So do you really love the simplified animation styles?

[Kalidor]

I keep seeing the trend more and more pushing the cartoon figures like the new Thundercracker and Autobot cars as well as the upcoming Shockwave and Skywarp.

Sometimes they look like new molds and others they appear to be retools of existing molds where all the details get smoothed out and the colors become simplified pastel colors with little to no details.

I feel like the line peaked with the WFC stuff because to me most of the new stuff looks like cheap imitations of the more detailed WFC toys.

That's why I'm satisfied with all the ones I already have. Am I in the minority here?

I preordered Kranix because I don't have a Kranix but everything else just isn't working for me.

 

[LordGigaIce]

I feel like the line peaked with the WFC stuff because to me most of the new stuff looks like cheap imitations of the more detailed WFC toys.

That's why I'm satisfied with all the ones I already have. Am I in the minority here?

I'm with you, all the way on that. I passed over SS '86 Prime, Bumblebee, Megatron, the Seekers, and Soundwave because I'm very happy with the ER/Netflix versions

 

[lastmaximal]

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the answer for me is somewhere in the middle. Stege just looks diseased, like 3D Frank Milkovich artwork. But the smooth boxes thing just feels so uncanny valley in many ways, and just... plain otherwise. (Not a pun.)

I don't know if the upcoming Shockwave errs too much on the side of the latter. Need to see more pictures (I haven't followed this one because it's not like I can afford to replace my current Shockwave anyway, and he'd still be a bit short). But the little I've seen reads as less egregious than the Siege sculpt, although that's harder to read because of the dark colors.

There's a middle ground, and Hasbro has done great with it for a lot of designs.

 

[LordGigaIce]

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the answer for me is somewhere in the middle. Stege just looks diseased, like 3D Frank Milkovich artwork. But the smooth boxes thing just feels so uncanny valley in many ways, and just... plain otherwise. (Not a pun.)

I tend to agree with this.
Which is why I really like ER and the adjacent Netflix line. It felt like a great middle ground between Siege's over-detailing and the current trend of under-detailing.

I said I passed on SS '86 Prime, and I did, but I still have him because my sister got it for me for Chanukah the year it came out. I've had it next to ER and ER has all of these neat moulded and sculpted details that call back to both the original 1984 toy and real world truck detailing. And it does it without being overwhelming. It's there, enough to be noticeable, but also subtle.

SS '86 Prime comes off as flat and uninteresting by comparison.

 

[Sabrblade]

Frankly, I'm of the opinion of "If they had just given me this hyper cartoon-accurate stuff back when I first wanted it when I was younger, I'd be perfectly fine with them doing more experimental designs nowadays." But it took them so long to get to this point because the people in charge right now were not in charge back then, while the people in charge back then would have never done this kind of work back then.

I do want these kinds of figures. I have been wanting them for a long time. But I didn't want to have to wait until now to finally get them, and do see how it's seemingly coming at the cost of more creative designs we could also be getting on the side these long-awaited cartoon-based figures.

And whenever we do get more experimental designs on the side, they're given the shaft in terms of proper articulation, as the current Hasbro team seems to think that the articulation standard that has been set in stone since Beast Wars can only be reserved for collectors and not kids, as though they think kids don't want to articulate their figures (imagine, for instance, how much cooler the Cyberworld toys would be if they had proper knee and elbow joints).

Yet, it was the articulation that was one of the coolest things about the Beast Wars, Beast Machines, RiD 2001, Armada Unicron, Energon, Cybertron, Animated, Prime, and Movie Trilogy lines in contrast to other non-Transformers action figure toylines. Transformers could actually pose where many other competitor boys' toys could not.

 

[lastmaximal]

A not-insignificant part of it for me is that in the last decade or so I've mostly seen this aesthetic tapped into by higher-ends like Takara's Masterpiece toys and a lot of 3P stuff that aims for that niche. And it's always seemed weird to me that they bent over backwards and spent (and charge) a ton just to hide sculpted detail or emulate a humanoid shape dressed up in boxes. I've come to associate it with impracticality to achieve a very specific kind of slavishness.

As always, mainline retail toys managing to pull off Masterpiece-y feats (even if this isn't really a fancy-engineering thing, it's just filing off sculpted features on regularly-engineered stuff) should be cool to see. But here it's like "THAT? You wanted to copy THAT?"

But idk, maybe that's just me. Missing Link taps into "the toy, but as articulated as you imagined as a kid." It makes sense for there to be a line that's "the animation model, but transforming". Honestly, just make the G1-based parts of Studio Series about THAT (since that's the credo for the live-action/game based stuff in it), and just put the regular-aesthetic G1s in the main Generations line. It's not like, Must Have The Primes aside, there's coherent inclusion/exclusion criteria for the main line right now anyway.

 

[CoffeeHorse]

I like toon, but not for its own sake. I like it because it is a goal. Whether it should be the goal or not is a valid question, but at least it is a goal. Ideally, I'd like the designers to go nuts on some new thing. Cyberworld is so refreshing. But if they're redoing G1 designs again, that's already out the window. So what is the goal then? """""""Modernized"""""""? That usually just means "We just turned every square into a hexagon. We had no other ideas." It's not that creative. Just generically cool? That sounds fine, but that way lies madness like Scourge getting an Earth alt mode and Cyclonus not, and Galvatron getting something in between, because everyone's just winging it with no concrete goal in mind. Toon, for all its faults, is a goal for the designers to keep in mind at all stages of production. It's guardrails so they don't go on random flights of fancy that no one but the designer will ever understand. It's a measuring stick to judge how well a design succeeds, and whether the design may need another pass. I think it's made the designers better at what they do.

Still, toy > toon in my book.

 

[CrockAlley]

Takara's Masterpiece toys

I'll never understand the desire for super expensive, intricately-engineered collector toys to emulate the purposefully-simplified animation models. The animation models were simple for the purpose of animating the cartoon easier and cheaper. I don't want that in my toys. Every time I see this hyper Sunbow accuracy, I can only see the cheapness of the old cartoon, but it's especially egregious when they do it to Masterpiece toys.

 

[unluckiness]

I’ve always been a toon-toy fusion kind of person. When the MP line stopped doing that and went full Sunbow, I stopped. I want some detail on my G1 figures, just not too much. I think the CommanderStudio Series Optimus is about as clean as I’d want my figures, albeit I’d prefer more paint detailing.

 

[lastmaximal]

I'll never understand the desire for super expensive, intricately-engineered collector toys to emulate the purposefully-simplified animation models. The animation models were simple for the purpose of animating the cartoon easier and cheaper. I don't want that in my toys. Every time I see this hyper Sunbow accuracy, I can only see the cheapness of the old cartoon, but it's especially egregious when they do it to Masterpiece toys.

I kind of appreciate it purely on the level of flexing the capability of wringing one out of the other. Sort of like the 3P figures that improbably make an actual transforming thing out of the absurd AOE/TLK etc designs (especially with little in the way of faux parts) that seemed like there was never any intent to have them actually transform. And like I said above, I can see that being a very specific flavor of nostalgia, the whole "it's like I reached into the screen" that I also like in my live action movie-based Studio Series.

But very quickly that feeling of being impressed at this capture can turn into "your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, that they didn't stop to think if they should". Like, I can find it neat to see like a non-transforming figurine out of that, like a Super 7 Ultimate or the short run of R.E.D. (Robot Enhanced Design) figures. But a transforming one just doesn't seem to be as good of a toy. Which is also a little weird, because it technically does do the thing the toy should do.

 

[Exatron]

I like the idea of having toys that are the cartoon models brought to life. However, I view that through the lens of recognizing that the cartoon models were simplified for animation. Part of bringing them to life as physical objects should be restoring that detail. Siege was excessive in that aspect, but the rest of WfC, Legacy, and AotP have done that well.

The overly-smooth recent figures is just one of the things that's led me to view SS86 as a bit of a disappointment. It simply isn't a coherent line anymore, if it ever was. It's a mishmash of Generations redecos, overly-cartoonish new figures, and stuff like Optimus and Megatron that straddles the gap. Likewise, you have figures that are straight Generations scale, and other figures scaled up to the new Optimus and Megatron.

It's a line that I liked fine when it launched and still grab select items from. But at this point, I view it solely as a line to use to selectively supplement Generations, not as a primary line itself.

 

[Anonymous X]

See, when I was a teenager, I remember getting some of the first-wave Transmetals figures,* and being amazed how much more additional moulded surface-detail the figures had over the 'classic' style Beast Wars TFs. Like the sort of detailing the earliest Transformers figures couldn't dream of having, and needed decals to sort of liven them up visually. So, the SS86 figures having plainer, less detailed designs than the Siege/ER/Kingdom/Legacy figures? That seems a step back to me. I like my surface detailing. The newer, plainer figures seem rather cheaper-looking to me, despite the sharp price rises, so that's why I've mostly been avoiding SS86.

* that was before Beast Wars was available in the UK and Europe. So I was importing the figures. Which was much easier and cheaper to do back then. Even as a teenager who was too young to have a job.

 

[Shadewing]

I want them when I feel they look good, Astrotrain doesn't. But its my distant never-gonna-actually-happen hope; that once these idealized sunbow G1 figures come out; that they'll turn to doing more unique or creative stuff. Like I have possibly the best toy of G1 Ironhide they can likely make outside of maybe them going wholly toy accurate. So do something like Overgear is doing and give us like a mix of Movie and G1 or something; because G1 Ironhide is one the most bland and boring designs in the franchise. This is part of why I like Cyberworld despite its faults. Its the franchise being creative again with these characters.

 

[Andrusi]

In principle I think the use of a simplified and smoothed look to emulate the cartoon's animation style ranges from "fine" to "neat." In practice though this isn't really an aesthetic that happens to be applied to new Transformers consistently, or at random, or anything like that. Instead it's part of a concerted effort to reproduce specific G1 cartoon animation models in plastic, and frankly a lot of those models are crap. It's not that the style inherently looks bad--Sideswipe comes to mind as a guy whose cartoon model looks good and also translated into a toy that looks good. They just individually look bad.

 

[Haywire]

In my mind, there is a fine line between making them look "like the cartoon" and making them look "cartoony". Unfortunately, there's not a hard and fast rule in my head that differentiates the two?

 

[Sciflyer]

I don't mind the aesthetic choice to make things smoothed out (on the r&b tip), but I also don't want to double or triple-dip for a figure that I already own (looking at you, Shockwave). Had this version of Shockwave been released first, I'm sure that I'd have bought it. Now though? Nah, B. Too little, too late, and I really, really, really can't stress how much I don't care about the new version fitting on Bruticus' shoulder.

The thing about this particular Shockwave, is that they can't seem to find a way to sell him without a gimmick. In Stege, it was all the extra fixin's he came with, now it's his integration with Bruticus. Can we please just have a Shockwave that is Leader sized, non-gimmicky, and "of a piece" with SS86 Megs and Soundwave? Basically, I feel like if you're going to do a new Shockwave, then do one. But quit crapping out these half measures that are clumsily shoehorned into the current offerings.

 

[Princess Viola]

IMO I think it just depends on the figure? Like I think SS86 Optimus Prime and Megatron look gorgeous and they both lean very much 'animation model made real', whereas the SS86 Seekers are kinda like...going too far in terms of that aesthetic, at least in robot mode - I think the jet modes have the right amount of detail on them. (That being said, I still prefer the look of them over the ER Seekers because those are too greebly for my tastes)

But my problem is there really is no consistency with the design aesthetic either. Even if SS86 and Gens are both focusing heavily on G1 Sunbow designs (for the G1 cartoon characters), there isn't consistency with how simple they look. Like SS86 Thundercracker (and Skywarp) both feel out of place next to the new Astrotrain, for example. Sure, they're all trying to do animation model accuracy but the former go farther in the lack of detail than the latter.

 

[Blot]

Sure, I love the simplified animation style. It's so weird that Transformer fans get a bug up their ass about this when it's G1 when literally every other cartoon related toy can get a pass... including other Transformer cartoons.

 

[lastmaximal]

There's also some intangibles in the impressions sometimes. Like SS86 Op was clearly designed to be as animation-modely as possible, and he's constantly cited in this very thread for that as a result. But whether in pictures or in hand the toy has just never seemed or felt (not in a tactile sense) "right" for matching that. Like he's too wide, or too square, or the legs are a bit stubby. Idk if this is just the Earthrise mold imprinting or whatever.

I've yet to get a Megatron so the vibe of the toy in hand may seem different, but he seems to be a better match except for the somewhat puny shoulders.

 

[Sabrblade]

In my mind, there is a fine line between making them look "like the cartoon" and making them look "cartoony". Unfortunately, there's not a hard and fast rule in my head that differentiates the two?

Related to this notion, there are some who would argue that the G1 cartoon, despite being a cartoon, did not actually look "cartoony". Like, the aesthetics of the G1 cartoon would clash with those of, say, DuckTales or Animaniacs (either version of each), both of which are very cartoony.

Some would even argue that Transformers did not first start to adopt a truly "cartoony" look in terms of aesthetics until Animated.