Star Vs the Forces of Evil - Characters

Star Vs the Forces of Evil is a new show from Disney XD that I absolutely love the art direction of (and no complaints about the story or characters here, either).

 

The character design somewhat reminds me of the kind of Cartoon Network styles that I have been looking up this year for my Applied project; simple shapes that are easy to animate, but also build up to make silhouettes that look very different from each other. The colours are bright, adding to the fun, upbeat atmosphere of the programme - even if the characters are fighting Evil quite a lot of the time, it doesn't stop the overall feel of the show being light and bouncy. The lines make sure that the characters stand out well from the background, and complements the simple shapes. The designs feel very well put together, and for Star and Marco (the main two characters above), you can easily tell a lot about them from their appearance. 

Marco is more your typical teenager, complete with hoodie and converse looking shoes; he isn't particularly a jock or a nerd, he doesn't fit in with any particular social groups, making him a little more relatable to the young audience of children from around 6-11. Star has a few more things going on in her outfit - the dress and striped socks showing the bubbly, more typically feminine side of her - which is expected from a Disney princes. On the other hand, she has a headband with devil horns, and animal looking boots completely with spiky teeth and horns. This shows the more mischievous, dangerous side of her - which fits well, because at least half of the dangerous situations that happen in the show come about because of her carelessness or misuse of magic. She always has good intentions though, keeping her from feeling like a bad influence or promoting the dangerous things that she does. Overall, the designs don't skew towards one demographic - the characters in the show appeal to a wide audience.

The animation is very fun and bouncy as well, which works nicely with the design. The principles of animation such as secondary action, follow through and overlapping movement is applied extremely well in this, making the characters feel much more lifelike and full of personality. there is always multiple things going on at once, and the animation consistently fills the scenes up with interesting things - I feel like you could easily watch this show without the audio and understand what is happening, the characters' reactions to what is happening and the people around them. Usually the character animation in 20 minute shows, at least the ones that I have watched, don't seem to put this much effort in every little movements - they might have great fight sequences and special effects, but SvtFoE really stands out to me when it comes to animating body language and the smaller movements.