India has long been a leader in family and children’s animation, but with Wolf King, the industry takes a bold leap into uncharted territory: dark, epic fantasy for young adults. In collaboration with Netflix, Lime Pictures, and Jellyfish Pictures, Assemblage Entertainment has crafted a groundbreaking animated series based on Curtis Jobling’s Wereworld novels—bringing his fantastical world to life with cinematic storytelling and breathtaking visual artistry.
For Wereworld author and series creator Curtis Jobling, seeing his characters and richly imagined world brought to life through animation for a young-adult audience was a thrilling and deeply rewarding moment. “It’s always a tremendous thrill to see my characters and stories come to life. I’m in the storytelling business, whatever the medium- film, art, publishing and my Wereworld novel series has always been very dear to my heart. Seeing it adapted, animated and hitting Netflix as Wolf King has been one of the highlights of my colourful career,” Jobling shared with Animation Xpress.
In an in-depth interview with the team at Assemblage Entertainment, we gained insight into its creative journey and the collaborative effort with global partners that brought this genre-defining series to life.
Ground-breaking new genre and tone: challenges and opportunities
Indian animated content is not traditionally associated with dark, young-adult fantasy animation. For the artists, this was an opportunity to stretch their artistry and visual storytelling skills while delivering at high production standards of a platform like Netflix. The challenge was finding the right balance: keeping the tone mature, intense, and cinematic, while still making it engaging for young adult viewers.
“With Netflix’s ambition and the astute creative leadership from Lime Pictures and Jellyfish Pictures powering this effort, we were able to explore bold colour palettes and stylised visuals that pushed the series beyond typical fantasy aesthetics. For us, this wasn’t just delivering a brief; it was helping define a new category for older-skewing animation on the global stage, and in many ways, a one-of-its-kind from India,” the creative team shared.
The artists had the privilege to work with director Tom Brass and the creative leadership at Jellyfish Pictures. Assemblage team explained how Brass brought a crystal-clear vision for the series but led with humility and openness, which made the process highly collaborative. “During his visit to our studio in 2023, he invested time in walking us through each character’s emotional arc and narrative purpose. This deepened our understanding of the story’s tone and helped us align creatively,” they shared.
Wolf King is one of the successful globally co-produced shows. It gave Assemblage an opportunity to collaborate with the wonderful team members at Netflix, Lime Pictures, and Jellyfish Pictures. They felt that given the scale and complexity of this global, multi-site production, it was very well managed. “With frequent and periodic calls/ meetings, the producers ensured clarity on all subjects, from creative direction to technical challenges. Wolf King reflects a truly global pipeline, with every partner contributing to making the show visually richer and narratively sharper than ever.”
Use of distinct visual style, animation choices and challenges
The foundation of Wolf King’s style came from Jobling’s storytelling and world, whilst the visual inspiration was led by the teams at Netflix, Lime, and Jellyfish. The collective endeavour of Assemblage was to translate that essence into 3D while preserving the grit and depth of his designs. “We leaned into hand-painted textures, stylised lighting, and graphic silhouettes to make sure the show felt like his artwork had come to life, just with the added richness and motion that CG allows. This approach allowed us to stay true to the creator’s and director’s vision while appealing to young adult audiences with a stylised, graphic world that feels both fresh and authentic,” they revealed.
As they dived into the creative process, animating on twos (12 fps) was a conscious choice made by the creator’s vision to enhance the stylised tone of Wolf King. Animating on twos complemented this look perfectly; it created a subtle “flip-book” effect in the characters’ movements, adding a handcrafted, textured rhythm to the animation. This choice not only fits the tone of the series but also gives Wolf King a unique visual identity that stands apart from traditional, hyper-fluid CG animation.
Animating on twos (12 fps) brought its own set of challenges. At times, subtle nuances in character performances could get lost, making movements feel slightly rigid. Another hurdle was camera strobing, a visual jitter that happens when characters animate on twos but the camera moves smoothly on ones.
To address this, they invested in R&D, running tests to understand when these issues were most noticeable. Also, adopted a hybrid frame-rate approach: while most shots were animated on twos, the artists switched to ones or even threes where needed to preserve fluidity. Through technical and creative R&D, they achieved the results successfully and scalably! This production has given them an incredible amount of experience in the category of this creative style.
“Animating on twos sounds simple, but it’s like a balancing act; you want that handcrafted, stylised feel without making the movement look stiff. Solving that puzzle pushed us to be more creative and inventive as a team,” said Assemblage Entertainment animation director Chetan Tahshildar.
For animation and look development, they primarily used Maya but the real innovation came in aligning a global, multi-site shared workflow. The team deepened their efforts on adopting a USD-based pipeline, in order to be in sync with the global partners and ensure a seamless, scalable production. This allowed the studios to share data seamlessly and work on identical scene files, significantly improving efficiency and reliability.
Another major challenge was the integration of 2D FX into the show’s stylised aesthetic. Skilled 2D FX talent is rare, so Assemblage Entertainment trained an internal team for months, running extensive look-dev tests with the director and art direction team. The goal was to ensure the hand-drawn FX felt organic alongside 3D characters and environments, without breaking the graphic novel-inspired tone. For sequences requiring speed, they also used Houdini to generate specific 2D FX, combining procedural workflows with hand-crafted artistry. All technical challenges were met and addressed by very experienced, capable, and collaborative teams between the studios and the excellent pipeline engineering work that their team demonstrated in executing this show.
“We relied on a mix of industry-standard tools, Maya for animation, Houdini for certain stylised FX, and a lot of custom scripts and plugins we built in-house. The real magic, though, came from the team’s artistry; the tools just helped us bring that vision to life,” said Assemblage Entertainment CG co-head Vidit Kundra.
Changing the Game for Indian Animation
According to Assemblage team, the buzz surrounding Wolf King at India’s premier animation celebration, the Animation and More (AM) Summit and Ann Awards, recently organised by AnimationXpress in Mumbai proved the audiences’ hunger for this kind of content. Many were surprised to learn that a show as dark, skewed, and visually ambitious as Wolf King was made in India.
Talking about their project and their studios’ contribution to Indian animation at large, Assemblage Entertainment CEO Arjun Madhavan shared, “Wolf King is a bold leap for us, bringing young adult dark fantasy to life at a cinematic scale. It’s a testament to the extraordinary talent in our region and the trust global partners like Netflix place in us. We’re proud to push boundaries, elevate genres, and redefine what Indian animation stands for on the world stage.”
The second season of Wolf King dropped on Netflix last week. The diverse slate of Assemblage Entertainment’s upcoming projects include Stitch Head (an adaptation of Guy Bass’ book) set to release theatrically in Halloween 2025 and Gabby’s Dollhouse: The Movie, a DreamWorks Animation production releasing theatrically in September 2025. They are also working with global studios and production houses on several unannounced projects, reinforcing their mission to push India’s animation industry into a new era of creativity and scale.
