I don't care how good your animation is. I don't care how good your texture mapping is, or your pre rendered lighting, or your production design. Unless any of it supports a well written story, it's a glorified tech demo.
And that's all this show is. It's a bunch of short "films" mimicking things the "filmmakers" have seen before without any concrete understanding of why it worked in the first place.
The shorts are made by visual effects artists, not writers. The focus and effort was clearly on the animation WOW factor, and less delivering quality content, that people are paying for.
I think the episode that finally broke the camels back for me was the episode in season 2 when the giant washes up on the beach:
It looked gorgeous; the concept was completely original. THEN they have a TERRIBLE voice actor recite TERRIBLE, cliched, pretentious lines of dialogue that add NOTHING. Everything the narrator says can be SEEN on screen. Has this episode been dialogue-less, it would have been near perfect. But these films weren't made by story tellers, they were made by 3D effects artists. So none of them heard of the lesson they teach YEAR ONE in film school: show, don't tell. And on top of that, the dialogue is the most nonsensical lofty noise I have ever heard; a pretentious British voice actor reciting lines he doesn't understand, but they threw in a bunch of "smart" words, so that means the writing is intelligent, right?
Really embarrassing. 2/10 because the animation is very good in all episodes, but none of the episodes themselves are good because the writing is poorer than poor. And I'm reviewing this as a SHOW, not a tech demo. Which is clearly is.
2/10.
And that's all this show is. It's a bunch of short "films" mimicking things the "filmmakers" have seen before without any concrete understanding of why it worked in the first place.
The shorts are made by visual effects artists, not writers. The focus and effort was clearly on the animation WOW factor, and less delivering quality content, that people are paying for.
I think the episode that finally broke the camels back for me was the episode in season 2 when the giant washes up on the beach:
It looked gorgeous; the concept was completely original. THEN they have a TERRIBLE voice actor recite TERRIBLE, cliched, pretentious lines of dialogue that add NOTHING. Everything the narrator says can be SEEN on screen. Has this episode been dialogue-less, it would have been near perfect. But these films weren't made by story tellers, they were made by 3D effects artists. So none of them heard of the lesson they teach YEAR ONE in film school: show, don't tell. And on top of that, the dialogue is the most nonsensical lofty noise I have ever heard; a pretentious British voice actor reciting lines he doesn't understand, but they threw in a bunch of "smart" words, so that means the writing is intelligent, right?
Really embarrassing. 2/10 because the animation is very good in all episodes, but none of the episodes themselves are good because the writing is poorer than poor. And I'm reviewing this as a SHOW, not a tech demo. Which is clearly is.
2/10.