>>52931
I'm in a ramblin' mood, so please furgive me if I talk too much.
Genndy Tartakovsky has had his hits and his misses. I don't think UWE (no relation to Uwe Boll, perhaps unfurtunately) was ever going to gel. I give Tartakovsky all due credit fur trying to bring some originality into the field of animation and trying to do something that looked and felt different, but I think some of his aesthetic choices did not work well fur the tone he was going fur with the scripts and characterization.
There were problem with the scripts, problems with pacing. There were aspects of the overall plot arc that did not seem to me to be well thought out, or maybe he had plans fur a second season that would tie together all of these disparate tangles that seemed to be going in different directions.
Character design, fur example, fur all that I love this character, named as "June Way" in the credits but never addressed by name by anyone else, I think the character design fur the show felt completely wrong. I grasp that he was going fur deliberate homage to E. C. Segar and Hergé and Max Fleischer. He made these human characters very expressive. But they all look like a gaggle of Olive Oyl's relatives from a prewar Max Fleischer cartoon. The proportions of their faces and bodies, the very shapes of their eyes, made them look like they were created fur slapstick. The script and the >implied metaplot were all this grimdark blood-and-thunder stuff, you know, about our reluctant heroes taking up arms to battle a mysterious Evil Power who wanted to Destroy Everything. Or something. One got the impression that the protagonists never quite knew what was going on, and that's fine. But when the audience is kept in the dark, episode after episode, when the people you want to be interested in the story you're telling, are scratching their heads in between the flashy kinetic fight scenes, this is a failure in storytelling.
There were some other bad choices in the storytelling. The protagonists, we are shown, are timeless spirits, or something, who periodically get together and possess humans, take over their minds and bodies, turn them into heroic figures to fight against this Big Bad that is never really explained, explored, or even examined. The heroes can't do their thing without, essentially, kidnapping and mind-raping innocent people, disrupting and destroying their lives, and putting them at risk of violent death. The story never dwells on this. It seems pretty dark, if we're looking at it from a perspective of morality. It's only remotely acceptable if it's the only way to fight against this enormous existential threat. Except, our intrepid heroes never do seem to understand what's going on or what they're fighting against. So they're body-jacking innocent people fur a cause they themselves don't understand. That's kind of messed up, in my opinion. It's pretty dark and morally grey.
And Tartakovsky is doing all this grimdark, morally grey stuff with characters who look like they should be living in Olive Oyl's boarding house and throwing pies at one another, or tripping over their own feet failing to chase Tintin through a back alley in Calcutta.
Even Max Fleischer, who ANIMATED the prewar Popeye cartoons that still have a cult following ninety years on, knew that you don't use goofball rubber-hose-arm pie-eye character design fur blood-and-thunder adventure stories. Look at Max Fleischer's wartime Superman animated shorts. Look at the character designs. No googly-eyed toons are present. Max Fleischer understood this implicitly.
But I still love June Way. She is a very competent opponent fur our heroes, brave, resolute, and skilled. She doesn't get many spoken lines, but we do get to hear her speak. She's very articulate, obviously intelligent, obviously educated. We never do learn who she is, where she came from, or what she wants. She's some kind of magical fox anthro in a world of humans, and this is never explained, explored, or even remarked upon. She's really purty, though, and lots of fun to look at. It's a pity the scriptwriters so misused a character who was much more interesting than Angst-Ridden Elric of Melniboné Clone #17, Tiresome Girlboss who is Always Right #243, Magical Negro #9001, and Robot Sidekick #42069.