#i do love a good 'becoming one with the vast neural network of conscious alien (?) flora and fauna that is taking over the earth' moment

[vampyre-rat]

Ok I NEED to talk about this!!! I read the books when I was a kid and genuinely they had such a profound impact on who I am today!! (btw they're written by the same guy who wrote the Spiderwick Chronicles which also fundamentally shaped me as a child <3 shout out Tony DiTerlizzi, massive artistic inspiration fr). So keep that intense level of bias and nostalgia in mind when it comes to my initial opinion on this show lol... but yeah I agree a 1000000% with everything you said!

I re-read the trilogy last December (btw it's such a beautifully compelling and captivating story!!! Everyone who likes sci-fi fantasy should give it a go, I get it's middle grade or whatever but that does not diminish its quality at ALL) and I spent months after thinking about how perfect it would be for an animated adaptation... but when I was picturing it I had more in a mind a sort of animated soup of stuff like the Dark Crystal, Nausicaa Valley of the Wind and Scavenger's Reign. Something really leaning into the alien landscape and cool creature design. I think that Wolfwalkers and the lotr animated movie like you mentioned too, are good examples of the right artistic vision as well, whimsical and fantastical!

What they've gone with for this show however... yeah it's just. too polished. It's too smooth, clean and has that stink of mass market appeal, leaving it missing all the grungy, wild, overgrown charm. I think the animation and art style looks great, don't get me wrong, but yeah I don't think it's the right fit for this story. To me the creative decisions taken when it comes to the animation (as far as I can tell just from the trailer) very much come across as 'playing it safe.' I feel like this is the perfect story to take creative leaps with and really delve into the weird, otherwordliness of it all. The trailer, in my opinion, is offering just your run of the mill, streaming service animated kids show. There's certainly nothing wrong with that but, I can't help feeling that it's drastically watering down the story :/

Because really the heart of the story is this young girl, Eva Nine, who has never met another human her whole life, raised and trained with the single goal of preparing her for life on the surface, only to emerge and find the Earth completely wild and unrecognisable in every single way. A totally alien planet that she has to learn to live in harmony with as she searches for answers to who she is, where she came from and what happened to all the other humans. And the new Earth is absolutely beautiful, yes, but it's also terrifying. Genuinely like half the animals and plants that she comes across attempt to eat her, plus she's being hunted by an alien bounty hunter who wants to turn her into taxidermy and display her in a museum... yikes.

As I was watching scavenger's reign last year, I found myself marveling at all these breathtaking animated landscapes and weird alien plants and critters and thinking "wow this reminds me so much of the search for wondla" (keeping in mind this was before I re-read the series and at that point it'd been a decade since I read the first book and it was still forever on my mind)

(freaky alien plants from Scavenger's Reign... one of the shows of all time btw...)

I think Scavenger's Reign and Nausicaa both perfectly capture that strange balance between the beauty and the terror of an alien world and it's genuinely a shame not to see this level of whimsical and unique visual storytelling in the art style of the WondLa show :( it just really does feel lackluster and unimaginative in a way that I feel really lets down the source material.

(Here are some stills from Nausicaa Valley of the Wind that I think capture that sense of eerie wonder! The Ohmu remind me so much of WondLa's water bears :3)

And here are some more illustrations from the books, I mean just look at how atmospheric (and at times unsettling) the world is!

I've also always been a super big fan of the 1950s-60s inspired aesthetics of all the futuristic human tech! I've been obsessed with this goldfish shaped hovercar ever since I picked up the first book <3

ALSO GIVE MUTHR BACK HER CREEPY LITTLE ARMS AND BIG SHINY EYES!!! And why does she have that generic siri voice man :/ In the book Eva describes her as having the voice of a 'beautiful woman from an old movie' which I always interpreted as like old Hollywood leading lady, smooth, elegant, mayhaps a transatlantic accent... that would tie in so much better with her warm, maternal character!

tldr: The Search for WondLa book trilogy has such a rich, creative and visually intriguing world and characters that is absolutely not done justice by smooth, overly polished cg animation, especially when all the interesting and unique design quirks of characters, objects and environments seem to have been buffed out, leaving cookie cutter sci-fi assets in their place :( Do I think the show is going to be bad because of this? Definitely not. BUT I do think it's somewhat wasted potential, at least based on what I've seen so far from the trailer...

Apple tv is making a WondLa show and as a fan of the books, I have to say I feel a slight bit of dissapointment!

The art style is extremely clean and scifi, it's that smooth CG look and I think I just would have loved to see it in the dark Crystal, lotr animated movie, high fantasy style that I know!

And disclaimer let me make some things clear:

1. The art for the show is not BAD. It is not Wrong, artists also made that and I hope they were compensated well for work well done. This is me expressing a personal preference for a different art style.

2. My GOD this is not about Eva Nine redesign.

Just putting that in the appropriate sized font, but no yeah Eva was like synthetically made she can be any ethnicity. And those are the types of changes that should be made!

There's actually a whole plotline of Eva infiltrating this city and having to conform and all that, and I think it will hit way harder with a non-white protagonist.

But yes once again I would have loved to see a new 2024 Eva redesigned in that high fantasy style! This Eva with original Eva's braids and baggy, off shoulder comfy looking outfits that made me Feral as a kid I'd love to see it.

And yeah those are the choices I feel dissapointment about!

Eva's wand becoming a sci-fi bracelet?

Muthr robot losing all those crazy panels and mechanical pieces for a smooth floating Alexa looking design.

I know there is certainly very practical reasons they couldn't reproduce this but I feel like it's the mindset of making just a sci-fi show that is the issue!

WondLa is a sci fi story, TOLD like a fairytale of a girl leaving her wood home, straying from the forest. At first look it just really feels like they sacrificed all the fun tactile storybook stuff for this very clean aesthetic that is just different to what I love about WondLa.

I think something like how Wolfwalkers or Klaus was styled would be much more suitable! And appletv produced Wolfwalkers I think!

So once again there is no moral failing happening here, I'm just saying I'm a fan of the original art and would have Preferred if we leaned harder that direction.