Cartoons at their best just keep getting better and better. I've tried rewatching the cartoons from my childhood, and I find them simply unwatchable, as old storytelling standards have simply not aged well for me. But these days are bringing exciting new cartoons such as Sonic Prime, The Owl House and this one.
What have we got in this show? A group of teenagers go on a field trip that quickly turns dangerous. Well, of course it does.
The result is lots of adventure and mystery. Trying to survive the dinosaurs. Encountering other humans on the island, nearly all of whom have nefarious agendas of their own. Dealing with robot threats when they show up. Unraveling multiple conspiracies and trying to figure out what's going on. Escalating threats, and new surprises with each season. We get survival, nice looking nature visuals, and even some visual variety when the characters get to go to other biomes in season 4. Basically, everything that I loved when I was a kid, and the sort of adventure I still love to watch. Except when I was a kid, cartoons were more episodic and almost never had continuing storylines, and here, the continuing storyline is a huge part of the appeal. Cliffhangers also keep things going, and I was often excited to see the next episode.
The show also mostly avoids talking down. It doesn't add lots of bad humor or dumb down the story. But it is limited by the rules of what a cartoon with kids as the target audience is allowed to do, which does harm its ability to create suspense. We know the dinosaurs will never bite the protagonists. People die, and all of them are bad or, in some cases, just turned good and quickly discovered that Redemption Equals Death. There's no blood, and while Sammy does end up poisoned by spines from a lab-created mutant dinosaur, which is heavily played up for drama, that's the extent of injuries to the protagonists. The dinosaurs themselves sure are slippery, the way they keep slamming into walls (especially indoors!) and just conveniently narrowly avoid getting to bite the protagonists, but damn if they don't get to eat bad guys with no trouble at all!
We also get a lot of fun character interaction. It's even used for drama, as an early conflict involves Brooklynn being suspicious of Sammy, who Yasmina defends, until Sammy is revealed to have been secretly spying for a company and destroying evidence. Which she apologizes for, and things get patched up between them. Ben was unsurprisingly my least favorite character, until his surprise turnaround in season 2. I also like the different characters' backgrounds, like Brooklynn being a YouTuber, and Kenji having wealthy family connections. That last one adding some interesting conflict of a very different sort in season 5. The characters mostly feel realistic-ish, save for some slight cartoonish exaggeration of their personalities (such as Kenji's laziness).
One thing I didn't care for is the show's shipping - both of the show's ships felt forced and unrealistic to me, with no realistic buildup until suddenly A and B are dating. It really annoyed me. I also felt that season 5 was when the show kinda was going downhill in general, as I just wasn't getting into the plot and its key conflict as much. Still, for the most part, I feel Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous is overall a great adventure cartoon that I would have loved to watch if it existed when I was a kid. I certainly loved watching it now.
I would have loved this as a kid
Cartoons at their best just keep getting better and better. I've tried rewatching the cartoons from my childhood, and I find them simply unwatchable, as old storytelling standards have simply not aged well for me. But these days are bringing exciting new cartoons such as Sonic Prime, The Owl House and this one.
What have we got in this show? A group of teenagers go on a field trip that quickly turns dangerous. Well, of course it does.
The result is lots of adventure and mystery. Trying to survive the dinosaurs. Encountering other humans on the island, nearly all of whom have nefarious agendas of their own. Dealing with robot threats when they show up. Unraveling multiple conspiracies and trying to figure out what's going on. Escalating threats, and new surprises with each season. We get survival, nice looking nature visuals, and even some visual variety when the characters get to go to other biomes in season 4. Basically, everything that I loved when I was a kid, and the sort of adventure I still love to watch. Except when I was a kid, cartoons were more episodic and almost never had continuing storylines, and here, the continuing storyline is a huge part of the appeal. Cliffhangers also keep things going, and I was often excited to see the next episode.
The show also mostly avoids talking down. It doesn't add lots of bad humor or dumb down the story. But it is limited by the rules of what a cartoon with kids as the target audience is allowed to do, which does harm its ability to create suspense. We know the dinosaurs will never bite the protagonists. People die, and all of them are bad or, in some cases, just turned good and quickly discovered that Redemption Equals Death. There's no blood, and while Sammy does end up poisoned by spines from a lab-created mutant dinosaur, which is heavily played up for drama, that's the extent of injuries to the protagonists. The dinosaurs themselves sure are slippery, the way they keep slamming into walls (especially indoors!) and just conveniently narrowly avoid getting to bite the protagonists, but damn if they don't get to eat bad guys with no trouble at all!
We also get a lot of fun character interaction. It's even used for drama, as an early conflict involves Brooklynn being suspicious of Sammy, who Yasmina defends, until Sammy is revealed to have been secretly spying for a company and destroying evidence. Which she apologizes for, and things get patched up between them. Ben was unsurprisingly my least favorite character, until his surprise turnaround in season 2. I also like the different characters' backgrounds, like Brooklynn being a YouTuber, and Kenji having wealthy family connections. That last one adding some interesting conflict of a very different sort in season 5. The characters mostly feel realistic-ish, save for some slight cartoonish exaggeration of their personalities (such as Kenji's laziness).
One thing I didn't care for is the show's shipping - both of the show's ships felt forced and unrealistic to me, with no realistic buildup until suddenly A and B are dating. It really annoyed me. I also felt that season 5 was when the show kinda was going downhill in general, as I just wasn't getting into the plot and its key conflict as much. Still, for the most part, I feel Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous is overall a great adventure cartoon that I would have loved to watch if it existed when I was a kid. I certainly loved watching it now.