![]() Perhaps the main element where the series expands on the game is in its influences playing off of more contemporary animation as well as those 1930s aesthetics, right down to the sound design and some faux film grain. The Inkwell Isles are realized with some lovely art direction, its chaos unfolding amongst charmingly old-fashioned backgrounds mixing autumnal woodlands and bizarro spins on speakeasies and art deco architecture. The upbeat jazz numbers and that specific spring in every character’s step, the elasticity with which their rubber-limbed Mickey Mouse bodies contort and deform in their wild movements is quite fun for a while. There are some pleasures to be found at the surface level, even if you just have a passing familiarity with the era of cartoons to which the show and the original game pay homage. ![]() But these moments are isolated, and the rest of its hyperactive episodes feel a little forgettable otherwise. There are some fun visual tricks like Kettle having a Kettle-shaped skeleton, or musical moments with King Dice’s “Minnie the Moocher”-style introductory number, or one real standout set-piece where Devil tries and fail to paint a fence in a sequence riffing on Fantasia. The Cuphead Show! makes more sense as an animated show directed at children because its jokes require little in the way of thought. It makes sense for an adaptation: with the video game’s potentially prohibitive difficulty, it’s a way to access its appeal, without friction.īut instead, the show is punishing in a different way: It’s simply not funny. This is something of a more easygoing, wholesome take on Cuphead, without the punishing, uncompromising bullet hell mechanics and boss fights and more about two idiots with New Jersey accents (I may be wrong here but please forgive me, I’m English) hanging out and trying not to piss off their elderly guardian. It should, hypothetically, be a lot of chaotic fun: the two mugs head to a malevolent carnival - a “Carn-EVIL?!”, as Mugman realizes in horror - or an equally malevolent gameshow hosted by the slick-talking Dice King (Wayne Brady, having some fun with it). Each episode takes about 20 seconds to set up that something is set to go destructively wrong. Todaro) are a precocious pair of brothers living under the guardianship of the elderly Kettle, and it doesn’t take them long to fall into debt to The Devil (Luke Millington Drake), who means to collect on what he’s owed: Cuphead’s soul.Īfter the introduction of this mostly one-sided feud the series remains a mostly disconnected series of vignettes, centralized around problems of the brothers’ own making and whatever new oddball (usually, one of the game’s bosses) that they run into as a result. Cuphead (Tru Valentino) and Mugman (Frank T. The new Netflix series is spearheaded by Time Squad creator Dave Wasson.Īs in the game, the story of The Cuphead Show! takes place on the “Inkwell Isles” (the opening song sings in rhyme that it’s “just off the coast,” around 29 miles). And now, perhaps somewhat inevitably, it has an animated show. The boss fights proved particularly memorable, conjuring up surrealist but vintage feeling monsters to humble the player. ![]() There aren’t many like it - painstakingly hand drawn with pencil and paper and animated on ones (the full 24 frames of drawings per second, rather than the more common 12), filtered through ’80s style side-scrolling game design of uncompromising difficulty. Inspired by the rubber hose limbs and the spooky qualities of early Disney and Fleischer Studios animation, the video game Cuphead made a splash with its striking art style and punishing run-and-gun gameplay.
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