Why Leviathan is animated and Uglies is not: the Netflix logic behind Scott Westerfeld’s adaptations

Leviathan, the dieselpunk trilogy filled with fabricated beasts and singing airships, was handed to Studio Orange, scored by Joe Hisaishi, and shaped under the author’s own eye.

Uglies landed on Netflix in 2024 after nearly two decades of stalled scripts, studio switches, and forgotten promises. The film, starring Joey King, finally brought Scott Westerfeld’s dystopia to the screen.

At the same time, the world of Leviathan was being built from the ground up as anime.

Same author. Completely different treatment.

Each story was approached with a distinct strategy. One was shaped for a YA crowd fluent in familiar arcs and recognizable faces. The other was framed as a high-concept visual event, created by a studio known for precision and style.

Scott Westerfeld played an active role in both, helping translate vision into format. And that’s where the real question begins. This isn’t about which story is better but what each one demands, and why sometimes only ink and movement can hold the weight of a world too strange for cameras alone. And if you liked Arcane, maybe Leviathan is for you too.

A long time coming: the tangled history of Uglies

The road to Uglies was anything but sleek. Back in 2006, the film rights were snapped up by 20th Century Fox, long before dystopias became a YA obsession. Scripts were written and shelved. Directors came and went. For years the project drifted in development limbo, eclipsed by the success of The Hunger Games and Divergent, both of which carried echoes of Westerfeld’s world but beat it to the screen. By the time Netflix stepped in, the genre had already peaked and flamed out.

Netflix reintroduced Uglies as a product of timing. With Joey King attached as both lead and executive producer, the project gained a face Gen Z already recognized. The aesthetic kept the clean lines and muted colors of dystopias past, but leaned more into teen drama than political allegory.

The sharper edges of the books, where beauty is law and resistance lives under the skin, were pared down to fit the frame. Instead of provocation, the adaptation offered familiarity, rhythm, and the comfort of a world that looked like one we’ve seen before.

That choice was deliberate. Uglies didn’t come to shift the landscape. It came to slot in, to resonate with what dystopia already means on screen, and Netflix made sure it did.

Leviathan takes flight: animation as elevation

Where Uglies eased into familiar terrain, Leviathan needed something else entirely. The series is set in a reimagined World War I, where Darwinists engineer living airships and Clankers pilot mechanical walkers. It’s dense, visual and strange. Too strange, maybe, for a conventional live-action treatment.

Instead of forcing the story into a standard frame, Netflix gave it to Studio Orange, the anime house behind Beastars and Trigun Stampede. Then they added Joe Hisaishi. And brought back Keith Thompson, the artist behind the original illustrations. This wasn’t a book being adapted. It was being rebuilt from the inside out.

Anime opened a door that live-action would have closed. Leviathan's world doesn’t obey natural scale or rules. It moves in arcs, pulses and biological logic. Fabricated beasts must look tactile. Mechanical walkers must feel heavy. A live-action version would have cost a fortune and still looked fake. Animation, especially at the level Studio Orange delivers, becomes a kind of truth. It allows Leviathan to be itself.

Netflix positioned this adaptation not as content but as craft. It sits closer to Arcane or Blue Eye Samurai than to anything YA adjacent. And that’s the point. Leviathan was never meant to play by genre rules but to bend them. The only way to do that was through movement, color, precision and an eye that knew how to build a sky worth flying through.

Two worlds, two markets: Netflix’s split YA strategy

On paper, Uglies and Leviathan come from the same shelf. They’re both YA, both speculative, both built on bold ideas and social critique, but Netflix treated them differently. Each project was tailored to fit a different lane. Uglies was streamlined for accessibility. Leviathan was elevated for impact. One aimed for scale, the other for signature. Each served a purpose.

Netflix has been doubling down on young adult content for years, but it’s no longer a single-track strategy. Some titles lean into familiarity, using recognizable faces and plot beats to trigger engagement. Others are engineered to stand out, blending high production with distinct worldbuilding.

Uglies was handed to a team that could deliver fast, clean and broad. Leviathan was built for slow burn prestige, more likely to get a VFX breakdown in a film journal than a trending clip on TikTok. The same applies to other recent projects.

The School for Good and Evil had all the trappings of a glossy YA fantasy, packaged with stars and set pieces. Shadow and Bone followed the formula with careful worldbuilding and a fan-driven campaign. On the other end of the spectrum, Castlevania pushed animation into brutal elegance. Blue Eye Samurai blurred genre lines with cinematic weight. Even Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, though lighter in tone, made full use of the medium to reimagine its own source material. Every title reflects a choice about scale, language and the kind of vision each story needs to come alive.

The author as anchor: Westerfeld’s guiding hand

Scott Westerfeld played an active role in both adaptations. His involvement went far beyond the usual courtesy credit. With Uglies, he worked closely with the team on tone, themes and continuity, making sure the story still carried the core of what made the book matter.

With Leviathan, he was even deeper in. From the start, the anime was built with his input on worldbuilding, pacing and visual identity. Keith Thompson, the illustrator of the original novels, returned as a key collaborator. This was about more tha licensing: this was authorship.

Very few YA authors get this level of control. Scott Westerfeld has always treated storytelling as structure, as a system with rules and pressure points. That perspective made him not just adaptable, but adaptive. He knows how his stories move and what they need to survive the leap from page to screen. That presence shows.

Uglies feels like it understands the pulse of its original audience. Leviathan feels like it understands its own scale. Both carry the voice of someone who was in the room, shaping the story from the inside.

Why Leviathan is animated and Uglies is not: a matter of gravitas

There’s no formula that decides which story becomes a movie and which one becomes a painted machine in motion. But Uglies and Leviathan offer a clear case study. One exists in a world that mirrors ours, framed around faces, choices and consequences that play well in close-up. The other operates on scale, on symbols, on invented biology and airships that sing. One adapts through actors. The other through design. The medium reveals what the story is made of.

Netflix approached these projects with intention. Uglies was shaped to live inside a genre people already know. Leviathan was given space to become something singular. Both belong to the same author, but they speak to different instincts. One is grounded in plot and recognition. The other in myth and movement.

What defines them isn’t genre or age group. It’s gravitas. And sometimes the weight of a world demands more than a camera. Sometimes it needs a lens that can breathe, stretch, drift and imagine without limits. That’s where animation begins. And that’s where Leviathan belongs.

Leviathan is set to debut on July 10, 2025, on Netflix.