Creator: Steven Spielberg
Executive Producer: Steven Spielberg and Harve Bennett
Producer: Dan Fausett
Art Director: Kuni Tomita
Associate Producer: Christina Mahotz, Scott Thoelke
Supervising Timing Director: Karen Peterson
Editor: Joe Campana
Assistant Editor: Paul Mahotz
Writer-Producer: Michael Reaves
Computer Animators: Keith Matz, Aaron Estrada, Matt Rampias, Kim Bitsui, Simon Coombs and Mark Kochinski
Character Designer/Storyboard Revision: Andres Nieves, Fred Reyes
Post-Production Supervisor: Wendy McNeese
Musical Composer: Carl Johnson
Background Artists: Phillip Kim and Eric Semones
Pre-Production Sound: Screenmusic Studios
Post Production Sound: Advantage Audio
Sound Effects Designer: Paca Thomas
Re-recording Mixers: Melissa Gentry-Ellis and Fil Brown
Overseas studio: AKOM Studios
I wanted to like this. HONEST. The time has been right for literally years for a dramatic animated series on Prime Time US TV. Steven Spielberg's determination to put exactly that on the Small Screen was admirable and spoke for the majority of animation fans.
Looking over the credits, I wanted to like this even more. Dreamworks SKG, to its credit, has assembled a crew which includes more than the average number of women on staff, including anime veteran Kuni Tomita as art director. Studios are getting the hint that the time of animation as a man's world is over, and that's a good thing.
However, I cannot say I like this. After watching two episodes of this "miniseries" I cannot characterize this as anything other than a complete botch, a waste of computer rendering time and film.
The story seems lifted from Japanese Animation. School kid finds out he's half alien and that his alien race is looking to conquer Earth. Of course, if this had been made for Japanese audiences the protagonist would be a kawae little High School girl in a schoolgirl uniform that fits a little too tight, with a skirt a little too short for reality. But it's the same premise as a ton of anime.
That shouldn't be a problem though. This show is looking to harness the teen and young adult market, and having a protagonist teens can relate to is usually a good success formula. "Daria" was successful largely on how real it was. But David Carter, son of CaleOosha of Tyrus, is a cardboard cutout character cobbled together from stereotypes. Actually that can be said about all the characters encountered so far...there is no "there" there. To be fair, I have seen only two episodes of the series. Perhaps there will be some more character development as it goes on. But right now the characters are two dimensional stereotypes.
Even though there seems to be a concerted effort to create "American anime" here, they didn't have to go so far as to mimic the stilted, awkward dialogue of anime dubs. The dialogue in the show makes one nostalgic for such leaden '70s Sci-Fi shows as "Logan's Run," "Buck Rogers" and the Mormons In Space epic, "Battlestar Galactica." Harve Bennett should have known better. After all, he was associated with the poorly animated but extremely well written "Star Trek: The Animated Series," as well as ST Classic. ST:TAS followed the ST Classic tradition (at its best) of writing great little Sci-Fi short stories and turning them into 1-hour TV shows. ST Classic had great writers like Harlan Ellison and David Gerrold writing for them. Who's writing for IA? The fact that no list of writers has come out from The WB or Dreamworks suggests that it didn't matter much to IA's high muckity-mucks.
The pisser is that they have apparently killed off Rafe, the bodyguard of both CaleOosha and David. Of all the characters who have appeared so far, Rafe was the most appealing. Rafe's a badass with a sentimental side, sort of like a Indy Jones character, who manages to get out of impossible situations. Will Rafe rise from the stone cairn David built for his body out in the Utah desert? It's not clear. Either way, they have boned themselves out of the best character of the bunch. If they resurrect him, any prayer of suspension of disbelief would be killed. If he's dead for good, the only appealing character is gone.
The villains are hissable melodrama villains. The big baddie is The Draggit... that's got to be the lamest name for a villain this side of "Mighty Morphin Power Rangers." And his Earth-assimilated plant in the Pentagon, Konrad, is unfortunately portrayed by one of the most recognizeable voices in TV history, Leonard Nimoy. It's like when the directors of "The Lion King" had the questionable judgment of using James Earl Jones as the voice of Mufasa. You couldn't get Darth Vader out of your head when you heard Mufasa speak, particularly in the "vision in the clouds" sequence. Likewise you can't get Spock out of your head when you hear Konrad speak. There were tons of worthy actors who could have played the character, but they had to go and choose Nimoy.
The mix of 2D and 3D animation is certainly not as bad as it was on the recent "Spiderman" series, but it was not as skillfully melded as it was on "MTV Oddities: The Maxx." "The Maxx" was done on a shoestring by a skeleton crew in the US and a big crew at Rough Draft Korea. Somehow they managed to pull both the 2D and 3D elements together in a beautiful, lyrical mix. Why Dreamworks SKG with their billions of dollars of resources couldn't is beyond me.
With some great dramatic moments in animation in the recent past, this is a real disappointment. The first two seasons of "Batman: The Animated Series" held a far better crossover possibility and were far stronger shows...when Fox had BTAS in their lineup they should have taken the leap and showed it in primetime. Other shows like Disney's "Gargoyles," syndication's "Phantom 2040," and MTV's "Aeon Flux" and "The Maxx" were far stronger shows than this. You would hope that Dreamworks could have taken the hint and raided those shows' crews for talent.
One last shot...the use of a schlock house like Akom to do the final animation really drags the show down. This at least could have been great eye candy, along the lines of "Silver Surfer." Akom's klutzy animation really spoils things. Dreamworks could have used the services of Tokyo Movie Shinsa, Mook or Rough Draft Korea to animate this series...any of those would have been able to handle the demands of the series. But no, they had to cheap out with Akom and their hacks. At least in the best anime the limited animation flowed with a grace like Kabuki. The animation here is choppy and klutzy and jerks around like Marionettes.
Spielberg should have been ashamed with "Tiny Toon Adventures" and "Animaniacs!" but he really should hide his face with IA. "Prince Of Egypt" had better be really kewl.
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
Page last updated 6/12/1998
This web site was built by Catseye Creative Services, Ink.