Bennett makes animation that watches things eat other things and waits. Scavengers Reign drew an alien planet as a working ecology and let a few people walk across it; the world is the achievement, and the human stories are still catching up.
Fi1m perspective
The Bennett shot is a locked-off camera on a patch of alien ground, held while a plant closes slowly round a small animal and nothing else happens. In Scavengers Reign (2023) that patience is the whole method. Something grazes, something lures it, something lays eggs in it, and a castaway works out how to use what is left as a tool. The pleasure is in watching one thing cause the next, and the fear is in realising that the people are the newest animals in the chain. We were more frightened by it than animation usually manages, and the reason is how calmly it is drawn: flat colour, thin dark lines, faces made with a few marks, a plant going about its business with no music telling us to mind.
He came to animation from painting, which shows in those crowded backgrounds, and from short films made quickly and posted online. The planet Vesta first appeared in Scavengers (2016), an eight-minute short with no dialogue that he made with Charles Huettner, and the series grew out of it. He wanted the long version silent as well. "There was a period where I wanted to even try to do the series with no dialogue, and the network did not want that," he has said, and he now thinks they were right. We are less sure. The talk is the weakest part of Scavengers Reign; the pictures had already said most of it.
The series was created with Huettner and James Merrill and directed by seven people, Bennett among them on the episode 'The Signal', and the look holds across all twelve episodes, which is harder than it sounds. Vincent M. Vu's design gives Vesta the pinks and greens of a coral reef dragged on to land, and Jason Klein cuts slowly, letting a shot run long after most editors would have moved on. The faults are in a writing room six names deep. Kamen's strand circles for several episodes in the middle, his memories of home return until they stop landing, and the series' best idea, that the planet may be using the castaways rather than merely eating them, is said out loud after the drawings had made it plain. Ten episodes would have done it.
Since then Bennett has set up a studio, Green Street Pictures, with Sean Buckelew, Merrill and Benjy Brooke, and co-created Common Side Effects (2025) with Steve Hely, which moves him to present-day Earth: a mushroom that cures everything, drug companies, a conspiracy. We have not reviewed it and will not judge it here. Nor have we much to say about Cake (2019), an anthology of eighteen of his shorts, comic and experimental, except that it points to a lighter side the castaways never saw. The open question is whether he can draw people as carefully as he draws what eats them. In the meantime we would watch him draw a mushroom for an hour.
Biography
Joseph Bennett, also credited as Joe Bennett, is an American animator, writer, director and entrepreneur. He co-created the adult animated science-fiction series Scavengers Reign (2023) with Charles Huettner, serving as writer, director and executive producer on the Max production. The series is based on their 2016 short film Scavengers, which Bennett co-directed and for which he wrote the story.
Bennett is a co-founder of Green Street Pictures. He has also directed and written episodes of the series Cake (2019–2021) and created Common Side Effects (2025) with Steve Hely.
