The trailer for Netflix's new "Ghost in the Shell" series looks like a 90s kids' cartoon

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/01/31/the-trailer-for-netflixs-new.html

I actually like the look of this :slight_smile:

Personally, i find i get used to the different art styles of animation series after a few minutes watching, even some of the wackier anime ones…

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This looks really bland and boring.
And there is so much great stuff from Masamune Shirow to adapt, Dominion Tank police or Orion, maybe stop doing GitS adaptations for 5 or 6 years.

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Nothing against 3D in principle, but sadly this just looks kinda cheap.

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ReBoot was exactly what I thought of when I saw that still.

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Yes - that was exactly my impression. It really looked like they were trying to do it as cheaply as possible.

Netflix always seems to skimp on the animation budget. Even the highly acclaimed Castlevania second season basically required five episodes of people standing around doing nothing to afford that sixth episode.

It works ok for their more sitcom style shows like Bojack and Tuca & Bertie, but for action shows like Seis Manos it ends up looking terribly cheap and awful.

I don’t see the point of the show. I suppose it can serve as an introduction to the movies and series that already exists, but this just looks cheap and lazy compared to how great the animation has been with the Japanese stuff.

Not only does it just look cheap it looks like a cut scene from a budget video game. In action this just looks awful. Ghost in the Shell has generally had excellent animation to match it’s concepts this just waters down the brand.

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I will reserve judgement. The animation is a little tough to judge in this kind of edited trailer. And of course, the story itself, writing, voice acting will be what really make or break this, for me anyway. I’m about as hardcore a GitS fan as they get.

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I’m not a fan of the color palette and separations. One of the problems with allowing the computer to determine shadings and lighting effects is you can’t always get good color contrasts between the foregroud / characters / mecha and the backgroud. So with fast-paced action like this, it’s harder to really see what’s going on. There is a break with the “willing suspension of disbelief” that immerses us in the show when we have to think to ourselves: “what was that? Oh, it was a missile. And those bouncing red dots- those were the eyes of spider attack robots”. One of the benefits of hand-drawn animation is greater control of where the viewer’s eye is led.

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I love ghost in the shell. Though I still need to read the whole manga, it was ground breaking then. The original movie was amazing. And I really enjoyed the two main animated shows.

I will have fun revisiting New Port City, but I am not keen on this animation. I am hoping maybe it is a rough cut and they have more work to do?

I do like the 3d look when done right, including the cell shade look like in The Dragon Prince.

This style is reminiscent of the opening credits for the anime series “Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex” (first season only). The difference between the opening and the conventional animation of the episodes was always a bit jarring. It’s like Netflix wanted to correct the inconsistency.

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It looks like loud soundtrack, big eyes and weapons porn.

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You forgot the mechs and boobs.

I usually never care about the media format a story is conveyed in, as long as the story is good.

Now that I say that, I do realize that the Smurfs has never looked worse.

Yeah, that’s how it struck me, too. It’s not just that it’s cheap looking, but that there’s no distinct art direction, like they got some highly generic 3d-anime style models and stuck them in a game engine using default shaders and renderers.

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I quite liked that opening. The Major herself did look unfortunately like a Barbie doll (possibly intenionally?), but the opening sequence when her thermo-optic camouflage glitches as she runs through a puddle was excellent. So were the tachikoma, who were arguably rendered better in the opening credits than in the show itself, and unarguably far better than what we see here.

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As a fan of 90’s anime, I hope there’s still room for that in 2020. GITS had some really mindblowing concepts. It’s not all for show.

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