by underwear ninja » Wed Dec 26, 2007 8:50 pm
Aniamted's Pilot just aired in my time zone, and I took the time out of a busy personal schedul to watch it. For the most part I went into this with a fairly open mind, or as open as I could muster. I'll split this up into a few main categories: story/plot, animation, characters, and an overall grade.
STORY/ PLOT.
I really liked the plot the most. It borrowed ideas from the Bay Movie, but it didn't make them too obvious and downscaled to a small and comforting level that you wouldn't be like "hey, like in the movie," except for one or two parts. It stays fairly on track and relevent, and doesn't spoil too much of things to come.
ANIMATION.
To be honest, I was a bit dissapointed with alot of the animation. It seems like the different teams working on it animated different parts of it, and it mixes together incoherently. Mouths only move half the time and the vehicles often look more like they're sliding along instead of moving on wheels, and simple stuff like walking and making hand gestures is really stilted. The irony of this is that the action is animated very smoothly for the most part, but it doesn't quite compensate for it. Also, you'll be relieved that they kept the Japanese Anime cliches so present in Teen Titans (one of the crews who worked on the show) are kept to very few (I only saw one or two very obvious uses of them)
CHARACTERS.
I was fairly impressed with the characters, with there really only being two I truly hated (Sentinel Prime, and Sari.) Sentinel suits the role of a rival: he's cocky and arrogant, but almost to the point that he has those qualities TOO much. Sari is more useful than most kids from past series, but her design is really sort of unsightly (as most of the kids in the show are- I think the Super Robot Monkey Team people designed the kids) and her role in the show is sort of "god mody" as she even outdoes a certain Autobot Medic in a certain role ALL THE TIME. Speaking of Ratchet, he's the character I like most. His voice suits his design and personality and role perfectly, and his personality is very lovable (grizzled and cranky). I didn't care much for Prime's voice, as its not very distinguishable from some other characters, especually when he puts on his face plate. The Decepticons all have really nice voice work. I was questioning the Sponge Bob voice actor for Starscream, but it works very well to my suprise.
OVERALL: B-
This is very much an improvement over the past 3 Transformers series (RiD was good in my opinion) but that's still not saying too much. I personally feel the series has a "too many chefs spoil the stew" situation going on right now, but it has alot of time to polish out the rough spots. I have hope for the series in general, and hope that I can be completely sold in the first few real episodes.
There's my review. I tried not to spoil any of the actual episode for you guys, so there's obviously some stuff I left out that I wanted to comment on (like Blitz Wing or the similarities to the Bay movie) so if you have any questions please send me a note or contact me some other way, so we can keep this spoiler free.
Shockwave would think my posts are logical...
