Amazon Studios already shook up the television industry by taking home several Golden Globe awards at this year’s ceremony. They show no signs of slowing down, at least judging by their latest wave of pilots, available via Amazon Prime Instant Video starting today, January 15, 2015. Of the 13 new shows offered, four are animated and I’ll review each one in turn. Regardless of how good or bad the pilots are (and, to be honest, none of them are truly bad), the variety in subject matter and animation style vaults them right into the top tier of networks pushing cartoons these days.
BUDDY: TECH DETECTIVE
Of the four animated pilots, Buddy: Tech Detective is the weakest. The pre-schooler show aims to entertain as the title character scoots around his town solving mysteries with his friends: the inventor Trudy and the ferret Ferdo. In the 11-minute pilot, the three have to discover the source of some mysterious, slippery green piles of goo left in random spots all around the town. It’s a bit disappointing that a show ostensibly about using your powers of observation to discover things in the world around you doesn’t let its characters use all those powers of observation. Buddy, Trudy, and Ferdo only visually compare their sample of the green goo against other liquid green things they think of around the city, but one of the substances they investigate makes one wonder why they didn’t try tasting a bit of the stuff, while the final reveal shows that this decision was probably wise even as it forces one to ask why they didn’t notice any smell. The show also engages in a bit of extremely forced interactivity that makes me think it would do better as a video game than a TV show.
Visually, Buddy: Tech Detective is also the least inspired of the Amazon Prime pilots, looking like relatively non-descript CGI. It’s not a bad show by any means, but it isn’t terribly inspiring. The list of people attached to the pilot is rather long and each has an impressive pedigree, with the idea coming from Chris Dicker (What’s Your News?) but the “created by” credit going to Dicker, Jon Burton (LEGO Batman: The Movie – DC Superheroes Unite and The LEGO Movie), and Jocelyn Stevenson (Fraggle Rock), while the “developed for television” credit going to Jennifer Hamburg (Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood, Henry Hugglemonster). The final result feels a bit too built-by-committee.
NIKO AND THE SWORD OF LIGHT
This show, written by Rob Hoegee (Teen Titans, Generator Rex, Slugterra) and based on the interactive comic book app, holds out tantalizing promise to resurrect the fortunes of action animation, since it seems most broadcast and cable networks are skipping the genre in favor of animated comedies. The title character is a young boy who knows only that he has to carry his enchanted sword to the Cursed Volcano and end the darkness that has engulfed his world. The show feels a lot like the original Teen Titans and Avatar the Last Airbender, in both good and bad ways. The good is that the show is very visually distinctive and manages to pack in a lot of kid-friendly action and excitement; the bad is that the pilot for Niko and the Sword of Light can be a little too juvenile in the same way as the earliest Teen Titans and Avatar episodes. The show will whiplash from something genuinely exciting and mature to something incredibly childish a bit too often, making the tone a bit too uneven. However, while Teen Titans and Avatar took a few episodes to find firmer footing, Niko and the Sword of Light manages to find that footing after its first 15 minutes. Once Niko takes on his second antagonist (a wonderfully gross multi-eyed frog of unusual size), the show becomes infinitely better.
Titmouse has produced some of the most distinctive animation in the business (such as Disney’s sadly canceled Motorcity), and their work on Niko and the Sword of Light is a wonderful throwback to classic hand-drawn action shows. The show also benefits from a voice cast of veterans (Jim Cummings, Dee Bradley Baker, Steve Blum, Corey Burton, Tom Kenny, and Kevin Michael Richardson) joining relative newcomer Felix Michael Avitia as Niko, all directed by Andrea Romano. The coda to the opening episode suggests that there’s a bigger plot ready to be deployed, and the ultimate success of this episode and the lack of good action cartoons these days makes me really hope Amazon picks this series up for a full season.
SARA SOLVES IT
Sara Solves It is the most successful of this set of pilot episodes. Co-created by Carol Greenwald (Arthur, Martha Speaks, Curious George) and Angela Santomero (Blue’s Clues, Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood, Creative Galaxy), Sara Solves It happily blends music and comedy as the 9-year old title character and her younger brother Sam exercise creative problem solving skills to solve mysteries. The pilot episode involves a mysteriously vanishing pizza, and proved to be enormously entertaining and funny to both my five-year-old son and to the supervising adults in the house (the dog didn’t give an opinion). In fact, Sara Solves It even makes Buddy: Tech Detective look even worse, taking the same backbone for a show but executing it with much more flair and panache. It’s also just a lot more fun: there’s an entertaining running gag updating the classic pie-in-the-face in Buddy: Tech Detective, but the loopy charm of the characters and the delightful (and super-fast) musical numbers means Sara Solves It is a lot more likely to elicit laughs. The show reminds me of Peg + Cat (one of the best shows on the PBS Kids lineup today), although I do admit that Peg + Cat‘s laser-like focus on math skills make the bits on fractions in this episode of Sara Solves It seem a bit worse in comparison. It’s not that they’re bad, but while a pizza is a perfect vehicle for teaching about fractions, the lessons still feel a bit tacked on.
There’s a surprising list of studio tags that follow the end credits to Sara Solves It, including Santomero’s Out of the Blue Productions, public TV heavyweight WGBH, DHX Media, and Amazon Studios itself. The animation makes everyone look a bit like they spun out from Hey Arnold! but it lends a nice, hand-drawn style to the Flash animation. Sara Solves It is a real winner, and the other show of these four that I really hope gets a full season order.
THE STINKY AND DIRTY SHOW
The last animated pilot is based on the children’s book series by Kate and Jim McMullan, casting the garbage truck from I Stink and the backhoe loader from I’m Dirty as a pair of mischievous kids in a world of vehicles. It probably won’t be a big surprise to learn that writer Guy Toubes is an alumnus of The Hub’s show The Adventures of Chuck and Friends, since the show has the same wholesome and semi-educational vibe while using licensed talking vehicles to lure in young and predominantly male viewers. And, like Chuck and Friends, I’d be appalled at the shameless exploitation of little boy predilections except The Stinky and Dirty Show is actually pretty good. Our well-worn board book of I Stink was one of my son’s favorites since before he could talk, and I was not surprised at his enthusiastic response to the show. Mine is mostly positive as well, with the STEM-lite curriculum (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) lending the show a bit more educational value. If I have a quibble at all, it’s that the show has cast the characters as kids (Jacob Guenther and Ethan Wacker, both respectably enthusiastic) while I’ve gotten much more used to hearing them the adult voices of Andy Richter and Steve Buscemi in the animated adaptations of the books that Scholastic released (also a favorite in our household).
The animation by Brown Bag Films is extremely striking, looking like extremely intricate paper cutouts. It’s a fascinating blend of being extremely realistic and extremely stylized, but nicely reinforces the idea that the characters have jumped from page to screen. The title characters and everyone else around them closely match Jim McMullan’s illustrations from the books as well, translating nicely into this new style.
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New Niko episodes return September 6.