Contest!*

Favorite / Least favorite character designs.

I’ll go first.

I don’t know why, but I find this character endlessly appealing.  Best-designed character on animated television today.  Not even the other characters on the same show stack up, with the possilbe exception of a couple of the villains.

There were Kim Possible dolls in the stores for a while, but I thought they blew it; they gave her real hair, which seems beside the point to me.  The point of her hair seems to be that it remains in its solid Jennifer-Aniston wave, not that you could imagine running a comb through it.

I often bring up character design when discussing animation and my wife starts looking at me like I’m speaking Chinese.  In some recess of her psyche, there is no “character design,” there’s just what people look like.  And yet, to pick only one tiny example, I would say that a good reason for the relative success of A Bug’s Life over Antz was purely character design.  Theirs were friendly and fun-looking, ours were comparatively “adult,” sophisticated and even a little creepy-looking.

The bottom line for character design, for me, is “when I look at this character, do I want to know more about them, or less?”

Case in point.

My other favorite, Sally Impossible, I could not find of image of online.

Hmm — Kim Possible, Sally Impossible? More than coincidence?

Animators: no fair nominating your own creations.

*not a contest