Tanstoys wrote:
well TF wise armada and energon is so much better than the new animated series the way it looks
Armada had the shoddiest frame rate ever! About 80% of the fight scenes were just still images of both sides scrolling across the screen while laser blasts were animated in!
Half the time a Transformer in vehicle mode moved across the scene it was just a still cell being moved or zoomed in on, they didn't even animate the wheels turning!
Proportions went out the whazoo, at one point Jetfire Pants Prime flew towards the camera but his head remained the same size throughout the zoom, as he started with a huge one that ended teensy!
It was atrociously nasty animation!
As for Energon... I'll let
the Transformers Wiki fill that in:
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Energon introduced a new concept to Transformers cartoons: the blending of CGI with traditional cel animation. The animators rendered the Transformer characters in cel-shaded CGI, while animating humans and other aspects of the show through traditional means. On the plus side, this allowed for a consistently high level of cel animation quality (especially enjoyable after the often scattershot quality of Armada). In particular, the show uses the CGI to show many characters in motion at once, often with a high frame rate that gives them a very fluid appearance (for example, the many charges of the Battle Ravage Terrorcon drones, replete with numerous stamping legs and bobbing heads and tails.)
On the other hand, the CGI animation is positively primitive. Characters possess no sense of weight and can not move in any manner but the most basic. Even walking is a challenge for characters with bulky models, like Ironhide, who is often reduced to swinging his arms and legs back and forth while sliding along a predetermined path. The black-line outlines of character models were often not rescaled for different shots, resulting in the characters sometimes appearing as indecipherable masses of heavy black lines.
Additionally, "emotion" is nonexistent; the blank-faced CGI models could not easily display any facial expressions beyond "mouth open" and "mouth closed." Numerous characters don't have facial animation, even ones with mouths. Most prominent among these is Alpha Q, who has no facial animation at all despite the fact that he's basically nothing but four faces. In some cases, when it was necessary for a character to emote visibly (Megatron's pronounced yawning, Inferno's tortured screaming), or to do something visually dynamic (acrobatic transformation), the CGI would actually be replaced with cel animation, because it just looked more impressive. Does that seem right to you?
In addition, the show's CGI compares very poorly with Beast Wars and Beast Machines, both of which came out years previously, both of which were fully CGI (without the crutch of cel animation to fall back on), and both of which had characters who boasted complex, nuanced facial expressions and fluid, constant body language — even the ones with utterly inhuman faces and bodies. The only way to spare the animators' reputation is to assume that Energon's budget was miniscule in comparison.
Even within the limits of the animation, many bad editing, design, and lighting choices make the series difficult to follow visually. Unicron's body — primarily black, to match his Energon redeco toy — is frequently lost against the blackness of space. When Alpha Q energizes Unicron's head, it becomes the Energon Orb, with no visual indication as to what it used to be. Scenes set underground or within Unicron's body are commonly underlit, to the point that the characters can't even be distinguished. Strange elements such as the rift in space are inconsistently animated and described by the characters, making it difficult to figure out what they are.
Honestly, to tell me that Armada and Energon's animations are better than Animated's... I've just got but one question for you: Are you blind?
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You're far too young to be this bitter and angry at the world....