Western Animation - Discuss American, Canadian, and European cartoons here (or just bitch about wokeshit, I guess)

Bread Fetishist said:

Man, I am trying to be optimistic about this show, but the more I see of it, the more worried I become over it turning into woke nonsense.
Click to expand...
Nothing we can do now just wait and hope they don't cave in to gizmoundos idiocy oh and speaking of


The past few decades have given us some of the most interesting animated shows we’ve seen in generations.

Steven Universe, Adventure Time, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Bojack Horseman, She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, Infinity Train, and so many others have made huge impacts on culture over the last several years. This is largely thanks to the growing push for diversity behind the scenes, something that was sorely lacking in the days of The Animaniacs.
Click to expand...

The mintue I got thru that passage I knew to never ever take anything this hack "journalist" says seriously... ever.

SteelPlatedHeart said:
....that stuff in the intro wasn’t jokes, were they? They’re being serious.
Click to expand...
It's hard to tell if they're serious or not hopefully it is meant to be an intentional dig at the direction western animation's gone in...poe's law man it's a confusing one
 
I think people have forgotten that live-action remakes or pseudo-remakes (i.e. Hook) of Disney films actually aren't a new thing. They've been happening since the 1990s.
 
  • Horrifying
Reactions: Mr. 0
Just watched the first episode of Animaniacs and it's pretty much like what I thought it was going to be like "Futurama reboot movies and tv show". It's about as cringey too but only a bit more funnier.
 
Quijibo69 said:
Just watched the first episode of Animaniacs and it's pretty much like what I thought it was going to be like "Futurama reboot movies and tv show". It's about as cringey too but only a bit more funnier.
Click to expand...
Just got done watching the first episode too, It's the mixed bag I was expecting but I really hope we get some good episodes and dont hold the warners back on who they hit with a mallet, including that new CEO lady.
 
Emperor Pilaf said:
Just got done watching the first episode too, It's the mixed bag I was expecting but I really hope we get some good episodes and dont hold the warners back on who they hit with a mallet, including that new CEO lady.
Click to expand...
On the fourth episode now, and goddamn they can’t stop bringing up politics. Like, yes, they brought them up in the original series as well, but not literally every episode.

Not counting the theme (because, well, the original had Clinton anyway) there’s been:

1: That “current events” song, the Seth Meyers bit
2: The Trump cyclops (genuinely the worst scene of the show so far, it was awful) and a song about suffragettes
3. Probably the best episode so far, but still had a whole segment about the red scare.
4. GUN CONTROL.

The animation is significantly worse, as well.
 
  • Agree
  • Feels
Reactions: UnsufficentBoobage, XtrmGamr719, George Geef and 12 others
Crescent Fresh said:
On the fourth episode now, and goddamn they can’t stop bringing up politics. Like, yes, they brought them up in the original series as well, but not literally every episode.

Not counting the theme (because, well, the original had Clinton anyway) there’s been:

1: That “current events” song, the Seth Meyers bit
2: The Trump cyclops (genuinely the worst scene of the show so far, it was awful) and a song about suffragettes
3. Probably the best episode so far, but still had a whole segment about the red scare.
4. GUN CONTROL.

The animation is significantly worse, as well.
Click to expand...

The worst part is, if you complain about it, the usual suspects will just come out and say “um, ackchyually, Animaniacs was always political, you chud”. It’s fucking irritating.
 
  • Agree
  • Feels
Reactions: XtrmGamr719, George Geef, The Great and Powerful Us and 8 others
Quijibo69 said:
The animation sucks and blows in the new one.
Click to expand...
I wouldn't say the animation's bad per se; when you're using ToonBoom - or whatever the fuck they're using - and you're rigging your models and moving them in such a way so as to be energetic and bouncy, it'll look a bit artificial but it'll still get the job done. If the shapes are simple enough. That's partially why DuckTales 2017's were redone in a simple style to accommodate for that.
It cannot do that with complex character models. Like holy shit, it's bad: the human characters/celebrity caricatures worked in the original because the original was hand-animated and didn't go too overboard with detail: when you animated everyone in overly grotesque detail (the Seth Meyers bit where he slowly smiles shows that off the most), the software just can't keep up! When its hand-drawn, or at least done without the software moving it and you're going frame-by-frame, more care can be taken to ensure the characters move in a way that looks natural to the eye. When you don't do that and you try to mimic the style so much with software that's not prepared for that, you end up with the new Animaniacs reboot.

Which sucks because they've got some talented people that know what they're doing, but their work just doesn't work well with the outsourced studio they chose. Like, take one of the new boarders, Karl Hadrika for example. Dude's helped work on Long Gone Gulch, Bunnicula, SpongeBob, and currently the Animaniacs reboot. In the case of LGG, the designs are simple enough that the movement in his boards/animatics (especially when the creators are helping to board the material as well) wouldn't seem too jarring when made into a full-blown animated thing. But then you see his work on other shows and it just doesn't fit. Not because his boards are bad, but because the designs weren't originally made to stretch and bend that way.

Even his pilot short Becky Prim shows he can work well on his own with designs, doubly so when he can squash and stretch them to his every whim.
but under the mandate of Warner Bros. and with the team's insistence on using TMS(? I believe was the studio they picked) because nostalgia, it just doesn't end up looking good. Hell you could see it in the sneak peek where we saw a rough draft animatic. Looks okay on paper, but not when copied pretty much motion for motion with the only in-betweens being both handled by a computer and someone who's trying their damnedest to try and recreate the flow of movement from the original.
In essence, when you try and redesign the characters while also still trying to stick within the old style so much, the end result is going to look uncanny.

Animation aside, though: I'm alright with the reboot existing. It's a mixed bag, but it could have been a lot worse. ...Just please tone down on the politics, writers, like Jesus Christ. We get it: politics is a shitshow, and consumed all media. Please move onto the actual jokes. You're not a late-night talk show, you're an animated program for boomers who don't follow that shit that closely anymore.
Bread Fetishist said:
The worst part is, if you complain about it, the usual suspects will just come out and say “um, ackchyually, Animaniacs was always political, you chud”. It’s fucking irritating.
Click to expand...
"But they made jokes about Hilary and Clinton guys!!! Animanaics was always a critique on modern culture!!!"

And I'm just sitting here thinking two things:
1.) These fuckers went back in time to fuck with the Sistine Chapel, took over some made-up kingdom called Anvilania, cheated Death (twice), and taught us the state capitols and nations of the world. Animaniacs was never this expert commentary on political shenanigans and fellated itself on its own MAD-tier satire THIS MUCH.

2.) Just because they referenced that Clinton played a saxophone doesn't mean they really ever went any deeper than that. That's not to say they never covered that or even strayed away from current events at all ("A Quake! A Quake" comes to mind) but like, even they had the basic decorum to not bring up Clinton's affair in any episodes that I know of. Directly talking about pop culture figures and making commentary on specific news figures I guess is on brand for the demographic they're trying to appease now, so I guess I can't fault them for that, but it's still incredibly jarring. It comes off less like general commentary and more like the writers going "Lol look at how fuckin' dumb Seth and Trump are, they thinks they's is smart people" and expecting people to laugh.
 
Last edited:
  • Winner
  • Agree
  • Like
Reactions: UnsufficentBoobage, XtrmGamr719, Grass Mud Horse and 8 others
Bread Fetishist said:
The worst part is, if you complain about it, the usual suspects will just come out and say “um, ackchyually, Animaniacs was always political, you chud”. It’s fucking irritating.
Click to expand...
Did you catch the theme song posted earlier? It already does it itself right in the reboot’s intro.

Also, three more episodes in.

5 had Edward Snowden, and for a non-political lowlight there were a few minutes where it was outright shown that the old show’s missing characters ended up taxidermized and mounted. They reappeared at the very last second, but it was a weirdly dark scene before that happened.

6 had a bit that almost showed that they could totally do political humor without invoking Trump... until they ruined it at the last second by calling a literal Russian drone “more human than the last guy” and implied it’s the Russians that rigged the election.

7 was surprisingly politics-free unless you count Marie Antoinette, and was the best episode of the lot so far.
 
  • Informative
Reactions: XtrmGamr719, George Geef, Emperor Pilaf and 6 others
OmnipotentStupidity said:
I wouldn't say the animation's bad per se; when you're using ToonBoom - or whatever the fuck they're using - and you're rigging your models and moving them in such a way so as to be energetic and bouncy, it'll look a bit artificial but it'll still get the job done. If the shapes are simple enough. That's partially why DuckTales 2017's were redone in a simple style to accommodate for that.
It cannot do that with complex character models. Like holy shit, it's bad: the human characters/celebrity caricatures worked in the original because the original was hand-animated and didn't go too overboard with detail: when you animated everyone in overly grotesque detail (the Seth Meyers bit where he slowly smiles shows that off the most), the software just can't keep up! When its hand-drawn, or at least done without the software moving it and you're going frame-by-frame, more care can be taken to ensure the characters move in a way that looks natural to the eye. When you don't do that and you try to mimic the style so much with software that's not prepared for that, you end up with the new Animaniacs reboot.

Which sucks because they've got some talented people that know what they're doing, but their work just doesn't work well with the outsourced studio they chose. Like, take one of the new boarders, Karl Hadrika for example. Dude's helped work on Long Gone Gulch, Bunnicula, SpongeBob, and currently the Animaniacs reboot. In the case of LGG, the designs are simple enough that the movement in his boards/animatics (especially when the creators are helping to board the material as well) wouldn't seem too jarring when made into a full-blown animated thing. But then you see his work on other shows and it just doesn't fit. Not because his boards are bad, but because the designs weren't originally made to stretch and bend that way.

Even his pilot short Becky Prim shows he can work well on his own with designs, doubly so when he can squash and stretch them to his every whim.
but under the mandate of Warner Bros. and with the team's insistence on using TMS(? I believe was the studio they picked) because nostalgia, it just doesn't end up looking good. Hell you could see it in the sneak peek where we saw a rough draft animatic. Looks okay on paper, but not when copied pretty much motion for motion with the only in-betweens being both handled by a computer and someone who's trying their damnedest to try and recreate the flow of movement from the original.
Click to expand...
I think their reliance of using the TMS versions of the designs definitely hinders them and how the characters move underneath the new studios for a handful of reasons:

First off, the TMS episodes were never that consistent when it came to rendering out the characters, them being a Japanese company, there were multiple in-house animation teams and external studios working for them like on your typical anime. Add to that the amount of shorts they had to do on the original series, and you're not going to get a set of Warners that look the same from short to short. Not only that, but from personal experience by watching so many of these kinds of shows, any time a show animated in ToonBoom decides to use overly complex models and don't do at least some hand-drawn frames will always look janky when you try to move them outside of the limits of the rig unless the rig can accommodate it. And just judging from the first episode alone, I don't think the rigs supplied to Snipple or Titmouse were. Point is, if they really wanted to make the designs work, I really think they should have at least looked at the old series shorts done by StarToons and Wang. Both of who had far more simple and far more zany looking designs and animation that could have translated a little bit better, even when taking TMS's work into consideration.
 
  • Informative
Reactions: Emperor Pilaf, Dark Emporer Dood, The Great and Powerful Us and 4 others
Crescent Fresh said:
On the fourth episode now, and goddamn they can’t stop bringing up politics. Like, yes, they brought them up in the original series as well, but not literally every episode.

Not counting the theme (because, well, the original had Clinton anyway) there’s been:

1: That “current events” song, the Seth Meyers bit
2: The Trump cyclops (genuinely the worst scene of the show so far, it was awful) and a song about suffragettes
3. Probably the best episode so far, but still had a whole segment about the red scare.
4. GUN CONTROL.

The animation is significantly worse, as well.
Click to expand...
....fuck off with that.
 
  • Feels
  • DRINK!
Reactions: XtrmGamr719, George Geef, Sonic Sez and 3 others
Bread Fetishist said:
The worst part is, if you complain about it, the usual suspects will just come out and say “um, ackchyually, Animaniacs was always political, you chud”. It’s fucking irritating.
Click to expand...
It’s gotten to the point if you have any type of criticism of the reboot or just say “the new Animaniacs kind of sucks” you’ll immediately get accused of being triggered by Trump jokes.
It’s amazing how their using another cash grab reboot as their hill to die on.
 
  • Feels
  • Agree
Reactions: UnsufficentBoobage, XtrmGamr719, George Geef and 9 others
Bread Fetishist said:
The worst part is, if you complain about it, the usual suspects will just come out and say “um, ackchyually, Animaniacs was always political, you chud”. It’s fucking irritating.
Click to expand...
They think everything is political, no point in arguing. Just ignore and let them plot out their elaborate scheme to remove Biden from presidency so they can install one of AOC’s communist friends.
 
  • Like
Reactions: UnsufficentBoobage, George Geef and GrayWater
I’ve now finished the season, and it did not get any better in the slightest.

8: Brain runs for president and mind-rapes his wife. This episode also included one of only two debut shorts for the reboot, a small alien trapped as a child’s plaything. It wasn’t funny, and the decision to have the child played by a child did not help.
9: Extended Tucker Carlson parody, for some reason. Includes the second of two debut shorts, about a gnome that lives in people’s mouths and says what they’re really thinking. Painfully, painfully goddamn unfunny.
10: A fun setup about the Warners dealing with Russian knockoffs just leads to a bunch of tired Trump jokes.
11: The Halloween special, and one of only two episodes thankfully completely devoid of this dumb bullshit.
12: Two words: Manny Manspreader.
13: The first season ends with a song about the First Ladies, and the line “Thanks to Hillary Rodham Clinton, we almost had the first man!”

There are some mildly amusing shorts within all of this. 3, 5, 7, and 11 manage to largely avoid the politics (besides Snowden), and 6 was pretty okay until it all went wrong within like the last minute or two.

Overall, 3/10, really not looking forward to more episodes.
 
  • Informative
  • Horrifying
  • DRINK!
Reactions: UnsufficentBoobage, XtrmGamr719, George Geef and 13 others
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back