I love the animation it's absolutely gorgeous, it's such a huge accomplishment especially being an indie passion project from an extremely low budget small team. Unfortunately from the first episode it has a lot of the problems you would expect from something like this.
Due to its short first episode runtime it really feels like it's just briefly going through the anime motions without every really giving much. Who are the rangers? What do they do? Why does Hope care? What does she want? So many things that just went unexplained leaving it hard to get into the smaller moments that it starts to get into in a lot of its montages. So while the characters feel great and you really feel the relationships coming through (which is a big achievement because that alone is hard enough) but at the same time I feel nothing because I know nothing. And because the animation and sound scape is so minimal due to budget you don't get a lot of the atmosphere to make up for a lack of being told or shown anything about what we're getting in for.
The voice acting is great, the animation is so great, the designs and the ideas and the love for what this is seeps through every frame of this first episode and I'm hoping (ha get it) as the show goes on and it finds its footing it will fall into being as great as I know and feel like it has the potential to be. But the writing just needs to step up a little bit in terms of communicating the world and characters to the audience. It's a huge step up from Browntable's previous work on Return to Zootopia which I also really liked, but it falls into a lot of the same problems of having really great ideas but coming off as a little flat overall.
Nothing but praise and respect to the people who worked on this. You are all literally amazing and this is a huge achievement not just for you personally but for animation and indie filmmaking! It's one of the coolest projects I've ever seen and I'm so happy to see it come to fruition! I can't wait to see it grow and become more!
