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Reviews
Unicorn: Warriors Eternal (2023)
interesting worldbuilding, bad pacing and awful style
I'll preface this by saying that I've currently watched the series up to episode 8 (the last 2 have yet to be aired).
I love Genndys work. His last work, Primal, is one of my favorite works of animation. It has incredible style, animation, story and pacing. While U:WE has a cool overall plot, every other thing Primal got right is missing from this show.
1- Style:
This show has a rubberhose-ish 30s style, but without any of the fluidity that came with the animations of the period. And I don't know how to put this, but it does not feel like the style is very well integrated with what it is trying to show. To put it simply - it looks ugly, with the exception of the backgrounds, which are good.
2- Animation:
I am a fan of the art of animation, and I am an animator myself, so I think I may notice some things relating to animation too much. And I'll say that the action scenes are good (like 7/10). But for the majority of the time, the animation is simply awful. It feels clunky and cheap, like the studio was trying to limit the number of drawn frames to cut costs, and thought that motion graphics would make this imperceptible. It didnt. And I have nothing against motion graphics, I myself use them a lot. This was just badly done. And even the scenes with loads of frames end up not looking good, because their style of exaggerated motion end up just looking goofy and just... BAD, for a lack of other words. I think this show looked very good in the storyboard, but in order to look as good in motion, they should have used a more competent animation studio.
3- Editing:
This one is short and simple: a lot of the scenes feel like they stay on screen for like 1-2 seconds too long. It ruins the pacing and the storytelling, and makes the characters feel like paper dolls or something, because they end up reacting to things in a very artificial manner. It feels like this show was written as well paced 18 minute-long episodes, and someone at the last minute said that the show has to be 20 minutes, so they slightly stretched every scene.
4- Insufferable Characters:
I like Seng, and Copernicus is ok (he can't speak, and with the kind of dialogue writing in this show, that may be a plus). However, Melinda and her 2 lovers are just incredibly annoying. The behave like they are 12, when they are all adults and 2 of them are immortal beings hundreds of years old. I know they reincarnated into hosts that were too young, but even so. When you end up rooting for the evil people to be done with the main characters, you know you didnt do a good job.
I actually liked the worldbuilding (despite buing kinda tired of the steampunk thing) and I think that the characters have a lot of potential, but I feel like these 4 points cancel any of the good things with ease.
Mad God (2021)
A lesson in worldbuilding
I feel like people that are saying that there is no plot didn't really pay attention to the themes and the interconnectedness of the scenes.
Sure, nothing is very clear nor easy to understand, but little by little a clearer image begins to form.
This is a hellish place, governed by a mad god, its rules and its sadistic desires. There are many creatures made to suffer in various specific ways, there are creatures that are made to enjoy the suffering of others, there are creatures of a religious/ritualistic function, etc.
Think of it like an alien version of dante's inferno, with various layers of different types of suffering.
Of course, there are allegories and things alluding to real world problems and relations too. An example of this could be the jittery surgeon extracting gold, knowledge (in the form of books), etc. From a completely restrained person (which could represent the relations between the capital and the workers, for example)
Visually, this is a 10/10 movie
the worldbuilding is a 9/10
but the pacing is a little off.
Archive 81 (2022)
Great show with bad ending
The show is thrilling almost to the end, with very good pacing and ambiance.
However, the ending feels lazy, with a plot twist just for the sake of having one. Dan ends up switching times with Melissa, with her going to the present and him going to 1994. This happens without any plot reasoning or anything like that. Not saying that this is the first time in the show that they mess with time, but it ends up feeling improvised, like it came out of nowhere, with no buildup to it.
Diabolical: Nubian vs Nubian (2022)
It has its moments'
Not a great episode, not an awful one. Just before the ending, it has some funny moments, but the end itself is kinda boring.
The only real complaint I have it that, for some reason, the animation on this episode is really sloppy. Very choppy and not fluid at all. Kinda looks like it was made by an amateur, some of the time.
Diabolical: BFFs (2022)
a 50 YOs understanding of anime
This is such an awful episode.
Badly written and acted, stupid themes and some awful stylistic choices.
This episode clearly took inspiration in 2000s anime. The exaggerated expressions, the overuse of sound effects, etc. However, it seems like the person who made these choices only has a very superficial understanding of what anime really is, and just filled the episode with every 2000s anime trope that exists, like they read about them on TVtropes and told the animators to put every single one in.
What resulted is an unwatchable episode, with awkward pacing, weird reactions and a stupid amount of sound effects. Not only that, but the visual style is really... fake-anime? I don't really know how to describe it, if not by saying that the episode was made by western animators trying to copy a style without fully understanding it.
Not saying that every western show with an anime style is bad, of course. Bud this particular episode (of an otherwise good show) undoubtedly is.
The Legend of Vox Machina (2022)
D&D does not translate well to other media (very mild spoilers)
I'll start with what I liked about he show:
- the animation is pretty good (it isn't out-of-this-world or anything like that, but it is as good as it needs to be, maybe a little bit better even).
- the acting is great
- the main characters are fun, and have lots of great moments
- there are quite a lot of funny quips
Now, for the things I didn't like:
- all of the secondary characters are as flat as a sheet of paper. They exist solely to move the plot forward for the main characters (which is to be expected from an adaptation of a D&D campaign)
- all of the main characters are too... "interesting"? I don't know how to put this, but all of them have a LOT going on in their past. Their party has TWO distinct "mercenaries destined to rule their people", just to give an idea of what I'm talking about. Half of them are built like they are the sole main character of an adventure story. Again, I think this is because they are adapted from a D&D campaign
- the villains are clearly built as pure villains and nothing more. They have no redeeming qualities whatsoever, they are there just to be vanquished. They are caricatures of evil, made to be hated universally. Because of this, they end up being not interesting at all, you just end up thinking "shut up and die" every time they show up. Not to repeat myself, but as I see it, this is another consequence of this show being an adaptation of a D&D campaign, where the evil being vanquished is not even the main point of the game, it is just a justification for the adventure to happen for the players.
Don't get me wrong, I've watched quite a lot of D&D campaign podcasts and such, and I thin they are very entertaining. They tend to be unpredictable (because of the dice rolls and such) and spontaneous (because of the unpredictability and the ability of the players to just act through all of the events), and that makes them very fun to watch/listen. You end up feeling like you are there, playing D&D with them.
When you adapt this kind of media to a TV series, you end up having to throw out these thing I just pointed out, which are (IMO) the things that make this kind of media interesting. The characters, the worldbuilding, the villains, they are all secondary to the spontaneous interactions between the players and/or the GM, and to the dice rolls and the on-the-spot decision making.
What you end up with is an average show, with bad-to-average worldbuilding, flat secondary characters and uninteresting villains. I still liked some of the moments, as the main characters have very interesting interactions between themselves, but that was it.