Infinity Blade has given an explanation on the Discord quite a while back and I think it definitely makes sense:
PP also filmed their settings on location, so without context I don’t really get what point you are trying to make here. Actually, almost all major paleodocumentaries used real, filmed backgrounds, there are only very few that opted for a cgi background, mostly lower budget or at least lower production value documentaries (e.g. "Animal Armageddon" or "Dinosaur with Stephen Fry") that I believe nobody is ranking as serious competition for WWD. Admittedly not all managed to find backgrounds as good as WWD, nor did all of them manage to make their animals blend in with the backgrounds as well. Is that what you are trying to say with regard to PP?
Well, this used to be the case, but, for me at least, cgi is now getting to the point where quite often with well-made cgi I am no longer able to determine that something is cgi without using external clues, or at least am not sure. E.g. I genuinely don’t know if the baby sea turtles shown in the first episode are CGI or real-life animals.
But I don’t fully get your point here either, as it’s not like WWD didn’t use CGI (which, while good for the time, was much more easily apparent as such than the cgi on PP). Are you referring to the use of animatronics on WWD? That is a true point, and it is something that I appreciate about WWD, but I would raise the counterpoint that uncanniness isn’t exclusively reserved for CGI. An animatronic can also look uncanny, and (while they were well-made) I wouldn’t claim that the WWD animatronics looked 100% real either. In fact even though they were clearly an improvement over the limitations of CGI at the time for the closeups, and in some situations probably still are, it’s usually easier to visually determine that the WWD animatronics are animatronics than that the PP CGI is CGI. 1990s CGI would obviously have looked less convincing, but it’s not like they look or move perfectly like real animals.
Of course it could be that this is the problem, that the PP animals sit in the uncanny valley for you, while the WWD animals look less real, and are hence not so far in the valley yet. However, it is my impression that this, firstly, mostly applies to humans being animated, much less so other animals, and that, secondly, we’re already on the ascending slope of the valley when it comes to CGI. Poorly rendered or animated CGI humanoids in old humans often look uncanny to me, but more realistic, newer ones less so. The animals on animal armageddon look uncanny to me, the ones on PP much less so. Feel free to correct me if I am the only one who thinks this way.
But that’s not how what you are writing reads to me. I don’t want to build a strawman here, but the argument that is implied (critiquing PP’s CGI but not WWD’s) reads more as though WWD had not used CGI, so that criticizing the perceived uncanniness of CGI is exclusively an argument to be levelled at PP for you.
I liked both of them in their own way, but that’s, of course, entirely a subjective point anyway. What’s perhaps more objective is that I must say that as a non-native speaker of English, I’ve nevertheless never once found Attenborough difficult to understand.
Well the location jumping is obviously true, but as for "specific section in time", PP is geologically set at a single point in time, so the time jumping is minimal, at most a few months in order to show different seasons.
But what I’d be primarily interested in here is your take on how this compares to documentaries other than WWD, such as e.g. Planet Dinosaur. Your comparison with the former I do understand, as you have made it clear you prefer its narrative structure, but I think over on discord (when talking about what you’d want to watch with a guest) you implied that you also preferred Planet Dinosaur to PD. So what would you say regarding this point here, as PD basically follows the same disjunct narrative style as PD, showing brief segments set in various time periods and featuring various different animals?
I agree the
Opthalmosaurus and Cynodonts were among the strongest showings of WWD’s animatronics. On the other hand, the juvenile
T. rex were also imo among the strongest showings of PD’s cgi, and even though I know they weren’t animatronics, because if they were they couldn’t actually have moved as well as they did, I couldn’t have told that they weren’t on the closeups when purely considering what could have been better had they been animatronics.
Probably because mating is pretty much the single most important goal in life for pretty much any sexually reproducing organism?
Hmm, not sure I can agree with this.
New Blood: Cynodont reproduction is perhaps the central plotline
Time of Titans: The central plotline is watching a Diplodocus mature from an egg, via a hatchling and juvenile, into an adult, right up to the point where she herself mates, bringing us full circle.
Cruel Sea: we don’t really see any animals mating, as of my knowledge, but there is a whole lot of plot around the Opthalmosaur’s reproduction as well.
Giant of the Skies: Literally the entire plot of the episode revolves around the protagonist, our "Ornithocheirus", flying to Europe in order to get laid (which he then fails miserably at, but still)
Spirits of the Ice Forest: Leaellynasaura mating and reproduction is the central plotline.
Death of a Dynasty: T. rex mating and reproducing. Also,
Torosaurus intraspecific combat and display, certainly in some way connected to mating rights.
It’s true that a lot of the species on PP have their mating and reproduction featured at some point, but I don’t get the impression that it’s any more of a focus than it is on WWD. In fact I think due to the more focused plotlines in every episode, the struggle to reproduce actually seems even more front and centre, playing a key role in driving the plot of pretty much every episode (whereas a great many segments on PP feature no mating-related plotlines at all, even if by virtue of the sheer length of the programme we do see a pretty large share of the species shown mating at one point or another). Yes, of course the animals on WWD do a lot of stuff other than mating, but so do the animals on PP, it’s just that as a result of larger runtime, there’s also more time to show us the mating habits of several different animals, rather than just one or two in each episode. But most of the time the animals on PP also do a lot of other stuff besides that, and it’s not as though they were ALL shown mating either.
Well I think no point arguing about this, I obviously don’t agree, but maybe that is because I have seen WWD in something higher than 480p. I really quite like watching these old series in low res for that very reason (besides the low res itself perhaps having a certain nostalgic feel to it); the way the animals move and look in low resolution is really quite good, because you can’t see the lack of detail or realistic surface texture on the models as well, but at modern resolutions the CGI does become quite obvious, even if it’s still something I can overlook for nostalgia’s sake, and doesn’t lessen my enjoyment of the series.
So "yeah…"what exactly?
This doesn’t really follow nor address what I wrote, which was explaining and justifying why this narrative structure is well-suited to be used in extant nature documentaries.
Also don’t get what the other levels are, judging by what you wrote here your criticism of the narrative structure really all seems to boil down to the simply bottom line of it being a different kind of storytelling than the one used on WWD.
I think I explained why nature docs are structured like that already. People generally want to see something authentic, real animals behaving like real animals, and real animals don’t act out scripts or follow neatly planned-out stories that make sense or are enjoyable to humans. If you follow a pride of lions for longer than 5 minutes, you might find that the greater "immersion" this creates won’t be as exciting to you as you thought it might be. There will be an exciting hunting scene, and the rest of the time they are going to laze around and/or have sex (lions do a whole lot of that, so beware if you thought mating was overrepresented on PP already)–until it’s time for the next hunt, at which time this will repeat itself.
That we can sort of agree on in the sense that that certainly plays into why I can enjoy watching WWD over and over again, while I don’t generally do that with Planet Earth or similar documentaries, though that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy the latter.
Whoever said this, I have to say I agree with them, that is indeed your problem. More broadly I would say your problem is having very, very specific expectations in a documentary, which basically only something that is literally exactly like the Walking with-series will be able to fulfill, and if these expectations are not met, I’m afraid you are going to get disappointed again and again (especially if you additionally let your disappointment negatively impact your enjoyment of the things in question even more than it would otherwise be), which is quite likely as truly creative people (you know, the ones you’d usually want to have at the helm of a major docu-fiction creation like this) don’t tend to enjoy doing the exact same thing over and over again.
For that reason I would advise you to manage your expectations for "Life on Our Planet" a little more carefully than for Prehistoric Planet, because with the latter it clearly seems to have affected your enjoyment of an objectively very good series quite markedly (judging by comparisons not just with WWD, but also with other, non-WWD documentaries out there), even presupposing that you could, of course, never consider it as good as WWD.
Try to emotionally prepare for the possibility that it will not be exactly like WWD, that it will have it’s own style and its own pros and cons, and I think you will enjoy it more (regardless if whether it meets, exceeds or falls short of your hopes) than if you just expect it to be WWD 2.0 (which it likely won’t be, even if it will probably be more similar to it than PP was). For example, don’t forget that while we do know it will show us the history of life, we do not know anything about the narrative style within each episodes, but there are indications that there will be time jumps, and it might not have exactly the same feel of a single unbroken narrative with a relatively small cast of characters that WWD did (I might even go so far as to advise caution to presume that it won’t just have a similar Planet Earth-style narrative as the one PP used within each of the episodes).
"Dino Opera" is actually a really good descriptor.
In many ways, WWD is for Dinosaur docufiction what Babylon 5 was for Science fiction. I’m pretty sure there are people out there watching Battlestar Galactica or The Expanse and complaining that they don’t like them as much as they liked Babylon 5, but I think those people won’t really be happier for it, and might benefit from critically reexamining their nostalgia and seriously giving something else a fair chance. Babylon 5 was a great show, but nobody in their right mind and having watched both on a modern screen would claim that, for example, the CGI or special effects in general on that show were the equal of The Expanse (if someone claimed that, I sure as hell would consider that a case of "rose-tinted glasses"). It’s similar with WWD and PP, there are many subjective reasons to prefer one or the other, but there are also objective categories in which one is undeniably better than the other, and from a purely practical perspective, it can be more fulfilling to stay open-minded about the possibility that one might enjoy a show equally or more, even if it isn’t exactly the same thing.
Yes, I believe that you preferred a different style of documentary is something you have already made abundantly clear on one or two (dozen) occasions
You think so? I think Prehistoric Planet seems to have been a pretty big success among viewers and critics alike, despite the much more difficult media landscape of today (back in 1999, there were much less alternatives to watch both when it came to palaeontology documentaries, and TV in general. Nowadays, if you aren’t specifically drawn to PP…well then you probably don’t even have Apple TV anyway, so of course you’re not going to watch some dinosaur documentary you’ve never heard of and have no interest in. On the other hand, WWD was broadcast on life television back in a day when people were still actually watching it, not exactly an even playing field economically speaking).
That isn’t to say there weren’t also some critical voices, especially when it came to what some perceived was an excessive hype around the series, which to some degree I can understand, but it’s also not like there were no critical voices about Walking with (we’ve already discussed some of them, as you will recall).
The Trilogy of Life I can understand, and Dinosaur Planet too, to an extent (while IMO far inferior overall, it does have a focused narrative running through each episode, if not the series as a whole).
But When Dinosaurs Roamed America, really? I liked that show, but when watching it, my impression was always that it severely falls short in all the regards that you are praising WWD for. It’s accuracy was pretty good for the time, but that’s something you don’t care about, so it doesn’t really count. Its animation was clearly inferior to WWD by a long shot, and also quite different in style (and thus can’t even seriously be compared with PP, objectively speaking), and it didn’t use any animatronics either, which was one of your major points of criticism about PP. Its storylines were generally not very developed, in fact I wouldn’t say that any of the individual storylines on WDRA was really more engaging than many of the short segments on Prehistoric Planet.
The only thing it WDRA really has going for it is that it shows us multiple time periods, and does so in order, but shouldn’t that be more than outweighed by all the other points taken together, especially considering the additional downside that what WDRA has in terms of temporal coverage, it entirely lacks in terms of geographical coverage, with its limitation to North America, or even specifically the US (that as I showed previously is already massively overrepresented in paleomedia anyway), making it feel a bit "provincial", for lack of a better word?
As for Prehistoric Park, sure, you might prefer it to PP, but I wouldn’t exactly consider its narrative structure very similar to the the Walking with Series either, the way its plots are structured is really totally its own thing.
So how did these varies documentaries manage to lead you to develop such consistent expectations, considering they are all of such varying style and quality?
Really? Wow, I seriously do not remember that. Quite a thing to forget indeed.
But surely if one mistake the (even visually rather unconvincing) Dinosaur Planet for reality, then this could at least as easily happen with PP. I mean it is literally emulating extant nature docs, so why would what you consider "poor immersion" (that as you say you yourself don’t have with extant nature documentaries showing real, living animals) be a factor in not making you think it was real?
I get that you are again trying to strengthen your point by proving there are people who agree with you (which I never doubted), but this is also again a situation where this is neither really called for, nor helpful–it just reads as you showing that a few select people on reddit agree with you by making points that you yourself have already made here, and thus bring nothing new to the debate. There is no reason to feel defensive about our preferences or feel the need to justify them this way as long as we acknowledge that they are just that, preferences, laying no claim to being unbiased or generalizeable.
Now of course that goes with preferences being something that we don’t need to be told over and over again, because generally hearing about a person’s preferences in a particular regard once is more than enough. As they tend to not really have relevance to anyone else, they also aren’t something that we need repeated reminding of.
Except that’s not a new point, it’s literally a point I already made, which you even quoted, but merely didn’t really address before (instead you took it as an opportunity how much you didn’t enjoy this style even for a documentary about extant animals, going on to say that that is why you never enjoyed documentaries about extant animals either).
Believe my, I was not in any doubt that you do!
Well I would second that, except that by its very nature, it sort of does get in the way, because every screentime we see Maastrichtian North America (which right now has been shown about as comprehensively as any prehistoric ecosystem could possibly hope for, so that new portrayals currently have little new to add to it), is screentime that we can’t see something else that would be equally interesting but that has so far been underrepresented, meaning it has much more stories left to be told and science left to be shown.
That I agree with. In terms of naming the episodes while trying to stick to the Planet Earth / Our Planet formula, they did run into some issues (like a majority of scenes only being tangentially related to the supposed theme of the episode, or scenes in other episodes fitting the theme better than the ones in the episode itself). And making the last episode "North America" I believe was just a bit of an emergency solution born from the second season mostly being cut footage from the first, and them having so much footage of
T. rex,
Quetzalcoatlus,
Triceratops and co left that they simply needed a whole episode to throw together miscallaneous North American scenes. I thought the execution was nice enough, and there was nothing to complain about with the episode itself, but I just ended up more or less ignoring the proclaimed subject matter of each episode because it didn’t seem to have that close a relation to the content anyway.
Yeah sure I believe that, you already made it clear that realism is of no concern, so why wouldn’t you give this a plus? From an entertainment-based viewpoint, I’d readily acknowledge that it was one of the most fun scenes in the series, even if it was also one that I found less scientifically pertinent or plausible (esp. due to the narration also not doing a good job giving a scientifically plausible explanation for what gets shown, which would have been possible to do, but wasn’t).
No surprise there that you would agree with pretty much all my positives about WWD, but none of the positives for PP, or negatives for WWD. But please consider: it is called a "pro
and con list" for a reason. It’s not a pro and con list, not even a subjective one, if you don’t list pros
and cons.
What exactly do you mean here? the "Planet Earth 66 Ma ago" part? WWD also had an introduction that had us narratively travel backwards in time, as well as showing the age and place at the beginning of each episode, isn’t that quite a similar situation?
What animatronic failures are those?
Why are these two separate points?
A total of 10 enjoyable soundtracks actually doesn’t sound too bad. I’m a bit of a soundtrack geek, and I wouldn’t say I find 10 soundtracks I particularly like in all or even most of the TV series I watch, even ones with many times the runtime of PP.
No cons at all?
I don’t want to come off as insolent here, but have you considered that this kind of very open one-sidednes may be exactly what the people on reddit you have previously complained about were describing as "rose-tinted goggles"; namely elevating all the positives, subjectively rewriting all the negatives into positives, and rewriting the rules in such a way as to not have any need to acknowledge any of the remaining negatives (like accuracy) because they simply don’t count to you personally–then doing the opposite for the other show that you don’t like as much?
I get that this is not meant to be an objective verdict but a subjective one. But there is a difference between acknowledging one’s own subjectivity, and striving to be as subjective as possible on every point. Also I don’t see why, admitting subjectivity, being called out for said subjectivity by someone else would be a bad thing, especially if a certain amount of nostalgic bias seems to clearly demonstrable (I’d argue that, for example, the quality of the animation being better on PP is a pretty objective statement, as is the criterium of greater accuracy, both of which you either disagree with on subjective grounds, or simply declared a non-factor for subjective reasons). So isn’t "rose tinted goggles", without saying that that is such a terrible thing, really a pretty accurate descriptor of that kind of reasoning (counting all the wins but ignoring all the misses, and only considering those points relevant that you personally feel are relevant, with the kind of predictably one-sided result you see in your verdict)?
Considering statements like this, see above. Not meant as an insult, just an observation and food for thought.
I don’t really catch your meaning here without context. What’s "FB"? Who’s "getting the boot"?
Or, if you watch it, like me, as a not particularly big fan of the Planet Earth format and a massive fan of the WWD format, but as someone who cares even a little bit about accuracy in the palaeontology documentaries. That would also be worth mentioning, wouldn’t it?
