Sorry for my voice today, I'm coming down with strep throat and a cold.
Gotta love holidays.
Today, I'll be reviewing a pilot that is actually looking to be on the up and up.
There's a good chance now that it'll become an actual show on Cartoon Network,
so I decided to give the pilot a review because I like to help fellow writers and animators out.
It's the whole reason I made TechHeart, which also was supposed to have animation tutorials, but those take forever to make.
So, Owen Dennis, this one's for you.
First, let's look at the most obvious. The visuals.
The animation is amazingly smooth, the colors can feel a little blendy at times where they're a little too alike in saturation,
but they are consistent in that the color differences aren't distracting.
The style feels… college student.
Pilots typically have a different style than the final product as the network tries to keep two of their shows from looking too much alike,
and they also want everything to be more appealing.
The style here is already appealing save for the too level saturation of the colors.
The style itself is a bit inconsistent in that if you showed me the line art for the dog and the line art for the girl,
then I wouldn't be able to tell they were from the same show.
To be fair, very few published shows have that level of consistency, so that may be a harsh criticism.
Next, I'll be looking at the audio.
There's nothing that really sticks out as wrong audio-wise other than the loud audio when the gun starts firing,
and it wasn't until I listened with audio only that I realized that there's a lot of audio deadtime, where it's quite.
When there's a lot of back-and-forth dialogue,
you definitely don't want any background noise being too distracting,
but you do want some white noise to fill in the blanks between lines.
The beginning scale car was the worst offender of audio deadtime, and a gentle mechanical whir would have easily fixed this.
Audio deadtime, I understand is a very tedious problem to solve without the background noise being too distracting,
and I may be the only person it bothers.
Really, it's so there's a sense of time passing in the audio,
the same reason why it's recommended visually that even if the foreground character is being still, not everything in a shot should be still.
Next, I'll be talking about characterization.
The amount of traits a character has should be proportionate to the length of the work, which is why in 11 minute programs,
the characters start out with a few defining traits, but when Season 2 comes along, they begin to become full-fledged,
and by season 3, they're three-dimensional.
For an 8 minute work, most of the characters are very appropriate trait-wise.
You have 1-1, who are pessimism and optimism,
and Atticus, who is the kingly hero type.
For the first 8 minutes, that's really all you need,
and exposing more traits would be a little much for an eight minute shot.
Then, however, you have Tulip.
She is discovering herself throughout this episode, which feels like a little much for eight minutes.
In 22 minutes, sure, you could probably have some character development, but 8 minutes is just too short of an amount of time.
As far as tone and mood go (and for my audience, tone is what the work is feeling, and mood is what the audience is supposed to feel),
I'm guessing the mood is supposed to be mysterious for the most part,
but I don't pick up on mystery, so that's kinda a fault on my side.
Tone, however, tone can seem to change a little too quickly.
I can't figure out when Tulip is scared or joking around, when things are intense or lighthearted,
and faking an anti-climax is just… doesn't do it for me.
At times, because of this, Tulip seems less like a character, and more of a catalyst.
Comedic timing is good, but I'm gonna be honest with you, My Dude.
It took me three times to watch this short all the way through.
The fart car joke was just so out of place, and the voice actor didn't even seem to want to say the word fart,
like it was just shoveled in there.
The first time I saw this pitch, I stopped watching the moment they said fart car,
the second time, I stopped watching the moment they entered the fart car and it turns out it was real,
the third time, I finally gave it a full shot, and yeah, getting through the cheap, shoed in fart joke was worth it,
but there was no reason for it to be there.
It doesn't fit at all with the rest of the jokes.
The Corgi jokes were good though, and the comedy of 1-1 being such a foil of themself.
So, on a technical level, this short holds up a lot better than most other pilots,
and on a personal level, I like this pilot better than most published cartoons.
I'm not really a mystery person, like that aspect of Gravity Falls was kinda lost on me,
but even with that, the main aspect of this show,
and the genre of cartoon that there's a really big market for right now,
it's still a decent show to me.
I mean, as a first episode, this would stand out to me worlds more than the big big shows like Steven Universe.
I mean, this is on par with Avatar: The Last Airbender's first episode,
where it doesn't dick around for the eight minutes. And I respect the hell out of that.
Please, make this a show, Cartoon Network.
Not only is there a gigantic market for mystery right now,
but even to someone like me that's just not at all turned on to mystery, it's enjoyable.
I'd like to see Tulip a little more defined, but other than that, it's already show-ready.
It's got great animators, good audio mixing
(and I know I complained about that earlier, but it's actually really good, as I said, I had to turn off the visual and focus on only the audio to catch deadtime),
it has good writing, all it needs is a more defined protagonist and maybe some color upgrades,
and you have got yourself hopefully something that's on par or better than the other shows of the Cartoon Golden Age
like Adventure Time, Steven Universe, Gravity Falls, Wander Over Yonder.
Hell, Dog, usually I get sick of even things I like like El Tigre when I do these reviews
because I have to watch them over and over, but this?
I didn't get sick of it. Not remotely.
Well, okay, I feel dread before the guns blaze because it's loud, and yeah, I don't like that the first joke is Fart Car,
which may have worked if it wasn't literally the first joke,
but I'm not sick of this episode.
It has marketing potential. It has merit.
And, with all the re-runs of complete failures to show critics like Teen Titans Go, you could really use some more merit.
Something to fill the hole that Adventure Time's inevitable downfall left.
This is is.
This was a TechHeart Review,
and I still don't know how to end videos.
[multiple string and percussion instruments at once]
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