Invincible Fight Girl is a blast of concentrated fight animation that’s a complete blast, and something series creator Juston Gordon-Montgomery was looking to fashion for the show. Set in the Wrestling World where almost everyone is obsessed with the pro-wrestling leagues, an accountant student named Andy finally decides to live her dream and ventures into the world as Fight Girl.
The series is a fascinating hodgepodge of influences, ranging from Shonen anime to the bravado of the WWE. The heart of both kinds of shows can be seen in the series, with Andy’s drive to prove herself serving as an ideal emotional anchor for a show full of robots, explosions, and jump kicks. During an interview with TVBrittanyF, Juston Gordon-Mongomery discussed the influences that inspired the series, the lessons he’s learned from other animated projects that he brought to the new show, and the series’ biggest surprises.
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This isn’t your first time helming an animated show, as you were also the story editor on My Dad the Bounty Hunter. What lessons did you want to bring from that experience to this series?
Juston Gordon-Montgomery: [My Dad the Bounty Hunter] was a big watershed moment for me. More on the production side of leading a writing team. That was my first time in that particular leadership role. There was a lot that I learned about what it meant to get a team of people who were coming from various backgrounds on the same page in terms of thinking about what the north star of a series is. At the same time, navigating that while asking everyone to bring their different experiences and their different strengths and talents to writing their particular episode or to the collective writing group.
A lot of that was a bit of trial by fire for me. I took those lessons and kind of came here, and this, I feel like, is maybe an even more difficult project in terms of that. We’re asking our team to sort of be familiar with wrestling and Shonen storytelling, also all while trying to channel some of these larger themes that we want to talk about. We even want to something that is maybe not so Western in the execution of it all. That’s a lot of asks for the writing team, and it felt like that experience on [My Dad the Bounty Hunter] really helped me be in a good position to be able to convey all that and get the best out of everyone.
There’s clearly a lot of inspiration from shows like Naruto and Dragon Ball in Invincible Fight Girl, are there any inspirations that you think would surprise most viewers?
I think one of the biggest points, and it’s funny because it’s a more recent discovery for me in the past four years, was Hunter x Hunter. It’s a show that I had heard people talk about. At a certain point it became this thing was like The Wire, where you’re like, ‘Yeah, I’ll get to it.’ On a whim, I ended up watching it and then just binged the whole thing. It was strange, because I had seen [Yoshihiro Togashi’s] previous work. The way in which he was so intricate in his world-building, and was so just so relentless in his world-building, the way that he was subverting tropes but at the same time delivering on them, it was fantastic.
It had a deep effect on just my entire thought process in coming up with the world and coming up with future stories. This idea that your world and your story and the themes that you’re exploring don’t necessarily have to just be your main character, but can exist and be seen in all of these different characters across your world, in different stories, different things that are happening in different places, those were all exciting things. And I was kind of like, okay, that’s what we need to really get into this.
On the other hand, there’s the clear influence that pro wrestling had on this world. What was it like expanding an entire universe where wrestling is the law of the land?
I think a lot of it had to do with our starting point being, what are the things we love about wrestling? As we’re embarking on this challenge, though, it really did become a challenge How do you extrapolate that to an entire world? A lot of the conversations we had with ourselves are like, what are things that in Pokemon, what are things that shows like that are doing? What does Pokemon training mean in that universe? At the sort of most surface level, it’s a fun way that you can engage with a game and you can collect sponsors and battle.
That’s the sort of surface level. Then there’s all of these much deeper levels that different media have gone into, where Pokemon are this opportunity to explore the way that people relate with themselves, the way they relate to their passions, the way they relate with their dreams, the way they relate with their communities, the way they relate on larger geopolitical levels.
Pokemon is just kind of like the medium that they’re using to explore these things, and that’s really exciting to us. Now we get to have wrestling gags. How do wrestlers get around in public? What’s the much larger opportunities we’re allowed to explore when we examine wrestling from all of these different angles and different lenses?
You’ve spoken elsewhere about how the early ideas for Invincible Fight Girl came about in 2016 and went through years of development before being greenlit in 2022. Now, two years later, it’s already finished. From your perspective, what was that process like?
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It was definitely a little jarring at first. I think that six years really gave us time to cook and marinate on this idea. Once we got into this sort of accelerated production timeline, we had answers to all the questions. Being in production scenarios before, once you get in it, the questions are what trip you up. When you don’t have the answers to them, you’re, ‘Oh, shit, we didn’t think about that! Okay, let’s go back to figure this thing out.’ We had all the answers and so had to have it all figured out. That amount of runway made it so that we knew exactly what we wanted to do when we were able to execute it pretty on point.
What would you say has surprised you the most about Invincible Fight Girl?
I think I was surprised by just how much our team brought to it. Having six years to think about it, it’s kind of just in your head. You’re kind of filling in the blanks in terms of how it’s going to look. You’re kind of like, ‘Oh, I think the bikes will be cool.’ One of the biggest surprises was once our artists actually put pen to paper and really embraced some of these ideas and elevated them, they just weren’t what I was expecting in my mind.
So much of that was really like, Oh, wow. Like, we’ve got something here that is exceeding my expectations… a lot of that storytelling we had worked out, but once you get into [the kinds of fights we have], the artists really took the ball and ran with it. They’re doing stuff that is in the spirit of what the storytelling is, but going far beyond anything that I personally could do or would have personally thought of.
Invincible Fight Girl is now streaming on Max.
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