Tomash raves about The Dragon Prince

Subject: Tomash raves about The Dragon Prince
Author: Tomash
Posted on: 2019-05-08 05:27:00 UTC

Basically, I want to recommend The Dragon Prince, a Netflix cartoon series. One of the co-creators/writers/producers on the thing is one of the folks who did Avatar: the Last Airbender.

It's a pretty nice cartoon (it's on Netflix). The main things I like about the show are that the villains have complex, understandable motivations (in that they're not just pure evil, they think they're doing the right thing from their point of view) and that the show explores reasonably complex moral questions (which I'm not sure I want to go into too much for fear of spoilers). There's also plenty of funny character interactions to balance out the seriousness (and some general interesting bits like the elven assassin who can't seem to get around to killing anyone).

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Tomash raves about The Dragon Prince by Tomash on 2019-05-08 05:27:00 UTC

I do like the show, and I've seen all of it, but. by Scapegrace on 2019-05-08 09:07:00 UTC Reply

And for me it's a big but:

Maybe this is just my TV acting up, but the animation on this show, particularly character animation, is choppy to the point of actively unpleasant to look at. The designs themselves aren't bad, especially on the elf assassin, but (and this is especially prominent in fight scenes) they all seem to move around the world like they're animated by flipbook. There's no fluidity of motion in it. Say what you like about the animation in RWBY (and Lord knows I have over the years), but it's very flowing. This is very much not the case for The Dragon Prince.

It's not your TV. by Thoth on 2019-05-08 12:17:00 UTC Reply

The Dragon Prince is CG animated (obviously), but used a frame-skip effect in rendering as part of an attempt to feel more like traditonal animation. As you've noted, it doesn't work, it just makes it look choppy. This may be because A) traditional animation actually doesn't have a constant framerate if we're talking a about frame changes, as the number of unique motion frames allocated to the same action in the same amount of time can vary, and whether they're keyframes or tweens also changes things, or because B) it was a really stupid idea to begin with.

I strongly suspect that the only reason they're still doing it is because it means they have to render significantly less frames of animation, saving them quite a bit of time and possibly money on the project.