Gotham Knight/Animatrix - good format for a TV series?

A

arakaiscladdath

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Imagine a series with the basic format of GK or The Animatrix: where each episode is designed to allow a different director at a different studio to strut their stuff. It'd be the perfect format for an animated TV series with real craftsmanship in it.

The Welsh studio S4C did a few series like that (including Animated Tales of the World, which for my money is one of the BEST CARTOON SERIES EVAR), but they're let down by some rather quaint choices of source material (let's face it, a series of half-hour animated adaptations of Shakespeare plays is going to be kind of limited in its appeal). Someone should give this a real crack of the whip.
 
Don't see how any of the aforementioned works are incoherent. With a little ingenuity this things can be glued together pretty well (such as with S4C's Cantebury Tales, where the sequences forming the framing narrative were done by one studio, while the other studios handled the individual stories).

And... how many cartoon series have been done by one person?
 
Instead of one long movie, they were just a bunch of stand-alone shorts that just happened to be in the same movie. I'd imagine if a series did that it'd just be episodic with no real narrative, which I'm not a fan of.


I mean one person tends to be in charge of their show with writers and animators under them, like Greg Weisman who calls the shots on his shows.
 
I'm sure there's a format that would make a different studio approach workable. Something like the Canterbury Tales or 1001 Arabian Nights, which are really both collections of different stories being told by different people, could be done quite beautifully this way, I think. Each teller gets a new style and a new look, which makes the different studio approach a real inherent part of the show rather than just a gimmick (as, honesty, I found it to be in Batman Gotham Knight). They kind of did this in the Samurai Horror Tales (Ayakashi) anime series from Japan, although it was only Goblin Cat that really went wild with the different visuals.

Thinking about it now, an animated version of a show like The Outer Limits or The Twilight Zone would also be a perfect way to do this. Since there were never any ties between last week's show and this week's show, there wouldn't be as much need to keep them connected visually, either. Either one would also play up to the strengths of animation as a medium, too.

Barring that, I'd love a good, regular show that just showcased different animation all the time from around the world. I'd love a chance to watch more animation from Europe, China, India, or wherever. To an extent, Nick's Shorts in a Bunch could fit that bill, but most of their stuff tends to be more family friendly and domestic.

-- Ed
 
I'd say no unless you've got a hell of a lot of money.

Getting new art directors, art designers, possibly animators, and everything else to do with the art department, isn't cost effective for an ongoing TV series.

It's the same reason why a Spider-Man live action TV series won't look as good as the movies, they don't have the same budgets.
 
The trouble with this approach is that you risk ending up with something that looks like Gargoyles.



I'm not familiar with that one, although I've just thought that Paranoia Agent was kind of a vague nod in a direction that could be workable - each episode focusing on a different character (for the first half, anyway), each character with some quirk of perspective, like the kid's hallucinations or the pedophile guy's manga panels. You could go for a kind of Rashomon thing, I suppose. But I'm getting a bit overspecific now, I think...



Or how about Masters of Horror? Masters of Animation... nifty.



Animated Tales of the World did that - each episode was based on a folktale, and I think the original idea was to have each story animated by a studio from the same country. This didn't entirely work out in practice, so we ended up with a Caribbean story animated in the Czech Republic, but there was still a great international line-up behind it. Man, that series needs a DVD release.



Well, yeah, it wouldn't work as an ongoing series, I'm thinking more of a one-off, one season affair. I realise that it'd be quite an undertaking and probably wouldn't have much commerical pull, but an "alternative" outfit like Channel 4 could give it a try (in fact, they did, sort of)
 
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