Some time ago a new web animation series took the internet by storm: The Amazing Digital Circus.
The pilot episode has, as of writing this, 394 million views on YouTube. The second episode has 166 million views. While the subsequent episodes don't have as many views as the pilot, we are still talking about nearly 100 million views each. This is an astonishing amount of views per episode, and speaks quite clearly about the success and popularity of the series. The series is so notable and popular that, unsurprisingly, it has got its own Wikipedia page, IMDB page, tvtropes page, and so on.
The series was produced and created by the company Glitch Productions, stylised as "GLITCH" (eg. on YouTube). While the series is wacky and somewhat abstract, it's surprisingly enjoyable, and at points has quite deep character development. Even with all the wackiness and abstraction, it's still surprisingly easy to follow what's happening (something that's greatly helped by the fact that each character is very unique in their appearance and personality, so it's easy to remember who is who.)
This is not the only animated series that GLITCH has produced and published on YouTube. So given how enjoyable the series is, and its enormous success, one would think that their other series would likewise be enjoyable and worth checking. That's what I thought as well.
Turns out that The Amazing Digital Circus appears to be a sort of one-hit wonder. Well, at least from my perspective.
Yes, there are several other animated series on their YouTube channel, and yes, the visuals, production values and quality, the animation, the voice acting etc. seem to be on par with (if not even a bit better than) The Amazing Digital Circus. On the surface level these other series appear to be at least as high-quality and enjoyable.
Yet, somehow... they just aren't. Well, not to me at least.
For example I started watching another one of their somewhat popular series, Murder Drones, and I stopped at episode 4 (the series has 8 episodes as of writing this). I stopped simply because I found the series to be boring and unenjoyable, and I just couldn't be bothered to watch any more episodes because of the sheer lack of interest. The series is confusing, the pacing is all over the place, half the time I don't even know what's happening or why, the story is very hard to follow (so much so that it almost feels like there is no story, even though there's supposed to be one), and the vast majority of the time I don't even know who the characters being shown are (which is much unlike with Digital Circus). This is because all the characters look almost identical. Sure, they tried to make them look a bit different by making small variations, such as in hair styles and clothes, but it's not even nearly enough. Even by episode 4 I didn't have much idea about any of the characters, not even the main character, and most of the time didn't even know who's who, or what the role of each character being shown at any moment is.
Sure, there are many people who like that series, but I'm not one of them.
I also checked a bit some of their other series, and they didn't seem much better.
Recently they published the pilot episode of their brand new animation series, this time using fully 2D animation, which they appear to be quite proud of, and have put a lot of effort and resources into: Knights of Guinevere.
I watched it. It's 26 minutes long. It felt like 1 hour 26 minutes long. Yes, several times during the video I checked the youtube timebar (I had the video in full screen) to see how much of it is left. Sigh.
I mean, it's not bad, and some aspects of it had me a bit intrigued, but... it was like 90% boring, and a slog to sit through. Sure, also here there are many people who are huge fans and very excited, but it's just not for me. It's hard to describe why it felt so boring, bit it just was.
I will be checking the second episode in order to see if it improves (it wouldn't be the first time that an animated series actually improves after the pilot episode; it's rare, but I have seen at least a couple of such series.) However, I'm not very hopeful.
It's curious how GLITCH appears to have this one-hit wonder that's immensely popular, and then their other series are... just a bit meh. Same production values, same visual and animation quality, same voice acting quality... but still just meh. Well, at least from my perspective. Others may disagree.
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