A spectacular teaser trailer has dropped. It looks stunning! Cannot wait!
Okay, I’d like to take back my original statement. That does look pretty damn awesome.
I think some things looked awesome and some things did not. The Gelflings in particular looked bad to me: un-expressive faces, poor gestures and movement. That dark crystal looked like something from Robot Chicken or a Lego movie before final rendering. Frankly, IMO they just should have gone with straight CGI for the whole thing, but still figure out how to not make the Gelflings look like they have plastic faces made with a vacu-form mold.
OTOH, I thought many of the scenes had rich visuals, some with a spectacular number of cool things to look at. I think as a TV series this could work; our level of suspension for disbelief is much lower on TV and people are more intensely drawn to the characters and story, IMO, than with most feature films. So if they have the plot pacing down for the series arc and the pacing for individual episodes figured out as well, that would be good.
I’m looking forward to this, but I don’t expect to be blown away like I was with The Expanse; I just hope for a solid show.
It’s a balance between technology and nostalgia. They very deliberately wanted to maintain the look and methods, and I respect them for that. Pure CGI would have been too big a difference. As it is they can use it to expand the landscapes, hide the rods and strings, allowing them to develop the character abilities. I think the limited expression is considered part of the charm.
I get their aim, but I thought the Gelflings looked horribly stiff and unnatural back in the '80s too; it’s a bug, not a feature.
And CGI can look like anything now, so I still think they should have just gone with it.
I have to concur:
- It’s sort of silly to say that you’re bringing back puppets and the Henson methodology, just to have 99.2% of your film be 3D rendered.
- Slipping in some puppet heads to fill out that last 0.8% pretty clearly is a downgrade in terms of expressiveness - but likely wouldn’t have been so noticeable if it weren’t for all of the CGI around them, with all its details.
Though I do feel like - on point #2 - it’s probably possible to build a puppet that is able to be fairly expressive, these days, even if it gets you pretty deep into the animatronic world. Henson would have gone for it, though, so there’s no reason for them to have not.
Overall, the impression that I get is a hard budget that was pegged in advance and the production team had to figure out how to achieve something within those bounds. They couldn’t afford to do it all with practical effects and the expense of backgrounds, in 3D, was still high enough that they couldn’t put any money towards good puppets.
The original did, at least, have a lot of technological innovation and unique visual styling to go with it, even if the story was…eh. This won’t have either of those and the CGI may throw the puppets into a permanent uncanny valley. Unless the story is amazing, it’s going to be a hard boat to row.
More like 2% 3D rendered. Those are overwhelmingly real sets. The landscapes will be CGI and digital compositing, but for the most part it’s all as practical as the original movie.
The world feels a lot more… alive, I guess? And a TV series will give them more time to explore and develop the world, which was something the original desperately needed more of.