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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWEtCsi3Eo8 The Dragon Prince is a new animated TV series on Netflix from the head writer of Avatar the Last Airbender. Instead of drawing inspiration from eastern lore, this series takes from western fantasy media to depict a world full of mages, elves, and other assorted fantasy races. They've made it less white than the typical fantasy though, as the king and his youngest son are both dark skinned. The gist of the plot is this: Long ago, the humans used dark magic, and were driven off by the dragons and elves to one end of the continent. Now, after humans killed the dragon king and his egg, war is imminent. As forces gather, the elves attempt to assassinate the human king Harrow and his heir, the young prince Ezran. One among the elves, the young Rayla, discovers that the dragon king's egg wasn't in fact destroyed, but stolen. Together with Ezran and his step-brother Callum, she undertakes to return the egg to the dragons to prevent war. But the mage Viren, King Harrow's advisor, is intent on war. He seizes power after the king dies in the assassination attempt, and sends his children Claudia and Soren after the fugitives. A lot of it will seem familiar to fans of Avatar. Claudia and Soren are like less evil version of Azula and Zuko, united to bring in a trio of fugitive kids. There's magical powers utilizing runes and hand gestures instead of martial arts, and familiar voice actors. The biggest difference is that this show was not animated in Korea. Instead its produced entirely in North America. As such they did not have access to the drawing talent to animate it in 2d. They went the cell-shaded 3d route, and decided to go whole hog on the anime aesthetic by using only 8 drawings per second (animating on 3s). This is an...unfortunate choice. More experienced Japanese studios doing CG anime long ago learned that animating on 3s is really really hard to make look good, even though almost all hand-drawn anime in only 8 drawings per second. Successful Japanese CG shows like Houseki no Kuni animate on 2s (12 drawings per second) as a compromise between the hand drawn aesthetic and the rigidity of 3d models. I also don't think the western animators are paying enough attention to arcs because of the lower frame rate. The way things move would be classified in most studios as a "stepped blocking pass" as opposed to finished animation. If you can get used to the animation style I think the show is worth it, and they did a very good job on the character models and shading. The shadow shapes on the faces, armor, and clothing are very nice, which is another thing that CG anime struggles with. Hopefully it gets a second season but starts animating with a higher frame-rate.
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Sep 17, 2018 21:33
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Ccs posted:The biggest difference is that this show was not animated in Korea. Instead its produced entirely in North America. As such they did not have access to the drawing talent to animate it in 2d. They went the cell-shaded 3d route, and decided to go whole hog on the anime aesthetic by using only 8 drawings per second (animating on 3s). This is an...unfortunate choice. More experienced Japanese studios doing CG anime long ago learned that animating on 3s is really really hard to make look good, even though almost all hand-drawn anime in only 8 drawings per second. Successful Japanese CG shows like Houseki no Kuni animate on 2s (12 drawings per second) as a compromise between the hand drawn aesthetic and the rigidity of 3d models. Having watched the first two episodes this is absolutely a problem for me. It looks terribad, was there really no way to go in after the fact and fix that? Who let it get that far? The story also didn't hit that well for me in that time to make up for it. The dog-lizard is great, he's not enough to keep me watching though.
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Sep 17, 2018 22:33
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Jesus Christ, this show really is front-loaded with exposition. I'm less offended by the limited animation than this clear contravention of the "show, don't tell" rule.
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Sep 17, 2018 22:54
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I wanted to like this show and watch more but after 2 episodes i was actually experiencing a kind of motion sickness. The animation is loving atrocious.
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Sep 17, 2018 23:12
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Maelstache posted:Jesus Christ, this show really is front-loaded with exposition. I'm less offended by the limited animation than this clear contravention of the "show, don't tell" rule. Aside from the low frame rate, this is the other issue I have with the first episode. Avatar was great because the premise was concise. Firebenders, invasion, avatar, balance. This show starts with a whole lot of unnecessary information. You only really need to know that the humans and the other races are going to war because the humans killed the dragon king and destroyed his egg. Everything about dark magic, etc. could be introduced in the story proper in a more organic fashion. Instead they seem to have taken another note from older fantasy books and infodumped. Whereas a lot of newer fantasy knows not to do that and trusts the audience more the figure stuff out. I think being established talents and working with Netflix meant a whole lot more leniency was given to the creators on this show. But they might have benefited from some pushback or criticism in some cases. I've worked on a Netflix show and the only notes we ever got were about how to make the show more binge-able, providing hookups at beginning and end of episodes to lead to a more continuous viewing experience. Whereas network shows tend to have lots more notes about content, standards and practices, etc. Ccs fucked around with this message at 23:42 on Sep 17, 2018 |
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Sep 17, 2018 23:38
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The first episode does start with almost 4 minutes of narrated "story so far" setup, which definitely would have been better to deliver in smaller bits throughout the first season. The animation didn't bother me that much, but I can understand that it'll drive some people up the wall. I feel like they're still dialing the process in and there are scenes where things work really well and scenes where it's really wtf. I hope maybe with a combination of lessons learned and maybe some more budget they can improve in later seasons. It's a kids show -- no blood or gore -- but pretty well executed for a (so far) somewhat straightforward epic fantasy thing. I found the main cast to be a likable bunch of characters and the humor, while venturing into the realm of awful dad joke now and again, to not be mean, which is a plus. 
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Sep 17, 2018 23:39
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I think in slow paced scenes the animation can look a little rough but all the action scenes were fantastic. Overall I liked it but I think having a nine episode season for a show with this kind of scope is just not enough. One of the strengths of ATLA, imo, was that it gave its characters and plot plenty of room to breathe, in this show everything feels a little rushed. Hopefully, they get another season and are able to slow the pace down a bit now that the work of establishing the setting and the core characters has been done.
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Sep 18, 2018 00:24
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Ccs posted:Successful Japanese CG shows like Houseki no Kuni animate on 2s (12 drawings per second) as a compromise between the hand drawn aesthetic and the rigidity of 3d models. I haven't watched Dragon Prince yet, but this did get me to Google this show, and... huh, this is possibly the first cel-shaded low-framerate CG anime I've seen that doesn't look terrible. I suspect it's more than just the framerate being slightly higher than other such anime, but I'm not enough of an animation expert to say for sure.
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Sep 18, 2018 01:37
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The scottish accent is bad. It sounds like the voice actor struggles to get out every single sentence. If you watch Brave or Trainspotters you see that they speak at a comfortable pace but in this show it sounds like she emphasizes every single word.
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Sep 18, 2018 01:38
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Barry Convex posted:I haven't watched Dragon Prince yet, but this did get me to Google this show, and... huh, this is possibly the first cel-shaded low-framerate CG anime I've seen that doesn't look terrible. I suspect it's more than just the framerate being slightly higher than other such anime, but I'm not enough of an animation expert to say for sure. They had traditional animators giving them notes along the way and a special camera setup that would alter the rig geometry placement based on angle to create appealing face shapes that were more like drawings. https://blog.sakugabooru.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/houseki-layout-guidelines.jpg https://blog.sakugabooru.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/houseki-2d-corrections.jpg https://blog.sakugabooru.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/camera-o-matic.jpg https://blog.sakugabooru.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/NORIO-MATSUGEMOTO.mp4 Ccs fucked around with this message at 03:53 on Sep 18, 2018 |
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Sep 18, 2018 03:51
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Ccs posted:They had traditional animators giving them notes along the way and a special camera setup that would alter the rig geometry placement based on angle to create appealing face shapes that were more like drawings. Yeah, I was guessing that there was a lot of collaboration from 2D animators on this project. Interesting stuff, thanks.
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Sep 18, 2018 15:08
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I watched some more episodes of the show today and I liked how far they went to make the High Mage not a classic evil vizier villain. He's basically a guy with access to a form of power that seems to be pretty useful for humanity. And his defining push into evil-ish territory is because the King is a jerk to him. But it's more of a product of clashing personalities at a time of extreme stress rather than him trying to grab power. No cackling evil villains like Ozai or Azula so far which is good.
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Sep 19, 2018 04:20
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Sweep the leg! Winter is coming! Trogdor! Say hello to my little friend! Do they lay off pop culture references eventually? Did I forget that Avatar did this?
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Sep 19, 2018 06:28
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GigaPeon posted:Sweep the leg! Winter is coming! Trogdor! Say hello to my little friend! It's for kids
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Sep 19, 2018 11:17
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Mu Zeta posted:It's for kids What kids like any of those referances?
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Sep 19, 2018 12:19
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I thought they were funny.
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Sep 19, 2018 14:04
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Love the show. Wasn't sold on it until the second episode, but I appreciate the world, characters, and western fantasy aspects. It's a show for children, but I still managed to find some of the humor enjoyable and the rest inoffensive. I initially had an issue with the animation, but after an episode or two I forgot about it. The art-style makes up for it by being colorful and interesting, and the action scenes work particularly well. There are also lots of little animation details that I found very interesting. Tiny details that would be ignored or missed, but things like facial elasticity, subtle skin tone shifts, glowing, stuff like that. It's a really good looking show.
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Sep 19, 2018 14:17
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I think im still in chapter 4, but so far the show looks good. It's my type of fantasy so they won me on the first chapter.
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Sep 19, 2018 19:47
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I really wanted to like this, but the animation is literally nauseating for me, which is something I've never encountered before even with similarly animated shows. Halfway through the second episode I had to switch to just listening to it as it played in the background.
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Sep 19, 2018 20:08
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I finished watching this and I really, really liked it. I didn't even notice the animation stuff at all and I thought the fight scenes were pretty slick. I also really liked the characters and had a funny moment when I realized that Callum sounded exactly like Sokka from The Last Airbender (same voice actor). And I loved pretty much everything about kickass Aunt Amaya. It was cool for the show to have a major character be mute and have someone else translate her signing. Plus she's such a bad rear end. I'm already looking forward to season 2!
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Sep 19, 2018 21:25
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Watched a few more episodes and while I still like how the High Mage is being handled, I don't like how his kids seemed not to be sad at all about their friends the princes dying, and then being found to not be dead. Like all they were good for during that funeral episode was a bit of fire magic and a joke about coffee. Sign-language general lady is awesome though.
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Sep 20, 2018 02:07
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There's a scene at 10 mins in the first episode that is so choppy. At about 10:20, the kid is making hand gestures and comes to a complete stop and looks just like a static 3D model (which I guess he is). But it felt like a Microsoft 3D Movie Maker video. Slow chop to complete stop. It is really really hard to ignore.
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Sep 20, 2018 14:05
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Series was pretty good. I have some complaints, but it really does feel like it was written by most of the original Avatar writing crew, right down to literally everyone in the show having the same sense of humor as Sokka. My hope is that they've now gotten the basics firmly out of the way and have a better handle on the animation, and we'll see a similar upturn in quality as Avatar did in its second season.GigaPeon posted:Sweep the leg! Winter is coming! Trogdor! Say hello to my little friend! The script is perhaps a little too joke-dense. Avatar had jokes, but they tended to be more evenly spaced out, whereas the average Dragon Prince episode feels like ten different people pitched their idea for a Humorous Line per scene and they all got included. I think Avatar got lucky in that its writer's room had a roughly equal balance of people who wanted to write good drama and people who wanted to write good children's entertainment. You can see how cleanly the writing line was drawn between Korra and Dragon Price: Korra is a miserable slog that feels like only the interns were quietly trying to sneak in at least one moment of non-soul grinding drama per episode, while Dragon Prince is so overloaded with comedy that I kept expecting Callum to turn and mug for the camera to the tune of a snare drum. Captain Lavender posted:There's a scene at 10 mins in the first episode that is so choppy. At about 10:20, the kid is making hand gestures and comes to a complete stop and looks just like a static 3D model (which I guess he is). But it felt like a Microsoft 3D Movie Maker video. Slow chop to complete stop. It is really really hard to ignore. 3D animation that mimics traditional 2D animation is becoming more common, but the relative newness of the tech and the unique challenges it presents makes it difficult to film properly. I think a lot of traditional 3D animators coming into it are thrown off by how much filming in a low keyframe environment changes the techniques required. In a standard or high keyframe environment, animation is inherently smooth, which is one of the major advantages of 3D animation: you can show more subtle movements of the head or body that look good without having to waste valuable animator time. Once you go low keyframe, however, this smoothness vanishes, and subtle movements begin to, for lack of a better term, break the illusion of 2D. If you watch the first bit in episode 1 with Viren and Harrow talking out on the balcony, you can see how bad it looks when Viren tilts his head. It looks more like poor claymation than either good 3D or good 2D. There's two ways you can get around this. The first is to do very little full-body movement, and instead rely on facial expressions to carry the weight of a scene. The second is to make the keyframes variable, depending on the level of movement needed at the time. Some of the animators on the project are clearly proficient at the latter, especially as the series goes on. Watch at about 15 minutes into episode 6 and see how good the animation actually is: there's life, bounce, and movement as all three of them talk. The number of keyframes increase whenever they need to express rapid movement, which goes a long way towards making the animation feel alive and avoid "giving away" that it's just a bunch of 3D models. The issue, of course, is that high keyframe movement is also more time consuming, which is probably why scenes like the one in episode 6 stand out so much: it's a massive jump in quality compared to a lot of the other talky scenes, which is a direct consequence of more time being spent on it. I think the animation quality improves a lot as the series goes on, in general. Compare the fight in episode 3 with the fight in episode 7: episode 7's fight is briefer, but it shows a lot more competence in how to frame a fight in 3D without making it completely lose the illusion of 2D and how to use moments of high keyframes to show rapid movement and force. If they get a larger budget for season 2, I expect you'd see more scenes like the aforementioned one in episode 6 in the future and less of the entirety of episode 1.
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Sep 22, 2018 01:55
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The Finer Arts - The TV IV - The Dragon Prince: Oops, All Sokkas!
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Sep 22, 2018 18:12
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It is somewhat too lighthearted at times. Girl on wolf going up the horrible mountain is so upbeat even though she’s about to face terrifying monsters.
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Sep 22, 2018 18:27
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I liked this. But yeah, the super low framerate could be bit weird. It's cool that there's representation of a mute person, but her sign language is literally to fast for that animation, which looks really stuttery and undynamic. Maybe people who regularly play video games notice this a bit more, because I kept feeling the itch to go to the options menu and scale down some graphics options. But it's a fun little show to watch on a small screen, while doing something else.
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Sep 22, 2018 20:50
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I’m gonna hold off on this show until that second production season, see if the animation improves. I’m sure I could get used to it, but I don’t want to.
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Sep 23, 2018 00:25
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My son and I really liked it. I especially dig the deaf general.
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Sep 23, 2018 00:56
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My short review is that animation can be distractingly choppy (the horse at the vet was amazing), there's issues with how characters handle communicating information, the amount of 'fun bits', and the sheer number of plot threads it weaves and very slowly moves. Despite those issues, it's a seven or so. I can totally see this becoming a great thing, but i'll wait for "season" 3 to release before giving it another shot. I feel extremely confident in calling that we will have less than two minutes worth of the Bird stuff in the next batch of episodes and that's the storyline I'm most interested in at the moment.
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Sep 23, 2018 02:00
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Show got a lot better like 3 episodes in (much like ATLA), Amaya is rad and the best part of the show, and yeah the animation framerate is grating and takes away from what is otherwise pretty good art. Do we know anything about when more episodes are supposed to arrive? Are we talking a full year here? I know the wait between seasons of Voltron was not very long.
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Sep 23, 2018 02:21
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About the animation, so far, some parts look quite bad but there are moments where i go "holy poo poo this looks so great". My fave is when they are discussing before entering the human town. That was quite a good moment. Also, is there a translation of the ASL?
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Sep 23, 2018 04:27
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Desperado Bones posted:Also, is there a translation of the ASL? When she is addressing the statue of her sister: "Hello, sister. You were my hero. Perfect, strong and unbreakable. Kind and loyal. I'm sorry, older sister, I failed you. Your children were safe and I let them slip away." When she is addressing Gren before leaving: "I trust you. You have been my voice. Now I need you to be my will and save those boys."
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Sep 23, 2018 04:55
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ArmyOfMidgets posted:My short review is that animation can be distractingly choppy (the horse at the vet was amazing), There was a great line I can't remember the source of, but it goes something like, "The first thing every animator does when learning to do 3D is to completely forget everything they learned doing 2D." There's a reason most anime doesn't show things like horses in high detail drinking from a bucket of water, and it ain't because they hate horses; it's just tremendously time consuming to make it look good.
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Sep 23, 2018 09:20
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this show sucks for a few episodes and gets way better after the first four but its still pretty above average. i kinda like it in a weird way. reminds me of a decent ya novel or something.
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Sep 23, 2018 17:17
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Bunk Rogers posted:When she is addressing the statue of her sister: "Hello, sister. You were my hero. Perfect, strong and unbreakable. Kind and loyal. I'm sorry, older sister, I failed you. Your children were safe and I let them slip away." Oh thanks a lot! It's quite a bummer they didn't even add it to the subtitles. anime was right posted:this show sucks for a few episodes and gets way better after the first four but its still pretty above average. i kinda like it in a weird way. reminds me of a decent ya novel or something. Considering they are gonna work on a Netflix Avatar action movie, it means they're gonna get a greenlight for several projects so I'm hoping things go better in quality for a very possible second season. To be honest, it's actually better than Disenchantment (also, what's with Netflix and it's sudden interest in the fantasy genre? I'm not complaining, I love it, but it's funny-weird for me).
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Sep 23, 2018 17:46
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anime was right posted:this show sucks for a few episodes and gets way better after the first four but its still pretty above average. i kinda like it in a weird way. reminds me of a decent ya novel or something. Like I said, it really felt like when I watched the first season of Avatar. I don't tend to browse the YA stacks very much, but both Avatar and Dragon Prince managed to catch my attention. Avatar's first season had a unique aesthetic, creative worldbuilding, and a surprisingly candid and open attitude towards death that you wouldn't normally expect. Dragon Prince has likeable characters and an animation style that, while occasionally choppy and bad, also has several breathtaking moments and kinetic displays that outshine even its 2D contemporaries. Desperado Bones posted:(also, what's with Netflix and it's sudden interest in the fantasy genre? I'm not complaining, I love it, but it's funny-weird for me). Ever heard of a series called "Game of Thrones"?  In all seriousness, it's probably the vagaries of production schedules lining up in an odd way. Fantasy works always have some kind of an audience out there, so even making relatively mundane stuff will usually net you a decent return on investment.
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Sep 23, 2018 20:26
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Technically speculative, but spoilered anyway: we've all figured out that the mage guy shoved the king's soul in the bird right?
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Sep 24, 2018 11:56
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hangedman1984 posted:Technically speculative, but spoilered anyway: we've all figured out that the mage guy shoved the king's soul in the bird right? Holy... I did not notice that but now I can see no other reason why he would look at the bird and ask if he didn't have anything to say.
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Sep 24, 2018 12:11
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hangedman1984 posted:Technically speculative, but spoilered anyway: we've all figured out that the mage guy shoved the king's soul in the bird right?  Thanks. I'm not alone in that idea. It's looks super obvious.
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Sep 24, 2018 12:14
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Meallan posted:Holy... I did not notice that but now I can see no other reason why he would look at the bird and ask if he didn't have anything to say. Thanks. I'm not alone in that idea. It's looks super obvious. Meallan posted:Holy... I did not notice that but now I can see no other reason why he would look at the bird and ask if he didn't have anything to say. MORE SPECULATION: during those scenes there was a lot of camera attention on the bird. About how attached it was to the king and how it kept attention in what was happening. The King's body is NEVER shown. Remember it is covered the whole time. My idea is that the mage tried to forcefully change bodies with the king, the birdie got in the way, the interchange happens, birdie gets killed my elf and the mage hides the body and instead burns some dead soldier. I'm pretty sure one of the ideas is for the princes to discover what happened to their dad, and have some adventure trying to recover his body. I dunno, just ideas, but I do hope for them to go for something less obvious to surprise the viewers.
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Sep 24, 2018 12:21
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