Teen Titans Go Review

Teen Titans Go

As an animated show I didn’t like it, not as a comparison or a replacement mind you, as a show. The Brony part was amusing but.. it’s an easy joke. Throw a pop cultural reference onto the darkest character to give the character some anthesis/oxymornic aspect.. whatever. The format was promising at first, but I remember from when I studied animation theory books of the early 90’s a big hurdle Walt Disney had with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was (as it was the first full length feature) that you can’t keep someone’s attention on for 20+ minutes without a dramatic center in the narrative, so I had a feeling it would be pretty difficult to extend this particular chosen format onto 20 minutes (I don’t count adverts, it’s not part of the narrative). Than I started to think about other shows that I’ve been watching with 10 minutes narratives, Spongebob Squarepants and especially Phineas and Ferb and how they HAD creatively structured their comedic storytelling while creating a largeer indept narrative and universe. Teen Titans GO seemed more like an old format, which often felt isolated like a small universe without much space to move, which can work.. but it should be better considering evolution of animation in the last 5 years.

My main problem is I had no reference to the characters. The gimmick was working off the old Nostalgia crowd, I didn’t watch that much of Teen Titans so many of the in jokes went over my head (especially personality jokes), it also felt quite cringe worthy at times, especially the second segment between Beast Boy's and Cyborg's relationship, it was overly ott, and it kind of failed on what I think was a pretty important aspect. When Beast Boy had a flashback the animation went into pencil drawing cute style, normally this would be ok but there’s no frame of reference when you go from one cute style to another, there is no irony where the comedy here works off, it simply changes and lost is the idealistic and emotionally enhanced nature of the effect/affect. The DC Nation shorts were animated better too, it was short and it was amusing fitting it's format, the dramatic change to save animating time seemed pretty evident and unwelcome and seemed lazy compared to the DC Nation shorts. As a show would you be excited to watch it weekly?

I did not like this, not much.

The Ponie should have been cuter too, and what's up with all that glaring background colors?