Netflix's animated series adaptation of the video game Cuphead is streaming soon and a new trailer was released today in anticipation of its premiere:

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Based on the award-winning video game, THE CUPHEAD SHOW! follows the unique misadventures of loveable, impulsive scamp Cuphead and his cautious but easily swayed brother Mugman.

THE CUPHEAD SHOW! starts airing on Netflix this February 18. What do you think of the trailer? Has it enticed you to tune in for the premiere?

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[HarveyHouston]

I dunno... This looks a bit too modern to resemble that hand-drawn style of the 1930s. It looks more like Uncle Grandpa.

 

[PatrickD85]

I just love the art style used in this series

 

[Paolosworld]

Why are you so in need of attention? How is a still image of 2 cartoon characters disturbing?

I wanna be apart of the fight too!

 

[HeartfeltDesu]

Obligatory "old things good, new things bad" and "why aren't they using an outdated mode of animation that requires more money for more people to draw more images over longer periods of time to 1:1 perfectly capture the aEsThEtIc" comments aside, the show looks really good. Plenty of great animated shows coming out this generation, and I'm sure this will be counted among them.

 

[Paolosworld]

Obligatory "old things good, new things bad" and "why aren't they using an outdated mode of animation that requires more money for more people to draw more images over longer periods of time to 1:1 perfectly capture the aEsThEtIc" comments aside, the show looks really good. Plenty of great animated shows coming out this generation, and I'm sure this will be counted among them.

i mean i get it from a management standpoint but part of the whole selling point of cuphead the video game was the animation being so smooth. when you use flash animation instead with a lot of manual stretching and transforming, it starts to look way less smooth and more cartoon network-y, which kind of defeats the whole selling point of cuphead.

the only other selling point of cuphead was how old cartoons like that didn't have age guidelines and thus had a lot of religious and political undertones that went over a lot of people's heads back then (look up "Betty Boop in Snow White").
unfortunately this show looks like it was made for kids, so that point of interest is also liable to be nonexistent.

i'm 18 now though so im kind of out of my age group for this. maybe itll be a good show even if it's for different reasons.

 

[HeartfeltDesu]

i mean i get it from a management standpoint but part of the whole selling point of cuphead the video game was the animation being so smooth. when you use flash animation instead with a lot of manual stretching and transforming, it starts to look way less smooth and more cartoon network-y, which kind of defeats the whole selling point of cuphead.

the only other selling point of cuphead was how old cartoons like that didn't have age guidelines and thus had a lot of religious and political undertones that went over a lot of people's heads back then (look up "Betty Boop in Snow White").
unfortunately this show looks like it was made for kids, so that point of interest is also liable to be nonexistent.

i'm 18 now though so im kind of out of my age group for this. maybe itll be a good show even if it's for different reasons.

Firstly, to faithfully replicate hand-drawn, traditionally animated cartoons on the scale and schedule of a video game and its assets is a different beast entirely to a full-blown television show. That isn't even to comment on the issue that people believe a show deciding to aestheticize itself after the 30s also entitles them to egregious amounts of extra work to replicate the work conditions to resolve the non-issue of "it is not exactly the way it was in the 30s, therefore bad". It does not. The show is adopting an aesthetic within a modern medium, but no matter how much a show stylizes itself after the 30s it is still a show produced in 2022. It is a modern spin on a classic format, and it is made in 2022 and will use techniques and technology from 2022. Expecting anything more is egregiously silly, and frankly I think if anyone is disappointed in something like that it's their own fault.

 

[Paolosworld]

Firstly, to faithfully replicate hand-drawn, traditionally animated cartoons on the scale and schedule of a video game and its assets is a different beast entirely to a full-blown television show. That isn't even to comment on the issue that people believe a show deciding to aestheticize itself after the 30s also entitles them to egregious amounts of extra work to replicate the work conditions to resolve the non-issue of "it is not exactly the way it was in the 30s, therefore bad". It does not. The show is adopting an aesthetic within a modern medium, but no matter how much a show stylizes itself after the 30s it is still a show produced in 2022. It is a modern spin on a classic format, and it is made in 2022 and will use techniques and technology from 2022. Expecting anything more is egregiously silly, and frankly I think if anyone is disappointed in something like that it's their own fault.

i wasn't saying 1930s was practical, or even feasible, I'm just saying that this animation kind of misses the point of what made cuphead interesting.

i'm also not saying "it is not exactly the way it was in the 30s, therefore bad".
It's one thing to use modern technology and scale back the ambition, but what they did was change it to look like "the loud house" or "uncle grandpa" rather than an old mickey mouse cartoon. this is because the studios that netflix contracts to animate their shows are experienced in flash animation in the style of those shows, not the type you see in cuphead the game at all.

This show would have worked better with the watercolory backgrounds you see in the game, as well as the having much less vector use for squash/stretch like they do in cartoon network stuff. Here's the thing though;
All of these can be done in Krita/TVpaint using modern technology, it doesn't have to be penned and inked like in the 1930s.

The problem isn't that they don't animate like in the 30s, that would be ridiculous, but rather that they decided to contract an animation studio that works solely in flash animation, and made the show in a style that kind of loses the entire aesthetic of cuphead. It's not the workload that's the issue, but rather that the producers decided to go with a style that looses the point.

It's not even a style that's easier to animate. 60fps mouths are a nightmare in flash, and the amount of smear frames they have to make is crazy.
In other words, it's not "egregiously silly" to have an issue with bad direction on behalf of the producers, who likely had nothing to do with cuphead despite buying the rights to it. I simply wanted it to look less childish, and there are plenty of studios out there who could have done this much better. None of it involving anything having to do with the type of circumstances that you're describing.