After Kenneth Opel's rousing story of the invigorated me back into the pleasure of reading during grade school, I had high hopes for this series. The story of an underdog bat voyaging across country to reunite with his colony captivated my imagination and resonated deeply with my burgeoning imagination.Upon hearing of this series, I began browsing Bardel Animation's site and liked what I saw. The character design looked impressive and the fast-paced plot seemed to have been stretched respectably across a thirteen episode arc. Much was my disappointment, then, when I decided to watch a rerun early one morn.
The opening episode shows our hero, Shade Silverwing, pursuing a tiger moth in the deep hours of the night. Chirruping an echolocatory song, we see a nifty if crude CGI effect illuminate the moth, and the chase takes on a frenetic turn as the tiny insect creates numerous illusory copies of itself do deceive its pursuer. As a lover of biology, I had a decent understanding of the principles in place (tiger moths can sense the sounds their predators use for echolocation and spin a sonic cover for themselves) but without such exposition I would have surely been lost. A minor quibble, I thought. Surely they director will fill us in momentarily. I waited in vain.
Once our protagonist roosts down with some of his fellows, we are treated to some of the dullest dialog I've ever seen on television. Chinook, Shade's childhood rival, begin taunting the diminutive hero with the stupidest lines I've ever seen on a show. I can understand the writers not producing Shakespeare, but one would think they'd have had some social contact in their lives - surely enough to make communication seem natural. Oh, how wrong I was.
The voice acting, while not horrendous, hardly was a shining example of human achievement. "Oh Shade, you're broken the law!" Shade's mother sighs emptily. "You must come with me, young one." croaks Frieda, the wizened elder of the Silverwing Colony. The actors try, but it hardly matters at this point, as the story becomes less and less compelling with each pass minute.
While each episode deals with a problem of the week, as is typical of with most television series, overarching story arcs pervade the saga, for better and worse. While the main point of the story is Shade's reunion with his family, later episodes tack on other story arcs, involving cannibalistic bats from the Southern jungles and a brewing war between birds and beasts. The writers try to do too much at once, fighting to compress as many promising ideas as possible in the hopes that it will grab audience interest enough to keep the bloody show going on. Unfortunately, these attempts are futile to all but the eight to ten year olds at whom this show is aimed.
While it's nice to see Canadian media be perpetuated, it would be all the sweeter if the enjoyability of the series wasn't limited to the immediate family of the animators or frothing fans of Kenneth Oppel's books. There are worse things out there your children could be watching than Silverwing, but far better programs are out there, too. Pass on the mediocrity and read the books instead.
