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Changing Tastes
Aug. 30th, 2007 11:44 amI must admit I didn't really like Animaniacs when it came out. Though actually, it perhaps it was more of a situation where I didn't pay much attention to it. Just before Animaniacs there'd been a rush of these old-toons-redone-as-babies.
Flinstone Kids, A Pup Named Scooby Doo, TinyToons and so on. Most of them were badly animated, overly politically correct, and felt like they existed only to extend copyright on characters and rehash old storylines. Now I admit I did watch some of these. (Mostly TinyToons)
There was a lot of other stuff going on in my life with Animaniacs came out. I'd kind of liked Tinytoons and Animaniacs felt like a thin replacement for it (which was already a cleaned up version of Looney Tunes) so... for the most part, I gave it a pass.
A few days ago, Stacey and I were at Fry's and they had a bundled (20-DVD set) of the complete series of Animaniacs. She liked it and persuaded me to pick it up. I was tepid to it, but it wasn't terribly expensive and was animation so we did.
Anyhow... Now that I've watched about 6 DVDs from it, I can say... Not too bad. The stories are pretty predictable and their writers seemed to run out of ideas after about 20 episodes and started recycling, but the saving grace is the animation. Okay, it does go off-model quite a bit in places but... It MOVES! They characters are constantly in motion and doing exaggerated expressions. There aren't any of these damned long holds on dead images or long pans across a still and their lip-sync is done with the whole head and body. Not just mouth-shapes pasted onto a still picture.
It also has full orchestration and sound like the old Looney Tunes stuff and quite a bit of original Foley instead of just using the gawdawful canned HB library that every show uses these days. As something to watch for animation ideas, it's definitely great. The characters are clean and stylized but have the expressiveness of characters done by animators rather than characters done by logo designers.
Where the show really went wrong are the limitations they placed on it. You can feel it. The writing was censored heavily and the animators must have been required to stay within some 'company style and standards' sort of thing. Those limitations kept it from being REALLY brilliant. Allegedly, the characters are completely wild, uncontrolled, and nonsensical. If they'd really been allowed to do and be that, it could have been a fantastic show.
As is... The animation is fun and great for someone wanting to learn more expressive animation (In a completely different way from Ren and Stimpy or classic cartoons) but the stories are bland, and it leaves you wishing they'd been able to really cut loose.
Flinstone Kids, A Pup Named Scooby Doo, TinyToons and so on. Most of them were badly animated, overly politically correct, and felt like they existed only to extend copyright on characters and rehash old storylines. Now I admit I did watch some of these. (Mostly TinyToons)
There was a lot of other stuff going on in my life with Animaniacs came out. I'd kind of liked Tinytoons and Animaniacs felt like a thin replacement for it (which was already a cleaned up version of Looney Tunes) so... for the most part, I gave it a pass.
A few days ago, Stacey and I were at Fry's and they had a bundled (20-DVD set) of the complete series of Animaniacs. She liked it and persuaded me to pick it up. I was tepid to it, but it wasn't terribly expensive and was animation so we did.
Anyhow... Now that I've watched about 6 DVDs from it, I can say... Not too bad. The stories are pretty predictable and their writers seemed to run out of ideas after about 20 episodes and started recycling, but the saving grace is the animation. Okay, it does go off-model quite a bit in places but... It MOVES! They characters are constantly in motion and doing exaggerated expressions. There aren't any of these damned long holds on dead images or long pans across a still and their lip-sync is done with the whole head and body. Not just mouth-shapes pasted onto a still picture.
It also has full orchestration and sound like the old Looney Tunes stuff and quite a bit of original Foley instead of just using the gawdawful canned HB library that every show uses these days. As something to watch for animation ideas, it's definitely great. The characters are clean and stylized but have the expressiveness of characters done by animators rather than characters done by logo designers.
Where the show really went wrong are the limitations they placed on it. You can feel it. The writing was censored heavily and the animators must have been required to stay within some 'company style and standards' sort of thing. Those limitations kept it from being REALLY brilliant. Allegedly, the characters are completely wild, uncontrolled, and nonsensical. If they'd really been allowed to do and be that, it could have been a fantastic show.
As is... The animation is fun and great for someone wanting to learn more expressive animation (In a completely different way from Ren and Stimpy or classic cartoons) but the stories are bland, and it leaves you wishing they'd been able to really cut loose.
