I was thrilled when I first heard about this projects, since I love the books. After suffering through the three-year wait for it to finally reach the local PBS affiliate, I was completely disappointed in the result.
The animation quality, for starters, was pathetic. The characters had no character. It was as bad as any cartoon-based-on-a-toy that disgraces Saturday afternoons on WB. I was hoping for something at least on par with 'Watership Down', which itself could have been much better.
Too much of the book was left out, also. There weren't enough scenes in the enemy camp to give the viewer a feel for their motivations. They were just bad guys. And JUST bad guys. They hardly even seemed dangerous. The violence and threat were bowdlerized shamefully. Brian Jacques' books depict death and battle in an exciting way, without being too disturbing for young readers; surely we could have gotten a little more realism for the animated series. The sense of urgency to defeat the bad guys is lost.
I didn't like the lack of Jacques' wonderful dialects among the various species, but I can grudgingly understand why it was necessary to homogenize them for spoken lines. The moles and sparrows would have been nearly unintelligible, to audiences who hadn't read the books.
The Redwall books are such a wonderful literary series; they deserve better treatment in animation. Maybe we'll see a full-length, full-budget theatre movie, in the future.
The animation quality, for starters, was pathetic. The characters had no character. It was as bad as any cartoon-based-on-a-toy that disgraces Saturday afternoons on WB. I was hoping for something at least on par with 'Watership Down', which itself could have been much better.
Too much of the book was left out, also. There weren't enough scenes in the enemy camp to give the viewer a feel for their motivations. They were just bad guys. And JUST bad guys. They hardly even seemed dangerous. The violence and threat were bowdlerized shamefully. Brian Jacques' books depict death and battle in an exciting way, without being too disturbing for young readers; surely we could have gotten a little more realism for the animated series. The sense of urgency to defeat the bad guys is lost.
I didn't like the lack of Jacques' wonderful dialects among the various species, but I can grudgingly understand why it was necessary to homogenize them for spoken lines. The moles and sparrows would have been nearly unintelligible, to audiences who hadn't read the books.
The Redwall books are such a wonderful literary series; they deserve better treatment in animation. Maybe we'll see a full-length, full-budget theatre movie, in the future.