Look at this.
LOOK AT THIS
Why they're using this as a promotional image is beyond me, it seems to demonstrate everything that's wrong with (the visual side of) these series. Weird unnecessary smoke and electricity aside, I could recreate this exact frame with my TR Trypticon, a few cardboard boxes and some orange crepe paper. You can see the layers that everything was pasted into the frame on top of each other - smoke, fire, Trypticon, explosion, buildings - and they don't look like they exist in the same space, the lighting doesn't even seem to be consistent between objects! (There's an explosion right next to Trypticon, how is he being lit from above?) The explosion itself is so bad and it doesn't even look like it's being caused by Trypticon; it's just going off near him while he stands there statically looking dully surprised - how do you even GIVE a dinosaur an expression of dull surprise?!
This is not what animation is. Animation is for doing things that are impressive or even impossible in the real world, to look good and in cases like this look cool. There's toy accuracy to a fault on your 3D models (Cybertron/Galaxy Force, which I think is actually kinda cool aesthetically, occasional shortcomings aside), and then there's creating your city-sized dinosaur robot with a totally unarticulated chunky box for an entire torso "'cause that's what the toy looks like!" They're robots, yes, but priority NUMBER ONE in any animated Transformers media should be to make the Transformers feel alive, like more than just robots. Trypticon here doesn't have a spark of life to him, robotic or otherwise - it literally just looks like they took a photo of the toy, ran it through a cel-shading filter and stuck it into the show, and that's just sad to see.
Just... please, if there's one thing the CW series was competent at it was looking good in still images - don't take that away from us. I know it's just a single image and it's near-pointless to judge it yet, but if this was what they thought was good enough to submit as promotional material, I shudder to think what they may have decided was "good enough" for the end product.
Oh man, whew, that went on way longer than I meant it to. Hopefully that's all outta my system now though, and I can go back to not being a jaded cynical codger. On a less downer note:
This is a bit too long for me to feel okay about putting it in my signature, but I want you to know how much I want to, by god do I want to. What a beautiful piece of writingBlack Hat wrote:Sigma Magnus wrote:I hope they defeat Trypticon by attacking his hips.
Oh god I can see it now.
>"I am Trypticon! Tremble before my-"
>*CRACK*
>"What was that?"
>Trypticon's hips give way and he tumbles to the floor
>His tail falls off
>His chest falls open with a groaning metal sound and his vital components all fall out
>"...I hate this cartoon."