“Trapezoid’s kisses burn.”

I caught the premiere episode of the previously mentioned stop-motion cartoon What It’s Like Being Alone on CBC last night. The show is of the cutesy gothic variety exemplified in Slave Labor Graphics titles like Lenore and Gloomcookie and the animated ouvre of Tim Burton. It revolves around a group of freakish orphans, including a pint-sized version of the Creature From The Black Lagoon, a child who is constantly aflame, a cyclops kid with no mouth, a two-headed baby and many more, as they attempt to find a way to escape their orphange.

As I’ve said before, I’m a huge fan of stop-motion animation. I love the how tactile and improvisational it appears. What It’s Like Being Alone has some wonderfully subtle acting, with most of the best gags being visual in nature. There’s one little bit with a worm and a creature in the rafters, and another with some dead bunnies, that lend the show the little details that make it just watchable. However, nearly everything else falls short.

One of the main problems with the show was that there were, as I’ve already mentioned, far too many characters competing for airtime, with the result being that I had forgotten about nearly half of them by the show’s end. In addition, What It’s Like Being Alone seems to be covering too many comedy bases, with an overabundance of fart jokes ruining what little quirky charm manages to be conveyed. By far the worst offence in the show is the grating voice acting for many of the characters. Special mention has to be made for the main character of this episode, Princess Lucy, who is so incredibly annoying that I was hoping the rest of the characters would feed her to the lake monster.

As someone who is all too aware that sometimes a show needs a few episodes to work the kinks out, and who was impressed by the concept, setting, character design and animation, I’m willing to give it another shot. I’d certainly like to see more of Aldous, Seymour Talkless, Armie and the rest of the gang, but if they’re going to be hanging out with bad apples like Princess Lucy, maybe they’re better off being left alone.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 27th, 2006 at 10:08 am and is filed under Television, Animation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.