It’s Fall 2015, and time for a new batch of Amazon Studios kids premieres. This year, all 6 new programs are animated, with a variety of selections aimed at pre-schoolers to pre-teens. This set of pilots turns out to have a number of surprises in it, both good and bad and often set up by expectations established by the initial announcement. As usual, you can watch all pilots on Amazon.com/amazonvideo, and vote for which pilots should go on to full series orders at Amazon.com/pilotseason.
Everstar was the show that looked the coolest to me from the pilot announcement, so perhaps heightened expectations are why I felt slightly let down by the actual pilot episode. Intrepid pre-teen sailor Ainslie Wickett enjoys getting into trouble, as shown in a promising opening sequence where she and her best friend George are testing his latest invention at sea in the middle of a massive storm. However, she gets much more than she bargained for when she responds to a strange SOS that turns out to be from a spaceship called the Everstar, manned by an AI an a crotchety robot. She and George are whisked aboard, but the re-activation of the ship’s systems lures the pirates that have been chasing the Everstar and forced the last crew to abandon ship. The two are forced into a crash course in piloting and maintaining the Everstar while evading the pirates and luring them away from Earth.
All the ingredients for a fun show are in Everstar, but for some reason the pilot episode didn’t fully gel. There is a certain pedestrian tone to the show in everything from the writing to the animation: dialogue is extremely on-the-nose and the impact of some scenes is muted by the staging and the animated camera work. When Ainslie and George end up on the Everstar, the reveal that they’re in outer space feels like it should be much more epic than it is, and the subsequent chase and space battle with the pirates doesn’t quite have the tension that it needs to. It might also be that the pre-release artwork led me to expect a fully hand-drawn animated show, but the animation looks more like a Flash/After Effects cartoon rendered to look like hand-drawn animation. There might be a disconnect caused by the relatively rigid character models when the overall look is making me expect the variation and squash-and-stretch of hand-drawn animation. Either way, Everstar has a solid foundation for a show and could grow into a fun sci-fi serial epic, but the pilot doesn’t quite live up to its potential.
Heightened expectations might have also played a part in my slight disappointment with Yoyotoki Happy Ears!, a surreal animated series created by Adventure Time‘s Niki Yang. Like Adventure Time, Yoyotoki Happy Ears! is set in a strange world where magic is real and the inhabitants are an endearingly weird and extremely heterogeneous bunch. The title character is a decidedly non-magical fox, whose family crash-landed in the land of Mytholopia and are trying to keep their jellybean pot pie business going. A newspaper announcement that promises exactly one wish to come true prompts Yoyotoki to gather up her friends Steak (a talking green gummy bear) and Hotwings (…OK, not going to lie, I have no idea what he is. A burning hair pony thing?), and journey across a gigantic desert so she can get her wish for magical powers of her own.
Yoyotoki Happy Ears! certainly does not lack for energy or earnestness, nor does it fail to deliver some truly outlandish imagery. If nothing else, I’m glad that the cartoons of the recent past have been so willing to do deep dives into the bizarre, but there’s something missing from Yoyotoki Happy Ears! when compared to other weirdzo shows like Adventure Time or Pig Goat Banana Cricket. On the other hand, the pilot reminds me a lot of the early episodes of The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack, which grew into its strangeness as it went, so perhaps the same can happen to Yoyotoki Happy Ears! as well.
The Numberlys might look like a sterile Teletubbies clone, which makes the quality of the pilot that much more of a pleasant surprise. Based on a multi-media property (stretching across a book, short film, and app), the pilot puts the quintet of title characters in a gigantic concrete and metal city. When they discover a sprout growing out from the sidewalk, they take it upon themselves to keep it from getting trampled in increasingly creative ways. The Numberlys is also a lot stranger than it looks on the surface, with a distinctive CGI look and feel and some imagery that sticks with you afterwards. The legions of other Numberlys marching through the city in lockstep and in identical uniforms is an obstacle that the Numberlys of the title must overcome, but they’re also an oddly powerful image that ensures the title characters (and their brightly colored outfits) stand out on screen, while also reinforcing the show’s ultimate message on the value of creativity. It’s easily one of the nicest surprises in this crop of pilot episodes, promising a show that adults can watch with younger kids with both coming away with something different from the experience.
Hollywood has taken extremely slight subjects and expanded them to feature film or series length before. Sometimes they have been successful (Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs or Martha Speaks), and sometimes significantly less so (the live-action Cat in the Hat movie or Hasbro’s Battleship). Unfortunately, despite its best efforts, the animated version of If You Give a Mouse a Cookie falls somewhere in the middle but further towards the latter category than the former. The original picture book has been a favorite for many years, but the cartoon that results doesn’t have the same charm or staying power. Part of the reason is that each of the installments in the picture book series don’t have to sustain much of a narrative, so the slightness of the concept doesn’t work against them. In contrast, the TV show tries grafting a narrative onto the same sensibilities that drive the book, sending Mouse and his friend Oliver across town, with their shopping list growing unreasonably long as they helpfully offer to pick up stuff for all their friends they meet along the way. Even if this episode mostly succeeds on its charm and good nature, but not quite well enough that I can envision it sustaining an entire season. If You Give a Mouse a Cookie is a pretty good one-off that’s quite enjoyable, but I don’t know that there’s enough here to justify more.
If Everstar excited me in the pre-announcement, I have to admit Eddie of the Realms Eternal left me pretty cold, so I am also pleasantly surprised at the excellence of the pilot episode. The lazy elf wizard Hobi likes riding on the coattails of his famous grandfather, who summoned a hero named Edward Armstrong years ago to defeat the evil Shadow Queen. However, his boasts and tall tales of his grandfather’s exploits backfire on him when the forces of the Shadow Queen return and everyone expects great things from him. Hobi’s summons reach out across dimensional barriers to find teenaged Eddie Armstrong, grandson of the original hero Edward Armstrong. Eddie is plucked out of his comfortable suburban existence and into the middle of pitched mystical battle with his newfound friend Hobi, even though neither one has any solid idea what they’re doing.
If Everstar had an interesting sounding plot with under-achieving execution, Eddie and the Realms Eternal has a trite sounding plot with outstanding execution. The heroes-that-are-really-screw-ups trope is well-worn, but Eddie of the Realms Eternal manages to avoid the cliches and make both Hobi and Eddie into winning, appealing characters who aren’t as bumbling as they seem. The pitched battles against outlandish magical monsters are also quite exciting, nicely punctuating the plot points and ensuring we believe something real is at stake. It also helps that the animation is by Ireland’s Cartoon Saloon (The Secret of Kells and Song of the Sea); while it’s not quite the same super-stylized animation of the studios movies, the show is still quite beautifully animated. Eddie and the Realms Eternal really knocks it out of the park.
I expected Danger & Eggs to be another disappointment, since the pre-release announcement led me to expect a juvenile gross-out comedy. Fortunately, this comedy about a thrill-seeing girl named D.D. Danger and her more cautious friend named Phillip (who also happens to be a giant talking egg) beautifully drops surreal weirdness into a more-or-less normal suburban environment. It’s a lot like Disney XD’s Pickle and Peanut only without quite so much gross-out humor, or Regular Show with an infusion of some madcap Looney Tunes insanity. The inaugural episode sends Danger and Phillip into a titanic water slide that’s about to get demolished for being a safety hazard, which leads to some fast-paced, madcap insanity when the two get separated. Danger soon finds herself completely lost in the twists and turns of the waterslide, while Phillip discovers truth behind the urban legend that a kid vanished without trace in the slide years ago. By the end, a gigantic sludge monster and an impromptu bungee jump setup get involved and a movie is projected on the butt of the gigantic chicken that’s Phillip’s mom. I don’t think I can exaggerate how hilariously awesome all that is. Add in the same strong indie comic vibe that many current cartoons are sporting these days (to their benefit, in my opinion), and Danger & Eggs sums up to another surprise winner in this set of cartoons.
All the reviewed titles are available for streaming now via Amazon Prime. Viewers can vote for which shows should get a full season order on Amazon.com/pilotseason.
