Owen Dennis says Paramount+’s surprising animated Among Us series leans into what made the game iconic and emotionally expressive—while also reflecting a wider, tense moment for animation jobs and budgets.
On Friday. Paramount+ dropped its animated take on Among Us like a secret message—only this time. the joke is baked into the premise. Blushing cartoon astronauts. boardroom-style paranoia. and body-wide panic shots arrive with a familiar sense of danger: who’s trustworthy. and how fast can things turn?.
Owen Dennis. the creator and executive producer behind the series. isn’t interested in smoothing out the game’s weirdness for corporate comfort. He pointed to the “Among Us” character design as something instantly recognizable—“the most iconic in the past 10 to 15 years”—and said that recognition is exactly what lets the show go strange without losing the characters people know.
“That means that you can really do weird things with it, and people will still see it as that character and it’ll be fine,” Dennis told TheWrap.
In practice. the series turns emotional embarrassment and escalating fear into visuals that can look radically different from the show’s typical look. Cartoon astronauts blush through their visors when they’re flustered. and at other moments the animation veers into anime-inspired scenes that “drastically depart” from the series’ usual style. Dennis’ team often leans on characters who have no mouths. faces or arms—characters who instead use their whole bodies to brood or panic. He learned that technique while animating One-One from Infinity Train. described here as a confused. mouthless robot with two vertical eyes.
Dennis said the goal was to let artists push the emotional range hard. “I really wanted the board artists and our artists who were working on each of those sections to make this emotionally work for them and go hog wild. ” he said. “That’s why you end up with these characters that look really strange in some spots.”.
Among Us itself. released in 2018 by Innersloth. is the kind of hit that seems built for player decisions rather than a scripted TV narrative. The multiplayer game drops players on a space station where they’re assigned one of two roles: Crewmates or Imposters. Crewmates complete tasks and then vote out suspected imposters. Imposters, meanwhile, have to kill Crewmates one by one.
As a social deduction game, it’s compared to longtime party games Mafia and Werewolf. During the COVID-19 pandemic, it exploded in popularity. By November 2020, the game had nearly 500 million monthly active users.
Dennis’ confidence about translating that energy comes from his track record. His first major project was as a writer and storyboard artist on Regular Show, created by J. G. Quintel. In 2019, Dennis created his own series for Cartoon Network, the imaginative anthology Infinity Train.
Infinity Train asked characters to confront personal faults in hopes of escaping an endless train filled with maddening cars. The series earned widespread critical acclaim—praise aimed at its complex characters, imaginative world and distinct visual style. Like Over the Garden Wall and Steven Universe before it, Infinity Train was often hailed as an animated television masterpiece.
That acclaim makes the show’s ending sting. Dennis and his team wanted to continue, but Infinity Train received a fourth and final season in 2021. A year later, it was one of 37 titles pulled from HBO Max as part of a wider Warner Bros. Discovery mandate to pull away from children’s and family programming. Infinity Train is now only available via VOD.
That history feeds into Dennis’ view of where animation sits right now. When asked about the current state of animation. he called it “a really tough spot to be in right now.” He said many companies see animation “mostly for children. ” and that some stopped making animated work for that audience because kids are on YouTube. The result, he said, is that animators are out of work.
Dennis said Among Us feels like a love letter to animation partly because of that squeeze. For some of the show’s more ambitious, anime-inspired scenes, he recruited artists from OK K.O.!. Let’s Be Heroes. He also said the series—like Adventure Time and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse—aims to convey emotional truth rather than stick to a single visual style.
The show’s creative starting point wasn’t the betrayal mechanics alone. Dennis approached it by focusing on the theme behind the game: “Who do you trust? Why do you trust who you trust?” He said he wanted the TV series to be “throwing little rocks at that theme.”
Once the theme was locked in, Dennis built a roster of doomed Crewmates with complex relationships. Red is played by Randall Park and is described as a cocky captain with a mysterious history with the skeptical chief of security. played by Ashley Johnson. Black is a goth geologist. played by Liv Hewson. at odds with her hippy gemologist coworker Cyan. played by Kimiko Glenn. The cooks—Yellow, played by Debra Wilson, and Brown, played by Phil LaMarr—are best friends.
Beyond the obvious allies. the show also includes outliers: Orange. the overly cheery head of human resources played by Yvette Nicole Brown; Green. the eager unpaid intern played by Elijah Wood; White. the rich contest winner played by Patton Oswalt; Blue. the competent and handsome doctor played by Dan Stevens; and Lime. the conspiracy-loving engineer played by Wayne Knight.
Dennis said the process then became a matter of letting this crew loose on a space station “secretly invaded” by a body-shifting monster. For inspiration, he cited The Thing, Alien, Star Trek and Brooklyn Nine-Nine. “It’s basically a workplace comedy,” Dennis said.
Even with the comedy framing, the adaptation doesn’t pull its punches on gore. Most character deaths come with cartoonish pools of red blood and shots of comically large bones.
Dennis referenced Infinity Train when talking about unsettling deaths. saying. “Anyone who’s watched ‘Infinity Train’ will know that I’ve definitely killed characters in ways that are upsetting.” He added that there are “a lot of ways you can make deaths be upsetting” without having to pull organs out of somebody’s body.
He also said the team set a standard bar for gore. “We tried to make it like if you’re OK with your kids playing the game, you’re OK with what we did,” Dennis said.
Still, he acknowledged that age-appropriateness lines are blurred—especially with animation. He said teenagers and children will always watch shows meant for the next age up. and he pointed to the specific kind of content kids seek out even when they’re “not really supposed to be watching.” He described watching things at a friend’s house when a mom wouldn’t allow it. or seeing shows because a babysitter “didn’t give a shit.” “The stuff we’d watch… is good. ” he said. “It sticks in your brain really well.”.
For all the industry pressure—studio cutbacks and the threat of AI—Dennis sounded optimistic about animation’s larger staying power. He said the medium has “never been more popular.” He pointed out that animated movies make up 20 to 25% of all box office sales. and he argued that video games have helped bring more audiences to animation. He also said the indie scene has surged due to the rise of the creator economy.
Dennis has personal ambitions he’s still chasing. “I’d love to work on Star Fox,” he said. He also named a book he read—“the ‘Ratman’s Notebooks’ by Stephen Gilbert”—and said he’d love to turn it into an animated movie for adults and teens.
But he framed those ambitions within a funding reality: ambitious animated projects can’t move without backing from studios. streamers and networks. He said corporations need to gamble on more lower-cost bets instead of waiting for another $150 million movie to carry the industry for a few more months.
Dennis compared that kind of investment to farming. “The audience is there, but also you have to build the ecosystem,” he said. “You don’t get to just keep farming on the same land without tilling the soil.”
For now, the audience has somewhere to watch. Among Us is now streaming on Paramount+.
At the center of the series is a simple question—who do you trust. and why do you trust them?—but in the way Dennis talks about the show’s visuals and emotional intensity. it’s also a question about animation itself: can the medium still surprise people. still feel alive. and still find room to work?.
Among Us Owen Dennis Paramount+ animated series Innersloth animation industry Infinity Train Regular Show OK K.O.! Let’s Be Heroes Randall Park Ashley Johnson Elijah Wood