Raccoonolith is my new favorite Homestar Runner character
This is a pretty good movie
Full disclosure: I didn’t grow up going to the Great Wolf Lodge. Never been there even once. They didn’t advertise in my area until the 2010s, well after it had been established as a franchise. Besides that, my family wouldn’t have been able to afford it, especially since the California locations didn’t exist then. In other words, I never formed an attachment or nostalgia for these characters.
Despite that, though, when I first heard of this movie, I was looking forward to seeing it. As somebody who knew next to nothing about the Great Wolf Lodge mascots and had no prior bias, I thought these new designs were really nice.
As I mentioned on my Twitter, I was kind of astonished to see a well-animated, old school “funny animal” cartoon in this day and age that wasn’t Looney Tunes. Classical style cartoon designs for animal characters have been an extremely rare breed ever since the late 1990s...
The movie isn’t perfect, but I hope it does well and continues as a series. The lip sync is often off, especially earlier in the movie. I think the animators should’ve had a couple more months to polish it. The pacing seems kind of rushed too, like we just jump from one plot point to another. I’d like there to be more humor as well. It needs a tiny bit more edge to it, like MLP:FiM style jokes. As it is it’s a little mild.
I think this has a lot of potential, though. I look forward to seeing more of this version of the cast, should they decide to keep at it.
Wabuu of Dingo Pictures fame This came out better than I intended it to be. If I had been fussier about it, I could have done a full redesign with better anatomy, but I wanted to stay true to the original and have him still be a little wonky.
*raises arms* I won!
artwork:
tymime reblogged
Over the Hedge really doesn’t get enough credit for being a pioneer in semi-realistic cartoon animal character design and advancing fur texture technology- as far as I can tell, it was the first leap in realistic fur since Monsters Inc.
And you can’t look at the model sheets and convince me that there isn’t at least some similarity to the ones for Zootopia:
Over the Hedge was actually a huge influence on me as an artist, although perhaps not an obvious one. But more than anything, the movie helped me discover how adorable medium-sized mammals were, raccoons, opossums, and skunks most of all. Raccoons, ‘possums, and skunks are three of my most favorite animals because of it. And it’s probably the reason why I’m so obsessed with talking animal characters in general.
I didn’t even know there were half this many Over the Hedge fans in the world
Over the Hedge really doesn’t get enough credit for being a pioneer in semi-realistic cartoon animal character design and advancing fur texture technology- as far as I can tell, it was the first leap in realistic fur since Monsters Inc.
And you can’t look at the model sheets and convince me that there isn’t at least some similarity to the ones for Zootopia:
Over the Hedge was actually a huge influence on me as an artist, although perhaps not an obvious one. But more than anything, the movie helped me discover how adorable medium-sized mammals were, raccoons, opossums, and skunks most of all. Raccoons, ‘possums, and skunks are three of my most favorite animals because of it. And it’s probably the reason why I’m so obsessed with talking animal characters in general.
This is the YouTube channel for Oreo, the raccoon that served as the model for Rocket.
For reasons beyond my reckoning, it’s only got about 2,000 subscribers and the views never go beyond four digits. We must amend this!
Local wildlife
All the animals seen in our yard or in the neighborhood
- House sparrow
- Pigeon (aka rock dove)
- Mourning dove
- American crow
- California scrub jay
- Northern mockingbird
- Anna’s hummingbird
- American bushtit (we like to call them “little grey birds” or LGBs)
- Common starling (I think)
- Red-crowned parrot (supposedly escaped from a pet shop in the ‘70s)
- Southern alligator lizard (although I think the dogs got all of them)
- some kind of rat (probably the brown rat)
- Raccoon
- Virginia opossum
- Striped skunk (only seen once, but we smell ‘em pretty often)
Considering we live in the suburbs in the middle of LA county, not bad really.
This year's Mother's Day card. Now that we have the tablet, we can get more elaborate with the color and shading a lot more easily- even though we used the crayon brushes.
tymime reblogged
I don’t know if anyone can help me with this, as I imagine the handheld electronic game fandom isn’t very big and probably not very present on Tumblr. Plus I’m guessing that it’s probably a very obscure title.
Anyway, one time I was playing this LCD game at a cousin’s house, probably one of those Christmas parties that side of the family used to have. I believe you were supposed to be collecting letters at the top of the screen while avoiding monsters. (They looked like the chompy things in Donkey Kong Jr., sorta.) I’m not entirely sure, because I never could figure out how to play it. I think maybe the character was a raccoon?
It was such a long time ago, so sorry if the description is a little vague.
Since MAME started adding LCD games to their list earlier this year, I’ve been even more curious about the identity of this game.
Luckily I found a drawing I did as a kid loosely based on it, and this description from around the same time: “It starred an ugly weasel frantically trying to grab letters floating above his head and bring them back down to spell a word by gliding up, down, left and right thru the air. The problem was, there were monsters who lived to chomp the weasel flying across the screen. But no matter how hard [I] tried, [I] couldn’t get any of the letters or end the game by putting the weasel in front of the enemies.”
Based on that, either the game was broken or I actually had no idea what the real goal was. Also apparently it starred some kind of weasel thingy and not a raccoon after all? Some kind of critter I guess.
tymime reblogged
I absolutely adore the original 1980s version of The Raccoons, and while I’m happy that they’re making a comeback, I’m disappointed that they’re designed with that typical “bean mouth” thing- it’s not bad, per se, but pretty tiresome by this point. Everything else about the designs is fine, though. The reason I’m not a fan of the bean mouth is that it doesn’t really convey three-dimensionality. It just sorta slides around the face like a moving sticker or something. I prefer to get a sense that a cartoon character actually has a jaw.
All in all, though, I don’t see any need to redesign the characters at all- they’re trying to fix what isn’t broken. I don’t understand why so many people feel the need to “modernize” cartoons, when they can be just as appealing as they ever were. I also wish it weren’t animated in this pretty generic-looking Toon Boom fashion. Seeing characters almost always remain nearly the same shape no matter what the pose can be pretty dull to watch… However, I’ll refrain from further judgement until I hear the voices and get a sense of the writing style. The personalities of the characters and the storytelling was one of the strongest points of the original show, so I hope they keep it that way.
What the hell?? Oh my friggin’ God I hate these designs so much. Those bulbous heads... yuck yuck yuck
I mean... these just lose nearly everything about the originals. Now they just look like modern-day Cartoon Network knockoffs. I am never watching this reboot.
It makes me mad because I really, really like the original show, and a big part of the reason I do is because the characters had such wonderful, appealing designs. That... looks almost nothing like Bert, Ralph, and Melissa. If you showed me those Ralph and Melissa designs by themselves out of context, I’d never guess who they were supposed to be.
I would have been okay with the look they had in the pilot. (It’s no wonder they removed the teaser video.) I wouldn’t have loved it, but I could have learned to ignore it like I did Bert’s nose in the original. But this just goes to show that they don’t care about the fans (or some director or producer went and hired new artists that don’t). I’ve seen it so many times before: if they mess with the look of the characters, it’s almost certain they’ve messed with everything. It’s nearly universal nowadays.
Even on the off-chance that the rest of show isn’t hugely bad, I still couldn’t get past these designs. They’re not even good designs on their own- if it weren’t for the masks and tails, they wouldn’t look like raccoons, and the Sneers look even less like aardvarks than they already did. I can’t imagine how much money was wasted designing, rigging and animating the first redesign before scrapping them entirely.
I mean, good grief, you’d think after the Thundercats disaster, they’d stop and think “hey maybe we shouldn’t radically redesign a beloved ‘80s cartoon too?”. As if this style hasn’t caused enough controversy.