Delta State

Delta State is one of my favorite cartoons ever. While actors played the scenes, rendering it as cartoon-like animations made it possible to add many effects that would have been impossible (or too costly) to create in a real TV-show.

Although the storyline is deep, it is good, and easy to understand. You get the perfect blend of suspense, paranormal and logic.

I suggest anyone interested in watching The Delta State to start from the first episode or nothing will make sense. First time I watched episode 13 and although it was still interesting I wasn't as much in the storyline as when I watched it from the beginning.

There are 26 episodes so it isn't hard to catch up. Although you may think 26 episodes is short let me tell you that, as I said previously, the storyline is deep and very well done.

Well first off...Think MTV's old show downtown (which was also great) meets "The Matrix". This is based on the little known comic of the same name and it does something cartoons haven't made a casual viewer do since the late 80's..Think! I would say that this show definitely isn't built for the kiddies because the plot may or may not go over their heads and some might not even grasp it exactly. You really have to see everything in this as well. If you miss a couple of seconds, you just might be lost throughout the whole story and/or episode. But the bottom line is that the style and writing is great, the animation is definitely different and fluid (also looks like Aeon Flux as well), and it's an overall CHANGE from the anime, blocky faced, toilet humor characters that you normally see these days. Very refreshing.

Based on the 1997 comic by Douglas Gayeton and adapted for Teletoon, the series follows four amnesiac young adults living together, who upon waking up with no memories of their past all discover special psychic powers and the ability to enter the "delta state", an alternate dimension from our own. With these powers and under the tutelage of the mysterious Brody they must fight to defeat Rifters, other super powered beings from the Delta State who seek to control all human minds. Taking the original comic's premise and running with it, along with heavy influence from similar sci-fi of the era, i.e. The Matrix, the entire series is rotoscoped in its animation, having most scenes filmed in a greenroom by live actors in Montreal, and then edited and animated over in Paris. At a reported $11 million dollar budget and taking over two years to create the series was a bit of a flop, replaying enough on some Canadian television for me to briefly remember it growing up, but not enough to get subsequent seasons beyond the first. In its 26 episode first season it never really answers anything about the Rifters or the Delta State, preferring instead to make up new pseudo-science jargon each episode and giving hand wavy logic of convenience rather than consistent world building. The series does finish in a sort of grand finale, obviously leaving some things open in hopes of making future episodes, but closing up enough that it felt justified, however the plots episode to episode were so bad it didn't ultimately matter, and the acting so dry I couldn't even pay attention to what they were saying most of the time. The show tries to be edgy and definitely thinks its very cool, in an angsty teenage kinda way that was just laughable. All the shots throughout are at dutch angles so everything feels off kilter, and they even supposedly filmed at a thinner aspect ratio and then stretched out to fullscreen during animation to give a sort of warped perspective. The rotoscoping was intended to be used as sort of trippy representation of teens questioning reality, much like very recent Undone which I would highly recommend, but it comes across as jittery and bland, with any nuance of the actors portrayals lost to flat animation. I cringed a lot over its run, and had more fun reading its wikipedia page than I did watching the show, so unless you're really into groundbreaking Canadiana animation and have already seen ReBoot I can't really recommend this.

Delta State has all the makings of a cult classic. Visually, Delta State has no peers on television. The animators make clever use of computer-aided rotoscoping, creating characters and backgrounds that have both a fluid, analog feel, and the punctuation of modern effects. Unusual camera angles retain Delta State's comic-book roots, and add an almost cinematic feel to the show. Thematically, Delta State mixes the melodrama of it's 20-something protagonists with lurking psycho-mystical threats that are well suited to the unique animation. Although some early episodes threatened to repeat the same plot every week, the show quickly revealed an escalating enemy plan and relationships between the protagonists that will require many episodes to explore. And even at it's worst, the 'heroes settle their interpersonal crises when their paranormal powers are called upon' stock episodes are still very watchable thanks to the snappy dialog, good voice acting, and of course, sheer visual novelty.

I watched this show on teletoon for the first time a couple of nights ago, because there was very little to do otherwise. I immediately regretted it, the animation was the worst that I have ever seen, the characters looked like their noses had been cut off, and that one guy with the green and yellow striped shirt... that hurt my eyes, the lines never moved along with the shirt, so it looked like the lines were shifting around constantly. The story made absolutely no sense at all, 4 kids have sleeping problems, so all of a sudden they can travel through space and time, and change peoples lives from "drifters" that possess their bodies. Don't get me wrong, I like fantasy, but this is one hell of a stretch even for me. There is no way this show should ever have been aired.