by Panpardus » February 24th, 2017, 5:32 pm
There's actually not a lot I have to say about this one. It wasn't bad in any way, but it didn't exactly stand out in any way either, save for the art and animation which looked particularly nice given the amount of colorful birds they had to animate for scenes of the large multi-species flock.
The song was as I predicted (Hadithi sings it) and was alright, though it sounds like Beau Black and the musical crew are more or less just recycling motifs at this point; the songs are really starting to sound samey and relatively uninspired. I don't necessarily fault them for it, given they have to put out at least one song per episode, but it does get a little grating -- or at least dull -- after a while. The last couple of songs now, pretty much since "Lions of the Outlands", have all sounded almost exactly the same with minimal variation, and they generally sound the same as most of the other songs in this series. (The animation is the only reason I've had "Hadithi the Hero" on replay for a couple minutes now.) It might help if the score (which was nice, as per usual; I'm liking the new 'heroic' theme they used this time) and the musical numbers were a bit more integrated, as they were in previous Lion King projects; you'd at least get a bit more instrumental variation.
The idea of the mud print ceremony had me wondering why they didn't do something similar for the Lion Guard, granted, I still can't get over the magical paw print thing. But that's just a side thought. (Also a side thought: I noticed there's an ostrich footprint. That sounds like a story I'd be more interested in than this one, actually.) As for whether or not this was a season ender, I thought the previous episode was a more appropriate end point, unless you consider Ono's mud print honor a notable thing. At this point I don't think distinguishing between seasons really matters all that much outside of marketing-related purposes.
Last edited by
Panpardus on February 24th, 2017, 6:26 pm, edited 2 times in total.