So after waiting just under 4 years for a new season of this amazing series the final season of The Boondocks ended up being mainly an exercise in frustration. With original creator Aaron McGruder off the series there was an immense wave of disappointment that befel fans upon the realization that something we've wanted and been looking forward to for so long may end up being shit. Now my first reaction was as long as Aaron's co-writer on many episodes Rodney Barnes stayed on there may be hope. Now that the season is over and i've had time to process i can say with conviction this season is terrible. Thats not even me being hyperbolic, it is legitimately awful. Now the animation by Studio Mir was pretty good. They did a great job upping the ante in terms of animation quality form JM Animation's work in season 3 but the problem really was that they were let down by the mostly terrible scripts they had to work with. Anyway heres the usual video and i'll go into detail about my frustration after the jump.
So yeah, The vast majority of episodes this season are bad. They mostly focus on Grandad who is a character that works best as a foil for Huey and Riley but having them have to work off his material mainly means everyone else gets less focus and our supposed lead Huey is basically relegated to a side character this season. Not that i'd want him ruined anyway because its obvious the writers didn't really know what to do with him since i guess you have to have a firm grasp of Huey's specific type of intelligence and personality to be able to write for that character. There's also the overarching plot of the Freeman's being broke which ends up going nowhere and being used as mainly an excuse for the characters trying a few get-rich-quick schemes that are more tedious than hilarious. Thats basically this season as a whole though. The are only 2 of the 10 episodes that are actually enjoyable and that's mostly due to one being a pretty good Breaking Bad parody as well as a spot on commentary on the black hair care industry, with the other being "Freedom Ride or Die" which was just very well written with the best animation Studio Mir did this season.
The rest` of the episodes are unfunny, insulting and even offensive. The worst offender being the last episode "The New Black" which gleefully makes fun of the less abled and then proceeds to depict them in the least flattering way possible. That was particularly upsetting because it started off as a decent spiritual sequel to the episode "The S Word" then devolves into making fun of the LGBT community and the outrage cycle without even trying to be clever or subtle about it and generally just being unpleasant.
This seasons most unnecessary episode is the stinkmeaner episode which basically admits to the audience through one of Stinkmeaners diatribes that they are just shamelessly ripping off stories from previous seasons and they don't care.
Its really one of the biggest declines in writing quality i've ever seen. The sheer laziness in some of the scenarios and overuse of blatant plot contrivances is quite jarring as well as the heavy use of jokes that have been made by others a multitude of times rather than using their own unique perspective to their advantage. Aaron had such a strong and focused voice in his work on previous seasons that something this half-assed just feels wrong. Well now enough of that unpleasantness, lets talk about Studio Mir.
So Studio Mir were basically the only people that seemed to care about quality when working on this season. The designs are all nice and detailed, the backgrounds look really nice with great use of lighting in a lot of scenes with lots of nice detail and there's basically no CG like they have to work with on Korra as Vehicles are all 2D. Now theres not a lot of action this season but what is there is pretty good. Not a lot of all out brawls like last season but "Freedom Ride or Die" had some nice action with a creative use of non violent fighting. The other main fight episode "Freedomland" however did suffer from some off timing during the fight scenes but overall it still looked fine. Nothing impressive but its better than the worst looking Naruto episodes. The main strength of the animation this season is Mir's ability to convey simple emotions in creative ways using interesting character movements. As you can see in the video they do this a lot in their work whereas in other american productions like Family Guy or Spongebob which also rely on character movement, they convey the comedy in a realistic way rather than an over the top and exaggerated manner. Thats what really worked best in previous seasons and Mir continue the tradition admirably.
One interesting thing i happened to notice is after watching all of Mir's output so far i've finally started to notice other animation styles besides In Seung Choi . From what i could tell Choi may not have even worked on this project since none of his trademarks were present but that is just from what i could tell as we don't have credits to go from anyway. I did notice a couple styles i will highlight here with the first one being an animator that uses smears quite effectively. This is most evident in the image below that features Grandad throwing a gun away and on top of the smears we have a nice Kanada Light Flare further highlighting the trajectory of the gun.
Now to compare lets take a look at similar examples in Legend of Korra. The first one here you can see is from the "Beginnings" special which features Mir's best animation overall to date.
These two pieces of animation near identical smearing techniques so form that we can presume the same animator did both. At the moment i'm inclined to presume that animator would be Han Chung Il (maybe?) who used a similar smearing technique in this cut here. It may be a stretch to some but they look similar enough that for now that's what i'm going with. Here's another piece of animation using the same style just to give another example.
The next style is more of an expressive style of character animation that makes use of a different smearing technique and involves a lot of additional linework. Heres the first example.
This style stands out because its a very effective abstraction of reality and they accomplish this with use of very expertly used smears and a high level of detail with the hair. The additional linework to emphasize impacts also adds to the expressiveness making it stand out even more. This just goes to show that Mir will continue to follow the precedent the Yu Jae Myoung set when he first started working on Avatar TLA that allowing a little more freedom to the studio's artists to be a bit more expressive and not so rigid was warranted as it produces results like this. The Anime Industry has been doing this for decades but its nice to see that Mir will continue to do so as well not like i had any doubt. Here is another example of this style.
In this second example you can also see that the hand after it breaks has a real sense of weight which adds to the depiction of the attackers pain thereafter. Its really an interesting style to analyse as while both cuts look similar, they show this similarity in different ways as certain things are always present. The sense of weight being the strongest element present in the 2 cuts. So now the final style is one i've wanted to see used in Korra to see how effectively Mirs artists can use it and its really quite interesting to see the Korean studios start to emulate this style of armed combat. Heres the first example.
While we've seen the characters fight using staffs and bats before in The Boondocks, we have yet to see the animators make effective use of triangular smears when animating the staffs and bats themselves. This cut shows us that the artists at Mir can basically make very effective use of pretty much any animation technique you'd expect from top talent at your average japanese studio. It's not much of a surprise but it was interesting seeing Mir use more than just interesting elemental animation techniques and see them work on a more grounded series in regards to combat. You can tell that it was much easier for them to work on this series and enhance the quite mediocre material with their prowess and then move back to Korra and make use of the new techniques they displayed here with this example.
So As you can see the rude dudes at Studio Mir be rolling in talent yo. This season of the boondocks was a fun watch animation wise with the episodes i'd recommend watching for the uniquely expressive animation being episode 5 "Freedom Ride or Die" and episode 9 "Stinkmeaner Strikes Back". The animation here never reaches the heights of their best work on Korra but its consistently good and the quality never drops in a significantly noticeable way. Its not overly showy because there are very few opportunities offered to Mir to show off what they can really do but even then they managed to produce some great animation overall and i would give this a rating of 3/5. Though i don't usually do this because i focus on animation primarily, if i was to rate it overall animation aside i'd give it a 1.5/5 because the writing was just arghhhhhh!! Not sure exactly when my next post will be because i'm full steam ahead on that Psyren project but it will most likely be one about the current state of DC's Animated Output with a focus on the studios WB Animation outsource too and my thoughts on each one.
So yeah, The vast majority of episodes this season are bad. They mostly focus on Grandad who is a character that works best as a foil for Huey and Riley but having them have to work off his material mainly means everyone else gets less focus and our supposed lead Huey is basically relegated to a side character this season. Not that i'd want him ruined anyway because its obvious the writers didn't really know what to do with him since i guess you have to have a firm grasp of Huey's specific type of intelligence and personality to be able to write for that character. There's also the overarching plot of the Freeman's being broke which ends up going nowhere and being used as mainly an excuse for the characters trying a few get-rich-quick schemes that are more tedious than hilarious. Thats basically this season as a whole though. The are only 2 of the 10 episodes that are actually enjoyable and that's mostly due to one being a pretty good Breaking Bad parody as well as a spot on commentary on the black hair care industry, with the other being "Freedom Ride or Die" which was just very well written with the best animation Studio Mir did this season.
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| Ahh, good times ... |
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| Umm ... Okay ... |
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| Meet Kardashia Kardashian, I bet you can't guess who she's supposed to be a parody of. |
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| Oh happy day! |
One interesting thing i happened to notice is after watching all of Mir's output so far i've finally started to notice other animation styles besides In Seung Choi . From what i could tell Choi may not have even worked on this project since none of his trademarks were present but that is just from what i could tell as we don't have credits to go from anyway. I did notice a couple styles i will highlight here with the first one being an animator that uses smears quite effectively. This is most evident in the image below that features Grandad throwing a gun away and on top of the smears we have a nice Kanada Light Flare further highlighting the trajectory of the gun.
 |
| Dem smears yo! |
These two pieces of animation near identical smearing techniques so form that we can presume the same animator did both. At the moment i'm inclined to presume that animator would be Han Chung Il (maybe?) who used a similar smearing technique in this cut here. It may be a stretch to some but they look similar enough that for now that's what i'm going with. Here's another piece of animation using the same style just to give another example.
The next style is more of an expressive style of character animation that makes use of a different smearing technique and involves a lot of additional linework. Heres the first example.
This style stands out because its a very effective abstraction of reality and they accomplish this with use of very expertly used smears and a high level of detail with the hair. The additional linework to emphasize impacts also adds to the expressiveness making it stand out even more. This just goes to show that Mir will continue to follow the precedent the Yu Jae Myoung set when he first started working on Avatar TLA that allowing a little more freedom to the studio's artists to be a bit more expressive and not so rigid was warranted as it produces results like this. The Anime Industry has been doing this for decades but its nice to see that Mir will continue to do so as well not like i had any doubt. Here is another example of this style.
In this second example you can also see that the hand after it breaks has a real sense of weight which adds to the depiction of the attackers pain thereafter. Its really an interesting style to analyse as while both cuts look similar, they show this similarity in different ways as certain things are always present. The sense of weight being the strongest element present in the 2 cuts. So now the final style is one i've wanted to see used in Korra to see how effectively Mirs artists can use it and its really quite interesting to see the Korean studios start to emulate this style of armed combat. Heres the first example.
While we've seen the characters fight using staffs and bats before in The Boondocks, we have yet to see the animators make effective use of triangular smears when animating the staffs and bats themselves. This cut shows us that the artists at Mir can basically make very effective use of pretty much any animation technique you'd expect from top talent at your average japanese studio. It's not much of a surprise but it was interesting seeing Mir use more than just interesting elemental animation techniques and see them work on a more grounded series in regards to combat. You can tell that it was much easier for them to work on this series and enhance the quite mediocre material with their prowess and then move back to Korra and make use of the new techniques they displayed here with this example.
So As you can see the rude dudes at Studio Mir be rolling in talent yo. This season of the boondocks was a fun watch animation wise with the episodes i'd recommend watching for the uniquely expressive animation being episode 5 "Freedom Ride or Die" and episode 9 "Stinkmeaner Strikes Back". The animation here never reaches the heights of their best work on Korra but its consistently good and the quality never drops in a significantly noticeable way. Its not overly showy because there are very few opportunities offered to Mir to show off what they can really do but even then they managed to produce some great animation overall and i would give this a rating of 3/5. Though i don't usually do this because i focus on animation primarily, if i was to rate it overall animation aside i'd give it a 1.5/5 because the writing was just arghhhhhh!! Not sure exactly when my next post will be because i'm full steam ahead on that Psyren project but it will most likely be one about the current state of DC's Animated Output with a focus on the studios WB Animation outsource too and my thoughts on each one.
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