What is it about the animation industry that literally kills creatives? Rebecca Sugar went from a pretty unique artist to changing her style to be more streamlined (She doesn't even doodle in her old style anymore) and creating a show that just generates scripts based on typical anime tropes.
Even Guillermo Del Toro's "Book of Life" ended up having the same shitty writing as an early Dreamworks film.
A medium where anything is possible and yet the industry crushes all imagination from it.
That art style is not easy to animate and not something that would suit SU very well. Shows exist to make money. Shows like Wander Over Yonder andUncle Grandpahave plenty of imagination.
What are examples of things you're even looking for?
>>84358594
It's because creating cartoons is a team effort. SU might be Rebecca's show but she stresses frequently that it is a team effort, and this is obvious in the loose storyboarding style.
>>84358660
A lot of what I really like ends up being European and Japanese films. Secret of Kells, Ernest and Celestine, Triplets of Belleville, Tokyo Godfathers, Persepolis.
This doesn't mean I hate Western animation, I think shows like Clarence and Gravity Falls are fine. But I like it when a product has the voice and style of the artist creating it. Lilo and Stitch feels very much like Chris Sanders, they didn't try to redesign Nani to have the typical Disney face. The Batman Animated Series is basically Bruce Timm's baby, and that's great. Wander Over Yonder is great because I can see Craig McCracken's hand in the work.
So when I hear someone like Sugar or Guillermo is making an animated product and it ends up being a way dumber version of their work and doesn't really feel like "them" at all, it comes across as more of a disappointment than something like We Bare Bears which I always thought it was boring to begin with, so I'm not as annoyed by it.
The pilot episode for Steven looked like it was straight out of Rebecca's sketchbook, I thought it was a huge breath of fresh air. They changed the style and I decided to stick with it anyway because I thought, yeah well, they probably had to for cost reasons.
But then as the show went on, the writing just felt cliche, overly melodramatic, and sappy, even for Sugar, who had characters frequently crying and screaming in her comics. Then the visuals started to bother me more with constant cat faces for Peridot, the shitty anime face she and Steven do in an episode, and the shorts with chibi Gems. I would have never pegged in my life that the creator of Pug Davis would make a show with chibi designs. She's just become a really shitty generic cartoon showrunner rather than allowing her personal touch to shine through.
Same thing for Del Toro, where I would have never thought the guy who made Pan's Labyrinth would end up making a cliche love interest who "is a princess but also she's tough and fights!".
>>84358956
You could practically see the influence of executives and 'consumer feedback' in Book of Life, it was that bad.
Book of Life's plot wasn't great, but the animation and design workand song parodiessaved it.
Voice acting was good too. And the actual dialogue writing. If it had just had a more memorable plot... fuck, man.
>>84359232
Remember how Gennedy subtly hinted in an interview how he, the director, basically got bullied by Adam Sandler to make Hotel Transylvania 2 "his way"? It's amazing the guy still has enough passion to continue Samurai Jack despite having all his projects sans Dexter get canned and the years of shit he had to put up with Sony.
>>84358594
Executives.
The classic spreadsheets, business voodoo and profit-margins type.
The ones that have never touched a brush but still have some ideas and know that their ideas are great and they watched a business lecture on art-parapsychology-optimization and leadership-synergy once so you just gotta listen.
Peers.
In industry everything is a collaboration, there are other artists and EVERYTHING, every idea you have, will have a whole new different interpretentation for every artists you share it with, everyone has their own vision.
The end result is that everything ends up being a compromise decided by the local social pecking order and peer-politics. Compromise that usually ends up being bland or a complete mess.
The only way to get around this is having a solid art director that kills those compromises and makes a decision based on his/her sense of judgement and taste instead. Which tends to make a lot of artists sad since artists usually have history of being flakes/rebels.
You will have your ideas die/you have to kill off tons of ideas from other human beings all day, every day, it's an environment that sucks out all the juices out of you really fast.
Fans.
Are fans, all the good, all the horrible awful bad.
Reality.
In industry things have to make money, things have to be made on a schedule.
When you fly solo you have all the time you want to tweak all your ideas and productions, you can let the project just sit if you don't have anything good to add to it at the moment.
That isn't possible in the industry, you got ~8-14 hours a day and your part of the work effort needs to be ready on time, you have to let things pass without all the tweaking and if you have no good ideas you will just have to shit out a passable one so the next guy down the line can start doing his/her part. Everything will be watered down by this, at each step, there just isn't time nor money to distill things to that 100% purity level.
I thought Del Torro produced the movie and the guy that directed it was the one who did El Tigre. Guillmero is doing that monster movie with dreamworks, so maybe there'll be hope for him.Also, am I the only one that legitimately liked the Book of Life? I guess I'm a sucker for Mexican romance and music
>>84358594
>Sugar changed her art style
She didn't
>Book of Life was Del Toro's
You're an idiot.
>>84362275
>Dreamworks cancels Me and My Shadow project
>Greenlights Home series
>Next film coming out is Trolls
Plus all the lay offs and the fact that they keep outsourcing their work to Asia, I think DW's shitty circumstances is going to make any film they pump out from now out utter trash.
>>84358594
>>84362302
^The first point here. Sugar lets the storyboarders' style slip into their respective episodes for SU. Her sketches still have all their charm and style, and when she gets moments to animate in SU they're always noticable and there's usually an animation bump as well.
Pug Davis was a graphic novel that was incredibly detailed and also inked. Comparing that to Sugar's later sketches and animation for a TV series isn't really fair because they're very different things.
Also while I am a big fan of Rebecca Sugar's art I wouldn't say her style in Pug Davis was the most unique thing in the world, there's definitely some John K influence in there.
>>84358956
Okay, now that I've seen this I'm going to have to write even more.
By the time the pilot ep was leaked, Sugar had already redesigned the Crystal Gems HERSELF. She made the gems show their personalities more clearly just through their appearances, took out any unnecessary details, and has even mentioned that there was inspiration from the three core shapes of Bauhaus design (Garnet = cube, Pearl = cone, Amethyst = sphere) in order to make them all distinct. Some of the important character traits existed back then (they had already decided Garnet was a fusion even back then, look at her intro), but other things were less ... pronounced (did you really prefer pilot Pearl to the Pearl we have now? If you watch the pilot and Gem Glow back-to-back, the dynamic so much more fleshed out. Pilot Pearl was just kind of there.)
I read Pug Davis not long ago and storytelling/character tics that Sugar likes are still there. I think her inclination towards having characters crying and drama is bothering you because Pug Davis ended much, much sooner.
(1/2)
>>84358594
>We've got to have...MONEH
>>84362275
I liked the book of life, I mean visually wise its amazing and worth a rewatch just to see the details here and there. Honestly the problem with the movie was BOL plot wise was meh and only a few of the characters were worth a damn but still I liked it.
Also Del Torro was just a producer of this movie he had nothing do with the directing or writing that was Jorge R job OP.
Also when will Jorge do a revival to El Tigre now that he finally found some success?
>>84358956
>>84362953
(2/2)
>Peridot's cat face
That's only used when Lauren Zuke is boarding an episode, and while she is a good artist I do dislike that mouth on Peridot and she has done quite a few eps for her so it was rather frequent recently. If you look at the Raven/Paul episodes (ex. "Message Recieved," and earlier in "Keeping it Together"), they keep the turtle-like cupid's bow when Peridot smiles, and I personally prefer that.
>"they probably had to for cost reasons"
That has been proven wrong, as I said not only did Sugar redesign the gems by choice but also the crew have confirmed that SU the show has a MUCH bigger budget than the pilot did.
>the shorts with chibi gems
The chibi gem shorts are boarded/animated by Katie Mitroff, another storyboarder. I also don't understand why this in particular is bothering you so much - the shorts are only to explain things we already know in a cute and simple way, aren't OOC, and are separate from the episodes. It's not like any of the characters have suddenly gone chibi in the middle of an actual episode.
Animation is a group effort, and Sugar has been shown to be a shy person who is very welcoming to other people's ideas and dislikes conflict, so it makes sense that she'd want each ep of SU to have their respective boarder's quirks shine through (I'm going to assume you didn't know this either, but SU is written by it's boarders. The boards are done first, and it's a pretty collaborative effort but even from the styles of writing you can distinguish them from each other). With creators like Chris Sanders it can be more difficult, since from what I've read he's more assertive about his ideas and that has resulted in burning bridges in the past, unfortunately. Of course, there is a happy medium.
I don't get why you've lost faith in Rebecca Sugar so easily with all of this in mind. If you read all this and you still believe that somehow Sugar is a "shitty generic cartoon showrunner," then I don't know what to say.
