Full Series I feel the animation is really lacking on Rebels

Let me preface this by saying that I ~really~ like the stories in Rebels. The concept, the time period, it all works for me. I dig it... But, having said that, I'm really not liking the animation, at all, and for a bunch of reasons...

1. Over-animated main characters. At times it feels like if the animators are going over board with the movements of some of the characters. Specifically calling out Ezra, Zeb and Chopper. Whenever these guys interact it feels like I'm watching slapstick comedy, which to me makes it feel like it's not very SW...

2. Empty backgrounds. Lothal seems deserted. Capital city, or the 5 alleys we keep seeing over and over again at least, seem empty. The locales just do not work for me, nor do they convey a feeling of a "capital city". Lets take for example the highway we see in the pilot. it comes up again in the latest episode "Empire Day". A huge highway... and there is nobody on it. No traffic. Nothing. Just our heroes and the empire chasing them. How much more exciting would those scenes be if they had to weave in and out of traffic, deal with more locals, etc? But it's empty. Lothal seems abandoned, except for......

3. Same recurring BG characters. Seriously, pay attention. They have the same 4 or 5 character models show up ALL the time.



This is the crowd celebrating the empire at a parade on "Empire Day". The crowd is fairly sparce to begin with, and it's the same 4 characters over and over again. The white guy with the beard?
We saw him in Tarkin Town, we saw him on the shuttle in the episode with R2, we see him here (repeatedly). There are just ithorians and rodians here? C'mon.

4. The wookies... I hope we never see them again until they improve that model. Wow. Terrible. They looked like vintage toys, but with Disney eyes.



I love the stories, the concept, the time period. But the animation is quickly losing me.

 

Well, right now Disney didn't give them a very big animation budget. And I'll be honest when I say it did take some getting used to. But I really don't mind it now.

 

Getting real tired of seeing posted on every other star wars related site. They will eventually build up a library of more models to use.

 

it's a legit complaint. Or should everything be positive? Is criticism allowed?

 

Criticism is allowed this is just the 100th time I've seen this parade post. They aren't lazy, they just don't have the funds. Seeing as its the same team from Clone Wars.

I will give you the Wookies are very bad yes, but I personally like the animation style overall.

 

Okay. But here's my problem with that.....
Disney bought Lucasfilm.... CW was a Lucasfilm funded thing.
Disney..... bought... Lucasfilm...to do this? This cheap ****?
C'mon.
We aren't talking about Animation Warehouse or Animation Wholesalers.
This is Disney, who bought the greatest film franchise of the past 40 years.
To do this? Disney is supposed to be the pinnacle of American animation... and this is how they treat SW with their first project as its new owner. C'mon.
Unforgivable.

 

....Okay.

Well. Lucasfilm still runs Star Wars. It's just Disney giving them a certain budget for animation and they have limited character models right now. Once we get more seasons etc this will expand. Plus the style isn't that bad. It just takes some getting used to. And at least their hair moves now.

 

Yah, I don't understand the uproar around the background models. Clearly they have to take some shortcuts here and there. If that means a lot of the background models are the same so be it. It's better than not doing Empire Day at all just so some embarrassing gif doesn't show up the next day.

 

It isn't all about a low budget either, it is also about time constraints. Clone Wars was in development for years before seeing the light of day, and Rebels was created on a compressed timeline comparatively.

With a smaller budget and less lead time, it is of course going to be lacking in model diversity and more varied backgrounds, textures and locales.

I think it is a valid criticism, but I also think considering the real impediments and constraints that have limited the scope of these early episodes is necessary to evaluate the show's animation fairly when compared to Clone Wars.

 

No doubt some of it is just Rebels vs TCW stuff. The art is a huge objective difference between the shows. It was unavoidable for some people to be angry about season 1 of Rebels not being as good looking as TCW in the later seasons.

 

Don't forget, TCW was like this in S1 and avoided crowd shots for the most part. I remember this one episode has a senate scene where it's crowded with Orn Free Tay. Like 20 of him in different senate pods.

 

It's hilarious. I can't remember the episode and I think I have a screencap of it somewhere.

 

Man, one of these again...

A lot of people didn't like the animation style for TCW either when it first started. Some of the stated negatives were that the characters looked too much like wooden macquettes, or that both the style and antics in the show seemed not very SW. The reason for the 'over-animation' in Rebels is because the style changed, Filoni and co. wanted to diversify from realism, especially considering that you know, it IS a cartoon. As long as you're using this medium for storytelling, why limit yourself visually? At least you don't have Wile E Coyote moments or character eyeballs literally shooting out of their sockets.

It's a backwater world on the outer rim. There was actually some traffic as seen in Spark of the Rebellion. Beyond that though is probably where the budgetary issue shows.

Will people quit posting this image? Or at least show something from early TCW for comparison that doesn't look like an image for ants. As others have said, crowds were an issue when TCW first began as well. You saw a lot of the same faces and still do even after their asset buildup improved in the last few seasons. Unless it's a multi-million dollar movie, you will always get same-faces in crowd scenes within a CG production.

 

There's nothing wrong with the animation style of the show. The problem right now is resources, specifically new character models, and those take both time and money. Remember this show had a very short lead in time and was still in the middle of animation early in 2014, unlike TCW which had a good year to year and a half of development, and even then it took until the midway point of Season 1 before we saw more densely animated crowds. TCW also had the benefit of George Lucas' bountiful wallet, and Lucas was not afraid to spend his own money to tell the kinds of stories he wanted to tell. Disney is simply not going to give Lucasfilm Animation a near endless budget to create a series. So until the staff can build new character models, the series is going to run into some limitations.

Having said all of that the show really is beginning to strain the limits of believability. The limited character models on the show, and the sheer audacity of the plans of our heroes make it extremely hard for me to believe the Empire would really have that difficult a time locating the Ghost and its crew. From what we’ve seen of Lothal there’s the capital city surrounded by a number of small locales and farming communities which are all sparsely populated. However, the crew jumps around from town to town without a care of being spotted.

In the pilot episode it was established the Ghost was able to change its transponder code (basically its license plate) at any time allowing the ship to be identified as another ship. But how many freighters are crewed by a Lasat and a Mandalorian with brightly colored armor? The crew attacked the Imperial Academy on Lothal, rescued Wookiees in the Spice Mines of Kessel, escaped from a high security Imperial detention facility, and destroyed a critical component in the manufacturing of the Death Star’s super laser (although they were unaware of it), wouldn’t the Imperials have sent in mass forces by now to root out these Rebels and capture them? It just seems odd at this point that the Rebels crew has the ability to freely roam Lothal without the threat of being recognized. Don’t get me wrong, this is a minor annoyance, and I’m still able to suspend my disbelief to a degree, but it seems to me that the limited budget of the show is actually hurting its ability to tell stories in the most effective manner possible.

I almost wonder if the show shouldn't have started waaaaayyyy off at the edge of the Outer Rim with our heroes in very backwater settings, and slowly the crew of the Ghost makes their way deeper into the Outer Rim. This would have given the crew of the show time to create new assets so by the time the Ghost arrives at Lothal they are able to populate Capital City with an abundance of people and aliens. As it is, it looks like the population of Captial City might be pushing 50... the turnout for that mandatory Empire Day parade was pretty poor.

 

The way I see it, if it was a good show with a quality story, you would be too captivated by what's going on in front of you and not notice the background. It seems to me that's what they're banking on, but sadly, due to the lackluster, and basically inane story, any and all flaws are quickly becoming front and center. I have no real issue with the animation being used. I enjoy that it's unique to this show, just as the animation was unique to TCW. The issue lies in the lacking storyline that fails to captivate enough to keep people's eyes from noticing things they don't want to be noticed.

 

I haven't noticed these animation issues (barring the Wookiees in Spark of Rebellion) on my own, only when I see them pointed out here on the boards. That's because I'm too engrossed in the story to notice these things.

Also, the average viewer is likely only going to watch an episode once, maybe twice. Unlike us superfans, who watch episodes over and over and over (I saw Spark of Rebellion four times in three days when it first came out) and dissect them to death on the largest Star Wars message board on the internet. The more you watch an episode, the more you'll notice the small details that you overlook the first time around, and the more you notice the flaws. It's the same reason that a cardinal rule of magicians is to never show the same trick to the same person twice; once the mark knows what's going to happen, if you show it to him over and over again, his eyes start drifting where you don't want them to, and he eventually figures out how the trick is done. The average person is only going to see the episode once or twice (see the magic trick once), and probably won't notice small flaws (won't figure out the secret to the trick). We watch the episodes way too much and discuss them in detail (akin to videotaping the magic trick and playing it back, pausing it, playing it in slow motion), and so we start noticing every single flaw (we figure out the secret to the trick). And that, in a way, ruins our enjoyment of the show, just like figuring out a magic trick ruins our enjoyment of that trick.

This is why, since Droids in Distress, I no longer watch episodes over and over again. I want to take pleasure in immersing myself in the story without having my enjoyment ruined by noticing every last flaw. And by and large, I've been able to do that.

 

Hmmm, I never really noticed the reuse of characters in TCW. I also didn't notice the reuse of characters in the crowd until someone pointed it out. I really have no problem with the reuse of background characters, although I am starting to get tired of the Rodian. It is the woman, fighter pilot, and other imperials that bug me because they are so front and center that it is obvious. You can get away with it to a point, but the show hasn't been doing a good job of it. Honestly in a lot of cases they could do some minor changes that would make them just different enough. For example, the bearded guy. Should have modeled him without the beard, then modeled the beard as a separate model. Then save the man once with the beard and once without the beard. In most cases as a background character you would never realize they are the same character, and it took minimal work. There are a lot of little things they could do to get more characters for relatively little money by just making alterations to already established characters.

They did make one mistake though that is limiting them. They made the bodies of the imperial officers too unique. If they used a more generic body shape they could have more officers to pick from as it would only take altering the faces. With those bodies though, if they want a new officer they have to recreate the whole body also, otherwise it will look silly.

Just an FYI, I am trained in 3D modeling, although I don't do it professionally.

 

I'm not comparing this show to CW, because I didn't watch CW. I couldn't tell you the differences between Seasons 1-5 of CW, I'd have no idea what I was talking about.
I'm watching this as a casual viewer, and as a casual viewer I've noticed the things I've outlined above. And yes, even as a casual viewer I caught these things, including the recurring background characters. The guy with the beard, for example,
looks like the bearded guy in the famous McQuarrie group shot of the heroes (with the Zeb chewie) so he stands out the most. And the rodians, there are tons of rodians on Lothal. So it isn't me being a nitpick, I'm casually forming (valid) opinions.

 

I love the animation of the show. No real problems with it.

 

I think the animation is decent, but it's not at Clone Wars level yet. Clone Wars built up its library by visiting many different planets and having different species in different episodes. It seems like in Rebels they're in similar locations a lot of the time. I'm in "wait and see" mode with the show though - I enjoy it for what it is so far.

I feel like Lucas liked to run things geared more towards the art, rather than focusing on making a profit, but with Disney, the execs need to make sure they're making the $$$ they want. Maybe that results in less animation budget. Just a feeling though, of course.. I have no idea if the layoffs earlier are related to this, or what the numbers are.

 

It's probably not at TCW's level because TCW ran for five seasons...