I really do appreciate that Batman: Caped Crusader is going back to the airbrush + black canvas look of The Animated Series but I just popped on an episode from 1992 to compare and it's impossible to overstate just how instantly intensely better the traditional animation looks even than something with a lot of care put into looking similar. I don't think this is nostalgia talking, either—I've never watched much animated Batman at all before.
Not to get too brutalist but I think there's a real visceral appeal to seeing the materials that make up a work, even in their limitations. Which puts computer animation in a tough position: it's doubtlessly a more labor-efficient means of producing art, which is valuable1 particularly for television whose appeal has a lot to do with volume2. But at the same time, even if it were to go so far as to mimic cel animation artifacts like limited tweens and imperfect lines and economy of motion, that wouldn't actually be representing the limits of the medium the artists are working in so it wouldn't have the same sort of appeal.
All the same, I do think there's something to the low detail and constant darkness of TAS that's valuable in its own right, not just as an artifact of 480i broadcasts. It has a gentle abstraction to it that BCC reaches for but doesn't quite achieve, and that dovetails perfectly with the art deco Gotham that both shows want to evoke.
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Except inasmuch as the extra slack gets exploited by capital.
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I could write a whole post on this alone but I'll content myself 3 with saying that long-lived epsodic storytelling is a kind of poetry at the narrative level.
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Okay I gotta get this off my chest, I fucking hate ten-epsiode seasons. The first season of TAS had sixty episodes! I'm sure TV is a lot less lucrative now than in the broadcast heyday but give it some room to breathe. Let it be a bit schlocky!
