by Shockwave7 » Wed Mar 26, 2014 6:14 pm
This would explain why TF Prime bailed on the CGI format. CGI cartoons are notoriously expensive, and even introducing ONE new character is enormously compliated and costly, as was seen with Predaking. Creating, rigging and animating every new character takes up time and effort from the entire production crew. They had the entire season revolve around Predaking, and he wasn't even that good a character.
Not only that, but CGI tv shows haven't evolved to the point where they can do crowds, or large complicated scenes very well. It's just not cost effective. This is why CGI shows on tv are usually set on alien worlds, or sparsely populated towns, or deserts - where there isn't much scenery to render or crowds to deal with. Even Cybertron, while more complicated to the eye, was devoid of any visible life except for the already-created crew of robots that had already been on the show for two seasons. Any crowds that are rendered are 'clones', be it he MECH troopers (all masked), the Insecticons (all carbon copies), or the Terrorcons. There was no 'individuality' in any of the crowds because they were too lazy and/or cheap to spring for individualized characters. Note how on the "New York" episode in Season 2, they had them go immediately underground into the subways where the only other life form was the subway worker. This meant that they wouldn't have to render any crowds, cars, trucks or other things you would normally see above the surface in New York. I think this is primarily one of the reasons why the newer CGI "Batman" series failed so quickly. It was supposed to be set in Gotham City - but you could tell that (limited by expense and rendering technology) they were artificially rigging each episode to simplify the settings so there wouldn't be any crowds or complicated scenery. And for what was supposed to be a sprawling city, full of people and life, that just sucked.
This new show must be their attempt to fix that. By combining some CGI with hand drawn stuff, they must figure it will be much cheaper and easier to barf out new episodes and introduce more characters - as well as being able to put in crowds and varieties of people without needing CRAY computers and billions of dollars. Hopefully that means we'll see more than just a small core of characters. I like individual characterization, and more focus being put on fewer characters (The G1 cartoon jammed so many characters in that it felt impersonal). But I'd like more than just one or two new characters a season.
What think ye?
I could be wrong, but we have seen these character designs before and it's starting to get old. 
