A television animation director who has worked on series since 2009, Angelo Hatgistavrou is at his best when the jokes stop and the frame holds still. Kevin (2026) shows both halves of that sentence.
Fi1m perspective
The view from a windowsill at four in the afternoon. The underside of a bodega shelf. A radiator, a fire escape, a door that does not open. These are the things we remembered from Kevin (2026), and they are the work of its directors rather than its writers. Hatgistavrou was one of four, alongside Casey Crowe, Sarah Seember Huisken and Michael Moloney, and the supervising director, which in television animation means the person who decides what a show looks like and how long a shot is allowed to sit. The animation is flat and clean and does not try to impress you. For a show about a cat, that was the right decision.
He came up the usual way, as an animator from around 2009 on Bob's Burgers and Black Dynamite, then directing on China, IL from 2015, Harg Nallin' Sclopio Peepio (2016), Little Big Awesome (2018), which mixed drawn animation with puppets and live action, and ThunderCats Roar (2020). He was supervising director on Fairfax (2021 to 2022) before Kevin, much of it through the studio Titmouse. He has said he likes finding the absurd in the mundane and shifting tone to catch people off guard. "Life is absurd, lean into it."
Kevin is the fairest test of that, and the result is mixed. For half of its eight episodes it is crude, slack and only fitfully funny, and the shifting of tone looks more like a show that has not decided what it is. Then it settles, and the directors start paying attention to the animals as animals. An episode in which Kevin spends most of the running time waiting for a door to open got to us more than we expected, and what did it was not a line but a held frame: the cat, the door, Dan Romer's thin plucked score, and nobody cutting away to rescue us. That is the tone shift Hatgistavrou talks about, delivered rather late.
We have not reviewed Fairfax, but the complaint against it was the same shape: lively to look at, well voiced, and so reliant on references and passing trends that it felt thin. ThunderCats Roar was taken to task for a comic lightness that never read as parody. The pattern is a director whose drawing is more careful than his shows' jokes.
Which leaves a dry observation rather than a verdict. The quiet stretches of Kevin suggest someone better at the mundane than the absurd, and television animation does not often ask for the mundane. We would like to see a series that trusts the windowsill from the first episode.
Biography
Angelo Hatgistavrou is an American animation director and writer. He began working in the industry in 2009 after studying at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, initially as an animator on series including Bob's Burgers and Black Dynamite.
He has directed episodes of China, IL (2015), Brad Neely's Harg Nallin' Sclopio Peepio (2016), Little Big Awesome (2018), ThunderCats Roar (2020) and Fairfax (2021–2022). He served as supervising director on eight episodes of the Amazon series Kevin (2026). As a writer, he contributed to Mao Mao: Heroes of Pure Heart (2019) and Brad Neely's Harg Nallin' Sclopio Peepio.
