WesternAnimation The Animated Adaptation - Better than the books?
It's been a long time since I read the Silverwing books, and I only read the first 3. But after watching a few episodes of the cartoon, I think I like it more than the original books.
The thing about the books is, the first book is relatively tame. It kinda reminds me of Redwall, being a kid-friendly adventure that mixes in a little bit of darkness. But from the second book on, everything goes to heck.note And in the third book, literally! I remember wishing that the whole series was like the first book. Fortunately, the cartoon seems to be based only on the first book, so it's like a dream come true for me.
Now for some other aspects:
- The animation: While I didn't like it at first, because it's kinda choppy at times, it grew on me as I kept watching.
- The character designs: I was expecting the characters to look more realistic, but the designs they use are pretty cool. I especially love how some characters, such as Frieda and Goth, have stylized wings. The only thing I hate about them is their awful hairstyles.
- The acting: Some characters' actors are really good, such as Brutus and Goth, while others, such as Shade and Ariel, are a little Narmy at times, though their actors did try.
Plus, there's another thing about this show that I love: Goth. In the original books, he was a Love to Hate kind of villain to me. In the show, you know what trope describes him? Evil Is Cool. He deserves all the dramatic buildup he gets, because when he finally appears, he proves to be an extremely awesome, well-played villain with a mesmerizing Spanish accent and a great Evil Laugh. If Michael Dobson didn't win any awards for his performance as Goth, he absolutely should have!
I didn't really like Shade and Marina that much, but it's not the show's fault: for some reason, I rarely find main characters interesting.
Also, I'm glad that they made my favorite character from the books, Zephyr, just as cool as in the novels.
Overall, this show has its faults, but I still think it's a better Silverwing than the original books! I only saw a few episodes, but I would love to see the rest.
WesternAnimation 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.