Ok I need to let this out of my chest or I WILL blow up and never get over this. So the Cuphead Show was finally given a proper trailer and release date, and most people on the twitter and tumblr tags are hyped about it, which is really good! a very happy celebration!
However, I also see, here or there, someone going out of the way to complain that it doesn’t LOOK like the 30s. Cuphead was a game that felt like playing a cartoon from the golden age, why does this show look ugly, or too modern, or etc etc you get the idea. Someone even called it “like every other Netflix show” and just
Maybe trying to recreate old animation from the era isn’t this show’s purpose. It was the game’s purpose, but not the show’s. Maybe they wanted to expand or play around with the setting and characters they got. Maybe they just figured they got a franchise here, and wanted to expand to a cartoon, because that’s what they were inspired by, and let the animation team get creative with what they have. Maybe they wanted more money and wanted to make something profitable. I do not know, all I know is that they’re not doing the same thing they did with the game.
Probably because that would probably be an eternal, never ending development hell.
Like, think about it. we’re talking about an animation style that’s 90 to 100 years old, that mostly looks the way it does because it uses techniques not used as much, since they take so fucking long to work on. They had to color every cell through photoshop so they didn’t take eternity to finish the game, and they only did that because it would have the same effect to traditional coloring. Studio MDHR were meticulous as hell with this game’s style, even purposely adding in little mistakes in the animation to make it extra authentic. I have absolute respect for that kind of dedication, but I also understand if another studio wouldn’t want to do that as well, with how much time and money it costs.
Hell, Cuphead diehard fans should KNOW how time consuming and expensive this process is. The brothers had to mortgage their HOME to afford the development of the game, that’s basically a common fun fact. The original teaser trailer came out in 2013, while the game came out in 2017. That’s, what? 4-5 years of development? Same thing happened with the DLC. Announced in 2018, and it’s only NOW releasing in 2022, if it doesn’t get delayed again. It’s that time consuming. And this isn’t something they can speed up for a tv show using modern technology, because, to be blunt, animation nerds are absolutely anal about accuracy.
I’m know this, I’M an animation nerd, and I get anal over inaccuracies. Remember Magic Portals? It tried to do the same thing Cuphead did, and its trailer got ripped apart on sight. People noticed the tweening, the slow animation, the inconsistent time period, and they hit it ALL in their criticisms and mockery of the game. I’m not a fan of Magic Portals myself, I don’t really felt comfortable with what felt like a copy cat coming way too early in Cuphead’s popularity, but I think the backlash it got could reflect what would’ve happened if the show tried to be era accurate while also trying to be quicker about it. It looks too digital, they’re using tweening here, puppets there, this is obviously a reused asset, they wouldn’t hear the end of it. Animation nerds would pick it apart and NOT be satisfied unless it is pitch perfect.
But ignoring animation, would you WANT to watch a show similar to 1930s shorts? Like, 100 or so shorts of random bullshit happening, events disjointed and only kinda following a storyline, characters constantly changing their look because pre-production was not really a thing during that time? That’s not going to happen; both audiences and studios have WAY different standards now than what they had in the animation industry’s infancy. A studio wouldn’t just let the team go loose without preplanning, and more importantly? It wouldn’t have that much of an audience. Wow! people who like animation history! That is not a big nor particularly mainstream crowd. If you could get the furries with anthro characters, maybe it’d do better, but cuphead isn’t really known for its vast cast of walking talking animals. That show would BOMB with the average Netflix user if it was like that.
So, essentially, you’d have a show that’d be difficult and time consuming to produce, taking up a bunch of money, with no guarantee it’ll get that money back through views. It’d be a suicide project.
Look, you can not like The Cuphead Show’s style. You can skip it, find other shows to watch, maybe even play/watch the game again, and marvel at what its dev team’s dedication and love for the legacy of animation has created. But it’s unrealistic to sit there and expect a modern studio to use a pricey, tedious animation style, to create a show that maybe only you would watch.