>>41909Some thoughts, after watching the first ten minutes of it:
-It's incredibly ironic that this is a reboot of a creator-driven show with almost none of the original creators brought on.
-It looks consistently inconsistent. You have great drawings mixed with awful drawings mixed with astonishingly mediocre ones. It results in a very strange look, and I can't really compare it to anything. All I can say is that it's overall not great.
-The colors are also kind of muddy, and there doesn't seem to be much thought to their selection. Reminds me a lot of the later seasons of The Powerpuff Girls, if I can compare it to anything. I've seen much worse, but I've also seen much better.
-I will, however, give praise to the storyboarding. The compositions can be maybe a bit too centered, buy overally they're nice and clear, and generally appropriate for the shots they're being applied to. The cutting, for the most part, is also pretty solid, and gives a nice sense of continuity.
-The backgrounds are also pretty good. They do a nice job of framing the characters, and provide context for their actions without ever getting in the way. I get the impression they were drawn by fans of the original show.
-The animation itself (the way it moves) isn't anything amazing, and it can be a bit to fast, but it's probably the best use of hybrid flash/traditional I've seen in a while. R&S's HB-influenced limited animation lends itself well to that kind of thing.
-Getting back to the negatives, the writing is mediocre-to-bad. There's good individual gags (I like the dumbass welcome to hell sign), but it just doesn't click together as a whole. I know John K. would say that Ren and Stimpy was never a writer-driven show, but the writing was indeed a very important part of why the original worked. Spumco had a very top-down, holistic approach to constructing a cartoon, starting with the very broad broad-strokes and then working its way down to the hyperspecifics of storyboards. It leant the show a very cinamatic feel, even without the high-quality final layouts. The reboot, by comparison, feels like a complete mess in terms of structure. Things move at a very flat pace; important moments that should get a good amount of time breeze by, and gags that should last a few seconds are held on way past the point where they're actually funny. The plot itself takes way too long to kick in, and is TV-y in a way that the original show did its best to rebel against.
I can't say for sure, but the culprit seems to be scripts. I'm not going to say that script driven cartoons don't have their place, because there's plenty of great script-driven shows. But in my experience as an indie animator, it's a lot harder to control the pacing of an individual scene in a script than it is a storyboard. Scripts are very this-then-that; you say the literal events that happen and the sequence they happen in, but you have very little upfront control of when they happen beyond the cadence of the dialog. It's a much more segmented way of making a cartoon, and it really doesn't work for a show like R&S.
-The voice acting is
very bad. It sounds like a fucking video game tiein, where nobody knows or cares what they're saying and is just there to collect a paycheck.
Overall, it's not good, but it's a lot better than I was expecting it to be; about on par with the later games-era episodes. I find it more tolerable to watch than APC, but it's also a lot less interesting.