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She-Ra and the Princesses of Power

I was pleasantly surprised by how good the animation looked, but with one exception. Sha-Ra looks like poop.
 
"Nicely animated"? Did these people even watch the original show??? There were just some well done rotoscoped stock shots and then the average animation was absolutely subpar if compared with any modern production.

I wouldn't say any modern production -- there are still a lot of shows that have fairly bland animation with a low frame rate, even if it moves more than Filmation's stuff. And plenty of anime still uses limited animation on a par with what Filmation and Hanna-Barbera did 40-50 years ago, with characters just standing around talking for long stretches while moving nothing but their lips.

I've noticed that some people (presumably people who've never studied Latin and don't know the roots of words) say "animation" when they mean character design. I can get that people who grew up with the more realistic character designs of the '70s and '80s would be put off by the more stylized and cartoony designs in modern animated shows, but really, that ship sailed back in the '90s. I'd imagine some of these critics haven't followed animation since they were kids.

If anything, the character designs on the new She-Ra are much more conventional and naturalistic than Noelle Stevenson's usual cartooning style in something like the webcomic Nimona.
 
By the way, this is a picture of “He-Man and the Masters of the Universe” rotoscope actors with crew
tumblr_noos4gqQZR1rnfqjyo1_640.jpg
 
I'm a bit surprised they're wearing the costumes, since I'm pretty sure a lot of the rotoscoped action sequences Filmation did were used on multiple shows and for multiple characters on each show. I believe some of the moves I saw He-Man do were traced from rotoscoped moves I remembered from Tarzan: Lord of the Jungle. When I was a kid watching these shows, seeing these same movements repeated over and over again, I'd memorize them and act them out myself when playing. So I'm pretty sure He-Man did some of Tarzan's rotoscoped moves from time to time, and Flash Gordon's too. Not to mention that He-Man, Skeletor, and other characters all did the same movements as each other.

Still, I guess maybe they did some costume shots for reference so the animators would know how the costumes moved, even if they were tracing over a different character's movement cycle.
 

"Nicely animated"? Did these people even watch the original show??? There were just some well done rotoscoped stock shots and then the average animation was absolutely subpar if compared with any modern production.
Yeah...well done rotoscoped stock shots...that were so varied and so detailed that they managed to create daily TV series out of He-Man and She-Ra, and there are more than a hundred eps of He-Man and nearly as many of She-Ra to show for how good those original creators were at telling action fantasy stories, and it kills me whenever I see some snotty comment about how they did it, like all they did was trace a couple of pictures and spend the rest of the day fishing or something.

And the artwork is ten times better. I don't know what this show's fans see in the character designs here but you can have 'em and go with God.
 
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I mainly know AJ Michalka, the voice of Catra, as Lainey Lewis in The Goldbergs - who, as a side note, will also be in the upcoming spinoff Schooled (aka "The Goldbergs: 1990-Something")
 
The aesthetic is too anime-like for my preference.

Hmm, I guess I can see that -- or more the sort of anime-influenced American look seen in things like Avatar: The Last Airbender and Voltron: Legendary Defender. Although if it were really anime-like, it'd have more color shading. All the colors here are quite flat and one-tone, which is much more of a US animation aesthetic.
 
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