It's a fun romp, don't get me wrong. And frankly it's great to see any adaptation at all - often such works don't get anything if they aren't American. But the difference in quality compared to the books is absolutely enormous.
The most obvious area is characterization. Whereas the books featured incredibly layered characters with depth greatly surpassing reasonable expectations for a supposed children's series, the cartoon's writing struggles to do better than cliches and stereotypes. In the novels, there's so much more to Shade than being The Hero, so much more to Marina than a mere Tomboy - and let's not even get started on the more minor characters. Here just about every individual can be summed up in a few tropes at most. The cartoon also adds multiple original characters that are not only utterly superfluous, but also stick out as FlatCharacters even among the already Flanderized adapted ones.
Other areas suffer too. Even in the first book, the plot twists and turns create a "tour-de-force" (as one reviewer put it) that's enjoyable even for older readers. In the show, the plot is relatively linear and predictable. But the animated series actually adapts significant elements from Sunwing as well, which makes it that much more of a disappointment because said book takes the story complexity and turns the dial Up to Eleven.
As for production aspects, the show features some nice music, with the ending theme standing out in particular. Unfortunately, the same can't really be said of the animation, which tends to cause an Uncanny Valley effect, possibly as a result of the mixture of the already unusual 2D character models with 3D animation.
Pales in comparison
It's a fun romp, don't get me wrong. And frankly it's great to see any adaptation at all - often such works don't get anything if they aren't American. But the difference in quality compared to the books is absolutely enormous.
The most obvious area is characterization. Whereas the books featured incredibly layered characters with depth greatly surpassing reasonable expectations for a supposed children's series, the cartoon's writing struggles to do better than cliches and stereotypes. In the novels, there's so much more to Shade than being The Hero, so much more to Marina than a mere Tomboy - and let's not even get started on the more minor characters. Here just about every individual can be summed up in a few tropes at most. The cartoon also adds multiple original characters that are not only utterly superfluous, but also stick out as FlatCharacters even among the already Flanderized adapted ones.
Other areas suffer too. Even in the first book, the plot twists and turns create a "tour-de-force" (as one reviewer put it) that's enjoyable even for older readers. In the show, the plot is relatively linear and predictable. But the animated series actually adapts significant elements from Sunwing as well, which makes it that much more of a disappointment because said book takes the story complexity and turns the dial Up to Eleven.
As for production aspects, the show features some nice music, with the ending theme standing out in particular. Unfortunately, the same can't really be said of the animation, which tends to cause an Uncanny Valley effect, possibly as a result of the mixture of the already unusual 2D character models with 3D animation.