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She-Ra and the Princesses of Power

No, it's not chibi -- that's more extreme, turning characters into big-headed caricatures with babylike proportions, also called "super-deformed." The original Teen Titans animated series would often have its characters transform into chibi caricatures of themselves during the more comical moments, and the standard character designs of the Teen Titans Go! version are evolved from that. As I said, She-Ra has more of a Sailor Moon/magical-girl aesthetic. She-Ra's transformation sequence is very Sailor Moon.

Also, I don't know how you're using "rotoscoped." That word means to trace live-action footage to create animated characters that move realistically.

The 2011 Thundercats was very different stylistically. That was very anime-influenced, but in a more realistic and detailed style. There was nothing remotely chibi about it. Maybe you're thinking of the upcoming 2019 Thundercats Roar! reboot for Cartoon Network, which is going for a much more cartoony, comical look that has some similarities with chibi.
 
Christopher said:
No, it's not chibi -- that's more extreme, turning characters into big-headed caricatures with babylike proportions, also called "super-deformed." The original Teen Titans animated series would often have its characters transform into chibi caricatures of themselves during the more comical moments, and the standard character designs of the Teen Titans Go! version are evolved from that. As I said, She-Ra has more of a Sailor Moon/magical-girl aesthetic. She-Ra's transformation sequence is very Sailor Moon.

Also, I don't know how you're using "rotoscoped." That word means to trace live-action footage to create animated characters that move realistically.

The 2011 Thundercats was very different stylistically. That was very anime-influenced, but in a more realistic and detailed style. There was nothing remotely chibi about it. Maybe you're thinking of the upcoming 2019 Thundercats Roar! reboot for Cartoon Network, which is going for a much more cartoony, comical look that has some similarities with chibi.
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Have you ever watched FMA Brotherhood? That series makes full use of the 'chibi' style quite often, usually to comedic effect, and the defacto art styles for Princesses of Power and the 2011 Thundercats series very much remind me of FMA Brotherhood's 'chibi' sequences, but in such a way that it's as if the animators took 'chibi' style illustrations of the various characters from PoP and TC and traced over them in a more 'Westernized' style... hence my use of the term "rotoscoped".
 
^As I said, I don't know what you're talking about. I linked to a whole page of Google image results from Thundercats 2011 to illustrate its style, which is as far from chibi as you can get, and also bears little resemblance to She-Ra's art style. I think you must be confusing it with something else.
 
Christopher said:
I liked Filmation's design style too, but I would never mistake "What I personally like" for "What is intrinsically better." You can't expect everything in the world to cater to your tastes alone.
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I don't. But I still have the right to think something looks like crap.
 
As I understand the term, "chibi" is specifically the style with the short, tiny bodies and comically caricatured oversized heads, that are about twice the size of said bodies. I don't think that applies to any show being discussed here. (I'm pretty sure the word literally means "short" or something to that effect.)

The thing of it is though, while there's a lot of overlap, homage and borrowing of tropes and quirks, most shows tend to have their own particular style and the line between eastern and western styles is becoming increasingly blurry.
It's really kind of pointless to try and point at a western show and pick out to what degree it's borrowing from one anime style or another, especially considering Osamu Tezuka drew quite heavily from Disney's own particular character design principles, and the back & forth has only increased over the last few decades especially.

In the case of the new She-Ra: there's clearly a fair degree of influence from the world of anime (especially like likes of Sailor Moon, which ironically, always felt like it was itself partly influenced by the original She-Ra.)
That said, I think the Avatar/Korra franchise and Steven Universe (both also, *heavily* influenced by anime) are probably the much more direct reference points for this show. Mostly the character designs for the former and the general aesthetic & pallet of the latter.
 
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Maybe I'm confusing 'chibi' with "comedic 2D cell-shading", but what I'm trying to say is that the art styles for Thundercats 2011 and Princesses of Power remind me of the 2D art style that FMA Brotherhood frequently used to communicate comedy and exaggerated emotion.
 
DigificWriter said:
Maybe I'm confusing 'chibi' with "comedic 2D cell-shading", but what I'm trying to say is that the art styles for Thundercats 2011 and Princesses of Power remind me of the 2D art style that FMA Brotherhood frequently used to communicate comedy and exaggerated emotion.
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That's not unique to FMA. It's an old style of emotional iconography anime picked up from manga, which in turn can probably be traced back to kabuki. Western shows have also picked up on it here and there over the years. (The aforementioned Avatar/Korra shows even make use of it on occasion.) Point being, it has nothing to do with character design or art styles, it's just the visual language of (some) anime.
 
Okay, I finished the season.

They took a really interesting turn with Entrapta -- a morally neutral character who's single-mindedly fixated on her experiments and thus could easily be co-opted by either side. This show is definitely embracing a more nuanced morality than the pretty straight-ahead good/evil dualism of the old show. Although on looking up the characters online, I see that the original version of Entrapta was with the villains all along, which kind of makes sense given her name.

Speaking of which, I love it that Swift Wind has the priorities and worldview of a horse, indeed is a radical horse-rights revolutionary, rather than just being an obedient supporter of the human heroes. It makes sense -- he's a horse, so he'd see things from a horse's point of view. Which reflects the other thing I love, that Catra is so catlike in her movements and behavior.

The idea of She-Ra being a role passed down through the ages is a novel twist to the mythos. I wonder what it will mean for He-Man if and when the show gets around to introducing him. Anyway, it was pretty obvious that Mara (the previous, white-haired She-Ra whose mind was broken) and Madame Razz are one and the same, which is one heck of a twist.

Anyway, what with this being a Dreamworks Netflix show, I was afraid we'd get a cliffhanger finale. I'm relieved we got a proper resolution. I guess they had to end the season arc with the Princess Alliance finally coming together, but given how today's shows love their cliffhangers, it was hard to be sure.

Oh, by the way, I missed something. I've seen a number of articles talking about how Bow has two fathers, but I can't recall any episode wherein his parents were seen or mentioned. The show definitely has a ton of implied and semi-overt queerness going on -- the implicit romantic tension between Adora and Catra, Catra stroking Entrapta's hair seductively while trying to turn her, Kyle seeming attracted to Bow, Netossa and Spinnerella pretty obviously being a couple -- but I somehow failed to catch the bit about Bow's fathers. Where was that?
 
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Christopher said:
Oh, by the way, I missed something. I've seen a number of articles talking about how Bow has two fathers, but I can't recall any episode wherein his parents were seen or mentioned. The show definitely has a ton of implied and semi-overt queerness going on -- the implicit romantic tension between Adora and Catra, Catra stroking Entrapta's hair seductively while trying to turn her, Kyle seeming attracted to Bow, Netossa and Spinnerella pretty obviously being a couple -- but I somehow failed to catch the bit about Bow's fathers. Where was that?
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Didn't see it either. I suspect they'll appear in the next batch of episodes; either that, or the writers are planning a long way ahead. Certainly plenty of thought and care going into this show.
 
It's not something that was mentioned during the series. According to the articles, it was mentioned during the New York Comic Con Panel

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Stephen! said:
It's not something that was mentioned during the series. According to the articles, it was mentioned during the New York Comic Con Panel
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Oh, I see. Hopefully it will come up at some point. It bugs me when things like that are talked about only in interviews and glossed over in the work itself (cf. Dumbledore, Trini in the 2017 Power Rangers movie, etc.). It feels like a cop-out if the inclusiveness is only implied.

Dodge, nice Catra fan art in your avatar. People are gonna be cosplaying the heck out of that outfit, I bet.

Although it was kind of weird to see Catra mocking She-Ra's tiara when she's constantly wearing something that's basically a tiara of her own. Although maybe that was the point? I wonder if her headband thingy serves any purpose. In the original show, Catra's headwear was a sort of mask/goggles that would let her transform into a panther when she lowered them, IIRC.
 
Terok Nor said:
My main dislikes are the art style and Glimmer. I just don't get how something from the 80s can look so much better than something from 2018 but I could say that for any number of modern cartoons so it's not a criticism unique to this show.
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Christopher said:
"Better" is subjective. It looks fine to me; it's simply a different, more cartoony aesthetic. Animated shows in the '70s and '80s tended to have a pretty standardized look; comedy shows could go more for caricature, but straight adventure shows tended to use a consistent, naturalistic style. But that divide went out the window when Batman: The Animated Series embraced cartooniness and caricature and made it work in a very serious, dark, mature show. And animation character designers over the past 30 years have continued to innovate, giving each show its own distinct, individualized design style. Obvious not every single show's style is going to appeal equally to every individual's tastes, but it's hardly valid to say that the vastly greater creativity and experimentation of modern animation designers is "worse" than the rather limited, uniform character design aesthetics of the past.

There's also the fact that this She-Ra is far more of a comedy than the original was, so the more cartoony look is appropriate. It's not that great a departure from the character designs of other Dreamworks Animation shows like Voltron: Legendary Defender and Dreamworks Dragons, shows that also blend comedy and adventure. There's an anime influence too, which fits pretty well with the nuanced character writing and ambiguous villains. (I saw a headline suggesting that the Adora-Catra relationship is very similar to a core character arc in Naruto, though I'm not familiar with that show.) As I've remarked before, what's surprising is how little of Noelle Stevenson's characteristic cartooning style is evident in this show, although I can see a hint of it. It's basically a cross between Stevenson's aesthetic, a Sailor Moon-type anime look, and the Dreamworks "house style."

One way in which the character designs are definitely better is the range of body types. All the women in the original She-Ra had the exact same Barbie-doll figure, a requirement of the toy designers so they could use the same body molds for all the dolls and let them exchange clothing. (Probably made things easier for the animators too, since Filmation liked to trace the same movement sequences for multiple characters.) Here, we've got a much more inclusive world with women and girls of many different body types as well as different ethnicities.
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I actually much prefer this kind of art style to that of the original. I find this kind of style a lot more interesting than the IMO fairly bland look to the original.
 
Reading how people are misusing some animation terms reminds me this
p1ij6.jpg

(No offense, really:))
And this series is quite different in style from 2011's Thundercats: it was more realistic (yes, I know, they were talking animals, bear with me) and strongly anime-influenced (it was animated by Studio 4°C, a japanese animation studio).
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Christopher said:
Oh, I see. Hopefully it will come up at some point. It bugs me when things like that are talked about only in interviews and glossed over in the work itself (cf. Dumbledore, Trini in the 2017 Power Rangers movie, etc.). It feels like a cop-out if the inclusiveness is only implied.
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I read an interview with the creator (I forgot where), she said his fathers will come up in season 2 and that the info came out much earlier than intended and that made people think it was in season 1.
 
Skipper, I wasn't so much 'misusing' the word "chibi" as I was struggling to adequately convey what I was specifically talking about. :)
 
DigificWriter said:
Skipper, I wasn't so much 'misusing' the word "chibi" as I was struggling to adequately convey what I was specifically talking about. :)
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Ah, I wasn't specifically talking about you :), but about more glaring misuses, like "animation" instead of "character design" or similars...
 
Skipper said:
Ah, I wasn't specifically talking about you :), but about more glaring misuses, like "animation" instead of "character design" or similars...
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That's one thing that drives me nuts, someone says "the animation is awesome!!!" and shows a still image of a really niceely drawn background. Happens all the time.
 
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