Soft Snow wrote:I haven't seen that show, but despite being a blatant pony rip off, I heard it had good animation.
Well, for what it's worth, my comment was sarcasm (hence the emoticon). TLG has absolutely zero in common with MLP other than a symbol that appeared on each of the characters to represent a sort of "growth." I guess they're both animated shows for kids, so maybe two things in common? Each character has the same symbol, and other than in the initial mini-movie, they're never referenced or mentioned again. More relevant though, the show is written for an even younger demographic than Pony; it's more E/I than even S1 of Pony. In every episode the writers try to teach the audience a new fact about African nature or why certain animals do what they do, and quite often they stop the entire plot and focus on a teaching moment. Sometimes it's subtle, often it's not, and it's not always tied to the episode's plot arc or the overall moral they try to teach during the episode and recap at the end.
It's
not a deep show by any stretch of the imagination; Pony's lore is miles more sophisticated than what they're worrying about in TLG, at least so far. Heck, we just spent four pages talking about the possibilities of dragon civilization and what it could mean for the future. In TLG, half the species in the Pride Lands can't wipe their own asses without a member of the Guard helping them out. Considering the show's on Disney Jr, I don't expect that to change. I mean, I guess it's not a bad show for what it's set out to be, but as an old super-fan of the original movie and its two sequels (yeah, I liked TLK2 a lot)
and after being spoiled rotten by a show of the caliber of FIM, I guess I was hoping for a lot more.
So, be assured they're two very, very different shows. The characters don't have anything related to what we know of cutie marks or any of the mythos/lore behind cutie marks.
And while the backgrounds are almost always pretty in TLG, the animation tends to waver between quite competent to "not out of place in the old Timon and Pumbaa cartoon" that ran from 1995-99. I've seen better results from other Toon Boom shows, so I know it's not a software problem. To cite one glaring example, compare TLG characters walking across the ground compared to FIM characters walking across the ground. In FIM the animators almost always have the grounded hoof completely stationary on the surface, giving the impression they're standing on it. Often in TLG, the characters are sliding slightly across the surface; either their paw/hoof is moving too quickly or too slowly on the surface. That kind of thing really jumps out at me and either the animators don't have good algorithms/scripting/layer-locking set up for walking puppets or this particular detail isn't a huge priority for them.
Also, since my wall-of-text is pretty off-topic for this thread, I replied in the
Lion Guard thread. Further replies about TLG should probably go there.