The Energon Pub

craggy wrote:

PrymeStriker wrote:I haven't seen one cartoon halfway near the level of Prime's animation in my life. If you have, please show me where I may find it.

Michael Bay's Transformers A Film By Michael Bay - 2007

He said "cartoon".

Sabrblade wrote:

craggy wrote:

PrymeStriker wrote:I haven't seen one cartoon halfway near the level of Prime's animation in my life. If you have, please show me where I may find it.

Michael Bay's Transformers A Film By Michael Bay - 2007

He said "cartoon".

I can read.

craggy wrote:

Sabrblade wrote:

craggy wrote:

PrymeStriker wrote:I haven't seen one cartoon halfway near the level of Prime's animation in my life. If you have, please show me where I may find it.

Michael Bay's Transformers A Film By Michael Bay - 2007

He said "cartoon".

I can read.

Live action feature films w/ special effects =/= cartoons.

Sabrblade wrote:

craggy wrote:

Sabrblade wrote:

craggy wrote:

PrymeStriker wrote:I haven't seen one cartoon halfway near the level of Prime's animation in my life. If you have, please show me where I may find it.

Michael Bay's Transformers A Film By Michael Bay - 2007

He said "cartoon".

I can read.

Live action feature films w/ special effects =/= cartoons.

okay. Akira. Batman: TAS/Batman Beyond/Superman: TAS/Justice League/JLU. Futurama. Cowboy Bebop. Spirited Away. the cut scenes from any number of video games.

craggy wrote:Akira.

No idea what that is.

Batman: TAS/Batman Beyond/Superman: TAS/Justice League/JLU. Futurama. Cowboy Bebop.

While they're all animated quite nicely, they're nowhere near Prime, which rates to a theatrical film's detail of movement and texture.

Spirited Away.

Lost me again.

the cut scenes from any number of video games.

Video games aren't cartoons either. I'm talking about TV shows, man.

I guess it all boils down to taste, but I don't think the fact that Prime has won six Daytime Emmy awards for outstanding animation three years in a row is a sign that this cartoon has "adequate" animation quality.

Might we continue this conversation in a PM if you have more to add? We've drifted miles away from the original topic over the past week.

oh boy, considering your response, I don't see anything to be gained by continuing the discussion. Enjoy your bubble.

Well, for what its worth, I enjoyed it, yeah the graphics rendering is dated, but as a person in the IT industry (I also dabble in 3d rending), I was able to enjoy it cause I understood how it would be dated considering how fast technology upgrades and evolves. I wasn't expecting anything of the caliber of Prime.

craggy wrote:

Sabrblade wrote:

craggy wrote:

Sabrblade wrote:

craggy wrote:

PrymeStriker wrote:I haven't seen one cartoon halfway near the level of Prime's animation in my life. If you have, please show me where I may find it.

Michael Bay's Transformers A Film By Michael Bay - 2007

He said "cartoon".

I can read.

Live action feature films w/ special effects =/= cartoons.

okay. Akira.

Theatrical movie with a huge budget, also more on this later.

Batman: TAS/Batman Beyond/Superman: TAS/Justice League/JLU.

They look good, and for the most part have very good animation, however their animation is dated and does show its age. TAS also suffered from Studio AKOM ruining the animation to some episodes. I still prefer the animation style in TAS with its dark paper backgrounds over Prime's style though.

Futurama.

Incredibly dated with its use of CGI.

Cowboy Bebop.

OVA, which have higher animation budgets and longer production times than TV shows.

Spirited Away.

Again a theatrical movie with a huge budget, by a studio that is famous for its animation.

the cut scenes from any number of video games.

Video games are not cartoons, on top of that the cut scenes have the same budged as a TV show, but have far less material to produce. On top of that, the animation in Prime is handled by the same studio that does the cut scnes for Street Fighter and DOA.

Here's the thing, and I'm going to quote Shinji Aramaki, the director of the Appleseed movie, from an interview he had with a German anime magazine. I'm sure he said something similar in different interviews.
Appleseed uses the most modern and top of the line technology available in animation today (2004), and it looks fantastic now. But it is doomed to look and feel dated, technology in computer animation moves so fast that material that looks brilliant today will look terrible and dated just a few years down the line. Traditional 2D animation does not have this problem, that is an art form that has reached its peak and perfection years ago. Take Princess Mononoke for example, it is almost ten years old now. It looked breathtaking then and it still looks as breathtaking now because there haven't been any notable advances in the technology it uses.

Prime, just like Beast Wars back in the day, uses the most advanced and most hardcore animation technology on TV.

Beast Wars does not, nor did it look as good or better than Batman TAS did, yet its animation was of a much higher technical standard. And Prime does the same again, the only show on TV that can actually be compared to TF Prime is "Beware the Batman", since the animation technology is similar, yet Prime outshines it in every way. Not taking into account that Beware the Batman is cancelled due to not being a success.

2D animation has peaked and cannot be improved upon, it's maxed out, it can also only replicate TF Prime's qualities by going insanely overboard with its budget and then only as a movie, you can't make a TV show in traditional animation, that has all the subtle little things Prime has, like the subtle little twitches, and flinches in the faces you barely notice.

so, Dead Metal, do you disagree that TF Prime shows its budget?

Do I need to quote myself so that people realise that I never said it was crappy animation? I said it was good, but it shows its budget and that over the entire spectrum of visual effects, it's at about the same place now, as Beast Wars was when it was made.

Sadly, people seem to feel the need to reply to every phrase I write individually, challenging my points, without grasping what I was saying in the first place.

Blast Cannon wrote:I love these message boards and their pedantic arguments.

To get back on the Beast Wars bandwagon. A separate post so that the other one doesn't become toooooo insanely long and even more tedious.

Yes Beast Wars season 1 looks bad, especially the first few episodes. And even more from today's standpoint, it's as I sated previously a side effect of it being done in CGI.
Back then it was breath taking due to it being only the 3rd show on TV to be fully animated in 3D renders. However, we've since seen better CGI animation, Seasons 2 and 3 for instance, as well as Beast Machines. On top of that there was this huge CGI cartoon boom of the 2000s.
And even more on top of that, TV screen technology has improved since the 90s, the standard now being 1080 p, with some already having 4K, and in the realms of computer games even higher than that. Beast Wars, like ever show back then was animated for a resolution of 450 p, and watching it on our super awesome modern screens sadly shows us little imperfections, such as where the individual parts of the models meet, revealing that in some cases they aren't even attached properly, having "empty" areas here and there (the detailing on Rhinox's face for instance has a few minor anomalies).
But it's not the show's fault and doesn't mean I dislike it, in fact it makes me like it even more.
You see Beast Wars was the poster child of TV CGI, and without it CGI animation wouldn't be where it's now, including video games.
If you watch the first season and completely ignore everything but the animation, you can actually watch it improving. It improves so much actually, that the first 8 episodes could almost be considered to be the team's training material, since they look incredibly different and are done differently from each other. The show then finds its groove around episode 10 and then stays consistently the same quality for the most part.

The main reason why I sat through BW season 1 with the recent DVD release and didn't even consider skipping it due to the animation, was because I was nostalgic for it, I knew that kind of animation from my youth and I knew it would get better. And it did.

Dead Metal wrote:And Prime does the same again, the only show on TV that can actually be compared to TF Prime is "Beware the Batman", since the animation technology is similar, yet Prime outshines it in every way. Not taking into account that Beware the Batman is cancelled due to not being a success.

Even though Prime has objectively more advanced animation, I personally like the look of the current TMNT cartoon better overall.

Dead Metal wrote:The main reason why I sat through BW season 1 with the recent DVD release and didn't even consider skipping it due to the animation, was because I was nostalgic for it, I knew that kind of animation from my youth and I knew it would get better. And it did.

For me as a kid, I was taken by the sheer fact that it was CGI instead of a 2D cartoon, which is why I also enjoyed Voltron: The Third Dimension back then.

While the animation was indeed stunning, what most appealed to me was robots transforming into dinosaurs. That never gets old.

As a kid I didn't quite get the plots and characterization, but it looked pretty and things exploded frequently. Everything was good as long as that tiger hippie wasn't preaching about his bizarre philosophical musings.

Today... I still think it looks good, bearing in mind technical limitations. Some episodes of Season 1 still have legitimately impressive moments, such as Cheetor's dream sequences, or the flying island in "The Trigger", or the plant seed from "Gorilla Warfare", or the mobile hologram display from "Before the Storm". Some things... like moving water, and the empty sky, look abjectly primitive.

Beast Wars is probably my favorite Transformers TV series. I like the animation and the story a lot. Some of the characters I love and some I hate (I just want to beat Rattrap to death with the Forge of Solace hammer). Although it was well-written, it got cheesy even for a TF cartoon, like going through every character one by one to show them transforming and saying "(Insert name here), TERRORIZE/MAXIMIZE!!!!!!!! RAAAAAWWWRRRGH!!!!!!" And then Megatron saying "Yesss..." twenty times per episode. I have to say, though, Garry Chalk and David Kaye did an excellent job voice acting.

OptiMagnus wrote: I have to say, though, Garry Chalk and David Kaye did an excellent job voice acting.

I always thought Kaye would have been perfect for Bayverse Megatron. He could have pulled off the deep, booming voice for Megatron. Hugo Weaving, who admittedly didn't give a **** about the character and was just collecting a paycheck, was unnecessary and probably cost Paramount a lot more.

just make sure to skip b.m.

Rodimus Prime wrote:I always thought Kaye would have been perfect for Bayverse Megatron. He could have pulled off the deep, booming voice for Megatron. Hugo Weaving, who admittedly didn't give a **** about the character and was just collecting a paycheck, was unnecessary and probably cost Paramount a lot more.

Then we are in the same team. I even made a video with Kaye as Movie Megatron:



For me: Kaye Megatron have this "demonical thing" in his voice, this unique sense of style. He is mad, he is powerfull and power hungry, yet still sounds like a Gentelman. Just like Megatron should.

TurboMMaster, your video won't play because of this message:

Change your Country on Youtube...

PrymeStriker wrote:

craggy wrote:Akira.

No idea what that is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiliiRrQa0U

Spirited Away.

Lost me again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6az9wGfeSgM

Just so you know what they are.