spiritual Animaniacs sequel, “Video Review”). But it’s great for the musical sequences, too: There’s a jittery electricity to the introduction of Scott’s band, Sex Bob-omb, while a later living room jam erupts into psychedelic abstraction.
The cast seems to relish playing genuine cartoons this time around, too. Satya Bhabha hams it up as Matthew Patel, elevating Evil Ex #1 to jabbering supervillain status. Cera finds a more chipper register for his character that sounds like he’s doing a parody of English-language anime dubbing – it suits the quick-cut comic sensibilities of Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, but it takes some getting used to. Others opt for subtlety: Winstead, who’s become an avatar of onscreen intimidation in the years since Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, brings that intensity down to a slow boil to express Ramona’s wry amusement with Scott and incredulous dismay at the situation he’s dragged her into. It’s a layer of deadpan camouflaging the vulnerability that enables her to peel back the layers of O’Malley’s most complicated character.
Like any number of recent legacyquels – Top Gun: Maverick, David Gordon Green’s Halloween trilogy, Justified: City Primeval – this continuation of a dormant series is ultimately about the past, and how there’s no outrunning it. This might seem to contradict some of Scott Pilgrim’s most ingenious inventions: its dating-history-as-Mortal-Kombat-ladder, the destruction of Ramona’s subspace suitcase – literal and bottomless baggage she carries with her wherever she goes. But even the Evil Exes thing starts to wear a little thin by the fourth or fifth volume of the comics; if the Netflix series faithfully adapts anything from the books, it’s the feeling that the characters outshine the flashy concept that brings them together. (It makes later episodes’ resemblance to cozy, hangout fanfiction a little more excusable.) With a decade-plus of perspective and a fresh, animated lens, Scott Pilgrim Takes Off radically argues that the past is something to be accepted, not defeated.
