Less than a fortnight to go now until Make Your Mark hits Netflix! The trailer above looks to contain the first three minutes of the 44-minute special. As the thumbnail doesn't give away anything remotely significant, I'm not going to bother with putting the entire post behind a spoiler cut. However, I will mention a couple of things now that do contain some spoilers, so pass this point at your own risk
First up, the visuals seem fine. I'm not attuned to the fine details as some more experienced animation-watchers may be, but although I can tell it's not quite up to the standard of the film I don't think I'd have any problems watching this for three-quarters of an hour. It's all bright and colourful, and I must admit having a break from the "bean mouth" appearance of Tell Your Tale is appealing. The backgrounds aren't especially complex, but again they seem to do the job unobtrusively enough.
As for the actual content, it's interesting that they addressed Sunny (sometimes?) being able to turn into an alicorn right up front; that suggests it'll be a plot point in this special. The exposition bit worked as well as these things really can, and the voice work seemed fine as well. I'm going to rewatch the film before the special comes out, and I just wonder whether I'll start to find the movie voices unusual after a while.
Given what's been happening in the 2D web series, I'd imagine there'll be a song or two in the special, but there's no hint in this trailer of what they might be like. Really, though, for me My Little Pony lives or dies by the quality of its character writing. That was a reason the film got a big tick, and we'll have to see whether the chemistry works out here. So far? I'm cautiously optimistic. Nothing to scare the horses. :P
SPOILER WARNING
ReplyDeleteThe pit opening up in the street in Maretime Bay because of disharmony brought on an immediate flashback to The Good Place. Then I began to wonder if G5 was actually the Pony Afterlife, and... yeah, wasted a good chunk of the afternoon thinking about that without being able to convince myself otherwise.
I'm not attuned to the fine details as some more experienced animation-watchers may be
ReplyDelete[Notices everyone is eyeballing him, looks around] …What? What are you looking at me for?
I get it though, buddy, I'll keep this brief. Well, one-comment-length-brief, anyway. The true plunge into the visuals can wait for my review of the special in a fortnight!
This was never going to be like the film's visuals, despite Hasbro blatantly stretching the truth in the press releases. I've been telling everyone for months the main difference would be the movement of the characters being far less nuanced, and stiff/jerky at times, with minimal acting subtlety. That is true here, and as befits sweatshop-budget CG animation, it fluctuates, giving the impression they only have enough time for one pass on most movements. Compare the ungainly movement of Izzy's "There she is!" at 1:08 to the shot of Pipp from 1:14-1:18, which omitting the computer-automated inbetweening, could almost pass for something in the film, movement-wise.
I focused on that so much myself, and got duped by the new marketing renders being film-quality, the massive drop in the rendering took my by surprise, though it makes perfect sense. This series can't afford the time or resources for even the small (compared to Pixar) amount of render farms the film would have had. Thus, every frame is processed through a simpler physics and rendering engine, one that doesn't handle light, texturing nuances, particles or diffusion nearly as well (this is why Izzy got a mane cut – particle hair animation is murder for rendering systems). Hence the day-go saturation and flatness everywhere. This might be more forgivable if, like the movement, it didn't fluctuate so much from shot to shot, with those that have less elements to keep track of faring much better.
…did I lose the less-animation savvy in the crowd? Sorry, heh. Ask me for further clarification on anything if I lost you.
The other major thing; any new characters/locations, as opposed to those ported from the film, look far worse. With film elements, you still feel the higher-quality of the models, facial rigs, etc. New elements have that design offness common to models they didn't have time to iterate on. The proportions of Posey's face in the trailer is so warped, and the base colours on Pipp's mane stylists don't blend well. Then there's the sets; everyone's noticed the textures of the new lighthouse, and the ghastly interior of the mane salon. They both look so much better in the webseries, something I never thought I'd say.
Look, a work of animation can be technically flawed six ways to Sunday, it doesn't matter if it doesn't distract in the experience of watching it. The film took plenty of shortcuts, but was smart about it, and thus they never bothered. Sadly, I find they do distract here, more for the fluctuation if anything (the above clip has plenty of cases of the vocal delivery not quite matching the movements, this will be a norm). It all comes back to the same problem with Disney DTV sequels. Whatever their visual merits, they demand we compare them to visual works of art, and thus they call attention to all the ways they don't match up. Same with this; the merits here, and there are plenty of them, just stand out less than the deficiencies.
Had this film gone to cinemas, rather than the same platform as the series, maybe we wouldn't be comparing them so directly. Sadly, Hasbro needed the film to be CG for market penetration, and insisted the series be too for branding continuity. This, I'm sure, is the main reason we didn't get it as a Toon Boom show, which, much like FiM, could have been quite the showcase, if not as standout.
It's not ungainly on the whole, far from it. But my hopes it might be close to the visuals of the shows for Dreamworks' Dragons or Skylanders were well off, even if it's above preschool animation.
Interesting! The animation isn't as good as I'd hoped, but it's also not as bad as I'd feared - and it's written by GM Berrow. I'm going in cautiously optimistic.
ReplyDeleteIt's looking like cautious optimism is the order of the day! As for the animation, something Mike said struck me: that they only got one pass. So if something looked great first time, then yay. If it didn't, provided it was passable, then that's what you get, folks. Hence I suppose the inconsistency in how smooth things look.
Deletethat they only got one pass. [… ] Hence I suppose the inconsistency in how smooth things look.
DeleteHeh, not quite. That's down to, in any given frame/shot, how many onscreen elements there are to juggle (characters, props, light sources, particle effects, how much of the set is visible, etc. – sometimes offscreen elements have to be calculated too). The more there are, the more rendering hours the machine needs to achieve a consistent look, and thus, on a tight schedule, corners are cut for shots all over. Elements not ported over from the film, like the lighthouse, salon and new characters, are designed and modelled without nearly as many iterations as the film characters/props/locations.
My mention of "only getting one pass" was referring exclusively to character animation, how the ponies move. It's a mixture of several factors; on a film, the director, or typically the animation supervisor, discusses with the given animator the approach to be taken for that shot. They do a rough quick pass, jerky movement and all. Feedback is had, maybe some retakes, and once the rough pass is okay, they do it for real, and even there, they have the freedom to redo parts that don't turn out quite right the first time. Most importantly, they usually go back in and manually adjust the automated in-between frames of the movement. All this takes lots of time – on a given Disney or Pixar film, one animator usually only animates a minute of footage over a year-and-a-half. That figure would be higher on A New Generation, given they only had 48 animators and 82 minutes of film sans credits (not including the 2D prologue done separately), so almost 2 minutes per animator over about 15 months.
None of that for TV CG animation! No hands-on session with the higher-ups, no iterating, and far less adjusting of automated movement in between keyframes. I believe they're given a strict time period to do their given shots (comparable to tv anime in Japan where they're only allowed x drawings per episode, hence alternating between static shots with only mouth opening/closing to more elaborate shots for where it matters), and thus the animator has to not only do it in one pass, but take shortcuts. Hence blips like Izzy's dialogue at 1:08 above. And they don't have time to intricately study the line readings and fine-tune the movement to match the tone and emoting either. Plus, TV CG animation is often farmed out to overseas studios where the animators might not know English all that well, thus limiting their ability to intuitively match the lines quickly. This is also why the non-focal characters in a given shot have random fidgety movements, cheapest way to avoid being perfectly still.
Given all that, you get fluctuation between the odd shot looking movie-level quality in their movement, the valley of shots like Izzy, and mostly a mild but perceptible stiffness to most movements.
One last thing: the reason the newer marketing images of the characters look movie-quality is because, being static images, they can afford to render them the same time-consuming way Boulder Media did for the film. It's quite ingenious and sneaky on Hasbro's part, partially disguising to casual parents how the show is emphatically not the same visual quality as the movie. Least when they're picking up toys for their kids and looking at the packaging.
Thank you for that! :) Heh, have my readers noticed that animation isn't my specialist subject? :D
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