DVD: The Weird Faces on Reboot and the Growing Pains of Computer Animation

There's nothing weirder than someone else's nostalgia. Case in point: The animated series ReBoot (the first two seasons of which Shout! Factory is releasing on DVD this week), hailed as the first completely computer-animated half-hour TV series. If you were young enough to be watching Saturday morning cartoons in 1994, when the series debuted, you may be excited about revisiting Guardian Bob and his adventures in protecting the Mainframe from Megabyte. Those of us without fond memories are more likely to look at this rudimentary animation and cringe a bit at how far the medium has come in a relatively short time.

As clunky as ReBoot looks today, however, it actually represents a step forward from some of the earliest CG work. I remember being in college and catching one of those International Tournée of Animation compilations they used to release every year (whatever happened to those, anyway?) and beholding the groundbreaking Tony de Peltrie:

Trust me, this looked odd even in the mid-1980s, but it still represented a quantum leap forward. You have to remember that there was a time when people were so excited about the promise of CG that they actually faked it -- the original Tron was set inside a computer, but it used mainly traditional animation techniques, and Max Headroom was a guy in makeup and filtered through video effects pretending to be a computer-generated personality.

Around the same time, of course, Pixar was starting to emerge on the scene with delightful shorts like Tin Toy and Luxo Jr. (the latter still acting as the company's "mascot" in the company logo that opens their films), and the advancements in technology and art led us to everything from Avatar to How To Train Your Dragon to the Shrek movies and just about every animated feature being made these days.

There are still new horizons to be reached, of course -- realistic human representations still have to contend with the whole "uncanny valley" thing. (And one of these days, maybe even Robert Zemeckis can make an animated Christmas movie that won't give small children nightmares.) But ReBoot is an oddly entertaining look back at what used to be considered the state of the art.