How to Become a Cult Leader - When Animation Became the Driving Force Behind a Netflix Documentary Series
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1. Overview - Expanding the Identity of an Established Netflix Series
How to Become a Cult Leader is a satirical documentary series exploring some of the most notorious cults in modern history. Each episode focuses on a different cult leader, tracing how they built influence, manipulated followers, and ultimately lost control of their empires.
For this project, DeeDee Animation Studio collaborated with 6 Point Harness to produce animated sequences for the series released on Netflix.
Throughout the series, audiences are guided through stories surrounding Charles Manson of the Manson Family, Jim Jones of Peoples Temple, Jaime Gomez of Buddhafield, Marshall Applewhite of Heaven’s Gate, Shoko Asahara of Aum Shinrikyo, and Sun Myung Moon of the Unification Church.
Rather than following the dry and conventional tone often associated with documentaries, the series chose a more dynamic storytelling approach: using animation to recreate moments that archival footage alone could never fully capture.
2. The Challenge - Turning a Documentary into a More Engaging Viewing Experience
The biggest challenge of the project was not simply creating visually appealing animation, but making animation an effective storytelling device within the documentary format.
The animated sequences in How to Become a Cult Leader were never intended to feel polished like mainstream cartoons or visually glamorous like anime. Instead, the visual language was intentionally edgy, distorted, and satirical - perfectly aligned with the overall tone of the series.
Another major challenge came from the fact that every character portrayed in the series was based on real historical figures. This made the research phase incredibly important. The team had to study not only the characters’ appearances, historical settings, and costumes, but also their personalities, emotional states, and psychological behaviors.
Each episode introduced a completely new story, cast, and historical backdrop. Even seemingly minor details - such as phone models, vehicles, or clothing styles - required careful research to ensure historical consistency throughout the film.
And because this was ultimately a Netflix project, the pressure to deliver a high-quality final product was present from the very beginning.
3. DeeDee’s Approach to Solving the Case
Creative Direction from DeeDee
From the moment the team reviewed the documentary edit, DeeDee Animation Studio understood that the animation could not function as simple visual illustration. The sequences needed to blend naturally into the storytelling flow while standing out from the visual treatment commonly seen in other documentary productions.
According to the project leads, the characters in the series were real historical figures with dramatic and often extreme personal narratives. The team’s role was not simply to redraw them, but to reinterpret their presence through animation. “What made them believe? What made them obey? What could push an ordinary person to sacrifice their entire life for a belief system? The more questions the animators asked, the more material they had to build convincing emotional performances and nuanced character acting.
On the client side, 6 Point Harness provided extensive references for settings and characters, while still leaving significant creative space for the Vietnamese production team to expand and develop further. From there, the Animation Director and Supervisors established keyframes - the most important poses and movement beats - before animators continued refining the acting and performance based on those foundations.
In traditional hand-drawn animation, maintaining character consistency across scenes is always a challenge. One of the team’s highest priorities was ensuring that every character still felt like the same person throughout the episode, even when handled by multiple animators.
Building upon the visual style established in the first season, the team decided to push the exaggeration further and elevate the emotional intensity beyond expectations. DeeDee’s Animation Director, Kiet Doan, compared the process to swimming inside a large pool: everyone had creative freedom within their own space, as long as they “didn’t splash water outside the pool.” That is why the animated sequences in the series felt less like visual explanation and more like an invitation into the internal worlds of the characters themselves.
Production Pressure and the First Client Feedback
Each episode contained approximately 160-170 animated shots produced by the DeeDee team. During the early stages of production, implementing new techniques meant that some episodes required nearly two weeks to complete. Once the workflow became more stable, production time was eventually reduced to roughly one week per episode.
Choosing to push the project as far as possible creatively ultimately resulted in feedback beyond the team’s expectations. The client expressed appreciation for the quality of the final product, stating that it exceeded what they initially imagined. According to DeeDee, Netflix was never overly demanding about isolated technical details. What truly mattered was the overall quality of the final experience - whether the work felt polished, cohesive, and compelling as a complete piece.
4. Results
Following its release, How to Become a Cult Leader received positive responses from both audiences and critics, with the animated sequences earning particular praise.
Publications such as Fiction Horizon and San Francisco Chronicle highlighted the series’ creative use of animation to visualize moments that archival footage could never document.
“The most impressive thing is that these animated sequences are of very high quality and make the documentary look like a bigger effort than its contemporaries because it was.” - Fiction Horizon
“More successful is the creative animation that allows us to drop in on the private decision-making of the cult leaders that the video archives could not capture.” - San Francisco Chronicle
Following the success of the project, DeeDee Animation Studio continued to collaborate with 6 Point Harness on multiple international productions afterward.
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