It's a struggle watching Disenchantment - I have a deep and endearing love for Rough Draft studios and their animation game is strong here. In fact, Groening's aesthetic has never looked nicer - beautifully painted backgrounds, huge complex CGI sequences seamlessly integrated with the 2D stuff. You've got all your favourite voice actors and some nice cult British comedy casting, you've got the legendary Mark Mothersbaugh crafting a fun score to keep it rattling along. It's a serious shame then that it's so let down by some wildly inconsistent plotting and some absurdly sketchy characterwork.
In trying to flex from a syndicated-style comedy animation to a multi-part fantasy epic Disenchantment manages neither very well - and the weight of the story is let down by the flailing plot tendrils and stop-start character arcs that drift in and out of focus seemingly entirely randomly. It's like a big fantasy book where each chapter is being written by different people who each had a brief half-forgotten conversation with the person who wrote the chapter before. It's frustrating, and you find yourself going "wait, but what about this thing from seven episodes ago? Did they forget about it? Will it ever be referred to again?! IT SEEMED IMPORTANT AT THE TIME."
So it's a hodge-podge show really - magnificently polished on the one hand - but incredibly sketchy on the other. Like when a load of artists fold over paper and pass it to another to draw a strange hybrid creature, sure it all sticks together but it doesn't quite work as a whole. It's a show sort of fighting itself and my own mind is doing the exact same thing when I'm watching it. Was Futurama this frequently awkward and hit-and-miss? Is my whole life a lie?! Well perhaps but I'll stick with it for as long as Netflix does (or will the resurrection of Futurama on Hulu spell the end?) - for a deep love of what was and what may or may not ever end up coming to pass.
