ncolen

This episode is everything i love about james guns peacemaker, a strangely pathos driven dark comedy set in a world filled with absurdity that is played completely straight by the excellent cast. Tim meadows is an awesome addition that elevates every ridiculous joke to comedy gold just like he does in everything. Im excited to see where this season goes but so far it feels like we are finally getting a multiverse story done right in a way that avoids the confusion or stakes shattering that marvels foray into the multiverse has been plagued by lately. This show is more than it appears and im loving every bit of it so far.

Regardless of how you feel about the first season of Wednesday's story, humor, or genre the one thing that to me was undeniably fantastic was the shows cinematography and art direction and how beautifully they fit into and enhanced the directorial sensibilities of tim burton. Season twos start has a lot going for it and while im certainly looking forward to where they will go with this season i cant help but be a bit put off by the change in visual approach. The first season felt like it was shot by a photographer, there was artistry in how far they pushed the contrast while maintaining visual fidelity, or how focal depth felt considered and wielded as a tool to provide visual clues or obfuscate a mystery; season two looks like it was shot by a competent camera man, who rather than collaborating with the director is just getting the shots hey are told to and making sure they are in focus. Maybe its a new art director or an over reliance on the post production team but there is something noticeably off about the look of this episode.

This could have been a really fun entry into the predator series with just a little more work on the script and a lot more work on the art design. I was really excited to see what the people behind this would ise the freedom of animation to accomplish with the predators and their prey and while two of the segments have some really cool, well staged and blocked action sequences and even some emotional heft the other two segments fail on every level, so badly in-fact that they cheapen the first two segments. The film goes from these two relatively serious takes on the predator premise (a Beowulf vs Grendel style norse tale, and a generic but impressively emotionally rich tale of brothers divided being reunited through a common enemy tale in feudal japan) to an obnoxiously quippy, kinetically bland and just bad looking ww2 dog fighting segment (a ww2 fighter pilot and his crappy plane vs advanced alien tech is just silly and as it turns out, aesthetically painful in its drabness) and then finally the silliest bit, a conclusion that just feels like a bored kid playing with action figures while using every dumb cliche to make it feel weighty and absolutely failing. This last bit is just a knit pick but....if you are doing an animated anthology film set across different cultures and eras why in gd's name would you not have each segment use an art style that reflects the culture and era in which the story is set and use the wrap around/conclusion to show your three human characters in a shared reality/style. Its just dumb and insanely lazy.