Great Tak Review at Animation Insider!

My Google Alert is catching lots of Tak news now. With less than one week 'til the premiere (next Friday at 8:00!), there's a buzz generating. Check out the review at http://www.animationinsider.net/article.php?articleID=1456&document=1, which also has a lot of pictures.

My favorite quotes below, with my responses in green:

The computer animation for this show is beautiful; it's far more visually complex and rendered, and far more flexible than any stiff preschool television program or even the moderately appealing nature of demographically similar productions (i.e. Jimmy Neutron via DNA Productions). Nickelodeon has always found one way or another to maintain a strong sense of innovation in creativity through animation, and it was only a matter of time until they broke into the realm of computer animated television cartoons, with the same high-quality standards that many of their 2D programs are known for.

When they gesture for example, the characters emote in a far smoother and far more elaborate nature than viewers may be familiar with in other CG series.' Rather than arbitrarily poking and jutting their arms out and in odd directions while speaking and emphasizing certain words or phrases, in Tak and the Power of Juju, character's fingers curl, their arms wave or dangle and their eyebrows tremble… the level detail and continuity is much higher here than elsewhere.

With "Tak" I really wanted to focus on performance, specifically in subtlety, in a way that you never see on TV. We did the "Tak" pilot, and the style that was being directed at the time was extremely typical of TV animation, with everything snappy and moving the same, even when it wasn't appropriate. After "The Incredibles" came out, I saw several of Pixar's animators discussing what they had learned in the course of that production, about how much they could leave out of scenes, and a new level of subtlety. The fast nature of TV production is an area where performance isn't usually stressed, but I wanted to see how good we could get it. For the first series episode of "Tak", I gave more animation notes that there are scenes, sometimes writing paragraphs about specific scenes about characters' intent, what poses to remove, etc. Our friends at DQE did a tremendous job with all this feedback, and the episode turned out wonderfully. This set the animation style for the series, and has remained very high quality, even in the heavy throws of production. By the way, that episode is "The Gift", which I think is airing the week after the premiere. Programming moves episodes around all the time - we have nothing to do with it.

Nevertheless, Tak and the Power of Juju is the first of what should be an interesting future of in-house computer animation at Nickelodeon.

Right now we're developing a second series, which is looking pretty amazing... I'm directing a CG short test that is going to show what it will look like, and it's real nice. Of course our second in-house CG project was the pilot for "Bubble Guppies", which got picked up. That one looked great as well... I'll have to write about it some time!