The Webcomicker

A nice group shot, from the first episode of PvP The Series.

This is the post that was supposed to appear two weeks ago, and it was supposed to appear over at Comixpedia. But I’ve found the readers there prefer well-researched articles with well-thought out arguments and precise critiques, as opposed to the rantings of a fan suffering from entitlement. So I’m posting it where it belongs, here at the Webcomicker.

Let me start by saying that all in all, the first episode was not terrible. I’ve watched it over and over in the process of forming my opinion, and it’s still watchable to me. I’m looking forward to the next episode. And I don’t feel that I’ve wasted my subscription money, if only because I’m helping further the cause of webcomic animation, which I’d love to see more and more of in the future.

That being said, I would also say that the first episode of PvP The Series, while not terrible, was also not very good. And since I was a subscriber to Ctrl-Alt-Del the Animation as well, I think perhaps I have some perspective that many out there don’t have. So let’s dive in. (Oh, quick note: this is all about the episode proper, not the preview bit they put up for free as a teaser for the show).
First off, the animation itself. I’m not going to be nitpicky here about clipping problems and jerky movements. There have been much higher budget productions which have suffered from similar problems, and quite frankly the problems were minor and on the whole the animation was pretty fluid. However, the whole thing came off as really flat to me. Basically every shot in the whole episode consisted of the characters in three-quarter view, sitting or standing behind a table. Not too exciting, eh? I know that’s typically how PvP the comic strip goes down as well, but animation is not a comic strip. We want to see people moving around, doing things, basically taking advantage of the dynamic medium that animation presents.

Ctrl+Alt+Del is another strip that generally has the characters sitting and standing around in three-quarter view, and yet even in the first episode of CAD The Animation we saw a lot of dynamicism. Characters in foreground and background, a character falling from the roof followed by a really nice “run toward the camera” shot and generally a lot more of characters moving around. With CAD The Animation, it felt like Buckley was really enjoying the new medium, playing around with the opportunities it presented. With PvP The Series, it feels like Kurtz is just saying “Hey look, now my characters are delivering their jokes OUT LOUD!” I remember one of the big selling points for PvP The Series was that now Blind Ferret had its own in-house animation studio, and boy-howdy were they going to be able to do great things now. And, as evidenced by the Least I Could Do Animation Trailer, they can do good work. But it feels like PvP The Series isn’t using this talent.

Now, the voice acting. Notice that I’m not talking about the voices themselves here, but rather the voice acting. I think we all know how contentious a subject the characters voices are, and I’m content to let it be for now. I find that no matter how annoying you think a voice is at first (and note: I didn’t find any of the voices annoying), you get used to it and after a few episodes you won’t be able to imagine it any other way. Maybe you weren’t expecting a nasally Cole (I sure wasn’t). Maybe you thought Jade would sound more sultry. But in the long run, that’s not really what matters. What matters is the acting behind the voices, and in PvP The Series, it just seemed… off. Maybe it was really the editing that was the problem, but when watching the show, it sounds to me more like individual actors reading off their lines separately and then those lines getting spliced together than it sounds like a conversation between characters. And I realize that this is probably how it was actually recorded, but it shouldn’t sound that way.

This is actually a problem that was shared by CAD The Animation. In CAD, it often felt like the characters were talking to themselves, and I’m not sure if the two series are using some of the same voice actors, but it seems like something needs to be done. Maybe the actors need to have a bit less of a “Here I am, this is my line” reading mentality, or maybe the editing just needs to be tightened up to eliminate those short pauses in conversation, or maybe they just need to have a few more takes on the lines and then decide which take for one character fit best with which take from another character. I’m honestly not an expert here. All I know is that it comes off sounding forced, fragmented, and not a whole lot like normal conversation.

Lastly, the writing. All in all, the writing was very typical of PvP. The characters were very reckonizable, and acted about as I expected them to act. Francis seemed a bit tamer than usual, but this wasn’t really his show, so that’s reasonable. In fact, I could easily see this story being plotted out as a short storyline in the comic strip instead of an animation. And that may actually be a problem. Each scene felt like it could be a strip or two, with a premise, build up, and knock-down. One of the advantages of working in a longer form medium like animation is that every scene doesn’t have to be a self-contained joke. You probably want to work humor into each scene, but by no means does each scene need to execute like a comic strip. You can have scenes that build to a greater humor later in the show, that hint at things to come, or simply add to a greater ongoing plot without having any great significance by themselves.

This kind of adjustment in writing style is probably just something that takes practice. CAD The Animation had similar problems at times, with each scene feeling like an independent comic (Episode 1 is actually remarkable devoid of these scenes, but they cropped up later on), but as the series drew to a close Buckley was actually able to do a decent three-part Star Wars parody with pretty good storyline development and pacing (although by that time production was so ridiculously behind schedule that the animation suffered quite a bit, unfortunately). So I’m anticipating that aspect to improve with subsequent episodes of PvP The Series.

So what’s the verdict? Wait and see. As it stands, the first episode of PvP The Series was underwhelming in my mind. I liked the first episode of CAD The Animation better, and I like PvP better than CAD in general. But it certainly wasn’t so awful that I never want to see any more of it again. It really just has me interested in the second episode, to see if they hit their stride a bit better, with tighter writing and better use of the medium. And I’m looking forward to seeing some of the other characters transfer over to moving pictures. I was sad that Skull was not in the first episode, because he’s one of those characters that really provides a lot of energy to the strip, and energy is important to animation. And what about Max Powers? Or the infamous Scratch Fury!? They always add some hijinks to the mix. So I’m looking forward to seeing where things go.

We’ll see what my attitude is after episode 2.