Invincible Fight Girl’s creator wants to keep the dream of serialized animation alive

Juston Gordon-Montgomery grew up during the Attitude Era of pro wrestling — a time when the personalities were humongous, the storylines were wild, and the theater of it all bordered on high camp. Though it has gotten way easier to watch wrestling in the streaming era, the sport’s cultural dominance has waned in the years since it first captured Gordon-Montgomery’s imagination. Especially to non-fans, the idea of getting into wrestling can still feel a bit daunting. But that feeling is part of what inspired Gordon-Montgomery to create Invincible Fight Girl, a new series coming to Adult Swim.

Invincible Fight Girl’s story about a young accountant named Andy (Sydney Mikayla) who dreams of becoming a legendary wrestler is the stuff of shonen classics like Dragon Ball Z and One Piece. But the show’s setting — a world where everyone is some sort of masked brawler with unique costumes and signature combat moves — feels like a loving send-up of the pro-wrestling culture that defined the sport throughout the late ’90s. On paper, Invincible Fight Girl’s blend of influences makes its premise sound a little busy, but you can immediately see the vision come together as soon as its characters step into the ring.

When I recently sat down with Gordon-Montgomery to talk about Invincible Fight Girl, he told me that he wanted his love for the Attitude Era of wrestling to shine through “not just in Andy as a character, but the show as a whole.” 

“Wrestling felt magical to me as a kid, but the characters and their backstories also felt real,” Gordon-Montgomery explained. “I fully believed that the Undertaker really was a dead guy. The Attitude Era felt like it lent itself to the question ‘What would a world be like if it was filled with pro wrestlers,’ because they would all be these very distinct, very clear characters with ideologies that would come through in how they speak and fight.”

From the jump, Gordon-Montgomery knew he wanted to tell a story that both focused on someone chasing their passion and captured the feeling of getting swept up in the thrill of a wrestling match. Naturally, Invincible Fight Girl’s creative team took some cues from real-world wrestling. Because the show is all about a scrappy fighter training to be the best in a world full of magical people, though, anime series like Pokémon and Naruto were an obvious go-to source of inspiration.

If those shows could spin entire worlds out of concepts like catching monsters and being a shinobi, Gordon-Montgomery felt he might be able to do something similar with pro wrestling. To really capture the spirit of wrestling, though, Gordon-Montgomery and his team found themselves looking to “one of the most fantastic pieces of media there is”: director Satoshi Nishimura’s 2000 adaptation of Hajime no Ippo.

“I don’t know if a lot of people know about Hajime no Ippo, but it was the north star for us because, in that show, the fighting isn’t just fighting,” Gordon-Montgomery explained. “It’s a way to visualize philosophies clashing and illustrate how characters grow and change. So much of wrestling matches is just storytelling and pageantry, and it felt important to make sure that our fights weren’t just people hitting each other and pulling off moves that you recognize.”

Early in the series, as Andy’s first striking out on her own, many of her go-to maneuvers are wrestling basics you might recognize from live-action matches because she’s a novice who learned everything she knows from instructional videos. Her skills level up as she meets new allies like elderly wrestling legend Quesa Poblana (Rolonda Watts) and aspiring journalist Mikey (T.K. Weaver). But Andy’s transformation into Invincible Fight Girl takes time, something many networks seem increasingly skittish about giving newer projects.

When Gordon-Montgomery started in animation, he didn’t see Western studios producing a lot of serialized shows in the way he wanted Invincible Fight Girl to be. Protracted narratives that play out over the course of dozens of episodes are a hallmark of the anime Gordon-Montgomery was taking notes from, but he knew that pushing for that kind of story structure would be a challenge.

“Especially because we’re in this era of shorter season orders, there was definitely some concern about, ‘How long are you trying to draw these plot beats and revelations out?’” Gordon-Montgomery told me. “But to the credit of our partners at the network, I think they understood our vision. We were able to really convey that this is how Andy’s story needed to be told in order for audiences to really experience it the way we intended.”

Though Gordon-Montgomery doesn’t want to put a number to how many episodes he envisions Invincible Fight Girl running for just yet, he’s confident that the show’s core concept has legs akin to Pokémon’s.

“Pokémon is kind of at a point where it’s just going to keep going forever, which isn’t quite what we want to do,” Gordon-Montgomery said. “But I think there’s a very, very long runway of different ideas that we’re exploring philosophically with Andy and this world we’ve created. There are a lot of things that haven’t been done in animation here that I see us doing if we get the shot.”

Invincible Fight Girl premieres on Adult Swim on November 2nd.