I had been binging the Star Trek animated show 'Lower Decks" on Paramount+ with one eye while doing work on a computer. For those who aren’t familiar with the show, its style of animation is very non-realistic. Think “Rick & Morty” style animation.
Without me noticing it, Lower Decks ended and the streaming service automatically started in on “Strange New Worlds” which is a live-action prequel to Star Trek TOS. I glanced at the TV and thought “huh, that’s weird-- in this Lower Decks episode they switched to a highly realistic form of animation”. This seemingly radical switch in animation styles didn’t seem too strange, since LD is a clever show that plays with genre conventions, and I was used to shows like “Love, Death & Robots” on Netflix, a sci-fi animated anthology series that features unrelated episodes done in very different styles of animation.
It helped that the opening scene was in a darkened control room with aliens, but even when the scene switched to a long-haired bearded Christopher Pike in a well-lit scene, I thought “wow, the animators did a great job on the hair”. It gradually dawned on me that it was live-action, but I realized it was a different show even before I realized it wasn’t animated. The illusion of it being animated lingered surprisingly long.
So that’s about it-- really just a mundane, pointless Cafe Society-related thing I felt like sharing.