# I experienced a weird animation-related optical illusion watching 'Lower Decks'

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-experienced-a-weird-animation-related-optical-illusion-watching-lower-decks/982626>\
**Category:** Cafe Society\
**Tags:** cartoons-animation, star-trek-paramount\
**Created:** [April 13, 2023, 2:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-experienced-a-weird-animation-related-optical-illusion-watching-lower-decks/982626 "2023-04-13T14:03:56Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![solost](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/solost/32/11776_2.png) [@solost](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/solost)\
**Post date:** [April 13, 2023, 2:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-experienced-a-weird-animation-related-optical-illusion-watching-lower-decks/982626/1 "2023-04-13T14:03:56Z")

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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.