Sean Buckelew draws worlds that run on cause and effect and people whose shoulders give them away. Working inside a studio he co-founded, he had a hand in two animated series we admire, and the faults are shared as evenly as the credit.
Fi1m perspective
Marshall's shoulders go up when he lies. Frances holds her coffee cup like a shield. Those are the things Common Side Effects (2025) notices, in a style of heavy outlines and big heads that could have settled for gags, and they are the clearest sign of what Sean Buckelew and the studio he helped found bring to a drawing. The other sign is the backgrounds. A mushroom grows in close-up with every gill shaded, and spores drift across the frame like dust in a projector beam. We found ourselves leaning in to look at a fungus, which is not what we had expected of an evening's television, and the series earned it by holding the shot a beat longer than the joke needed.
Buckelew came up through short films, beginning in the mid-2010s after studying experimental animation: Hopkins & Delaney LLP (2015), Lovestreams (2016), a hand-drawn piece about early-internet romance, and Drone (2022), a satire about an ethical AI drone that goes rogue. On those he was director, writer and animator, and on Drone editor too; they are one man's work, and his subjects are plain in them, technology and remote systems and the people on the wrong end of both. Around 2020 he co-founded Green Street Pictures with Joe Bennett, James Merrill and Benjy Brooke, and the studio's two series are where most readers will meet him. He wrote on Scavengers Reign (2023), expanded from a 2016 short by Bennett and Charles Huettner, and directed episodes of Common Side Effects, including the second, fifth and ninth.
Both are ensemble pieces, and it would be dishonest to hand him all the credit or all the blame. What we can say is that the two share a method that is also his: a world built so that one thing causes the next, whether that is the planet Vesta or a pharmaceutical conspiracy, and characters drawn so that how they behave in it tells us who they are. Scavengers Reign is the better of the two, and the writing is where it falters. Kamen's strand circles for several episodes, tempted and giving in and tempted again, and the series says aloud its best idea, that Vesta may be using the castaways rather than eating them, after the pictures had already made it clear. Buckelew shares that writing room with five others, so the fault is shared too.
Common Side Effects has the opposite shape: the people are stronger than the plot, and the villains thinner than the heroes. The deadpan humour is closer to his shorts than the conspiracy mechanics are, and the episodes are at their best when they let someone lie badly and watch the shoulders.
On animation he has said: "The limits of it are just your own time. But you can do anything." The shorts show a director with subjects of his own; the series have so far borrowed him for other people's. We would like to see what he does with something long that is his from the first frame.
Biography
Sean Buckelew is an American animator, writer and director. He received an MFA in Experimental Animation from the California Institute of the Arts and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2019 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Buckelew is a co-founder of the independent animation studio Green Street Pictures. He wrote episodes of the animated series Scavengers Reign (2023) and has directed on Common Side Effects (2025). He also serves as president of the board of directors and head programmer at the GLAS Animation Festival.
