Crest Animation/Streetlight Animation (2010-present)
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| Crest Animation/Streetlight Animation (2010-Present) | ||||||||||||||||||
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 The company that has milked the Alpha and Omega and Swan Princess franchises to the point where they have become the Activision Blizzard of animation studios.
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Streetlight Animation (formerly Crest Animation Productions, RichCrest Animation Studios, Rich Animation Studios, and originally Rich Entertainment) is an Indian-American animation studio that was started as Rich Entertainment in Burbank, California, and was owned by Nest Family. The studio was founded by Richard Rich, who previously worked at Disney and its first and most popular film was The Swan Princess. Due to heavy box office losses, the company was sold in 2000 to Indian company Crest Communications Ltd. to form RichCrest Animation. In February 2007, it was renamed Crest Animation. After Crest Animation's bankruptcy in 2013, Streetlight Animation was launched in 2016, starting with The Swan Princess: Princess Tomorrow, Pirate Today!.
Why They Suck Now
- Ever since the release of both Alpha and Omega and The Swan Princess Christmas, the company went downhill from there to the point where some people lost interest on the company after these two films, even when it rebrand to Streetlight Animation in 2016 after giving the future Alpha and Omega sequel rights to Splash Entertainment, leaving the company to make nothing more than sequels related to the Swan Princess.
- They have been known to overwork and underpaying their employees when it comes to making money for their Indian filming business way before Crest’s bankruptcy in 2013.
- Quantity Over Quality: Throughout the 2010s decade and similar to Blue Sky Studios and Illumination with their Ice Age and Despicable Me franchises, they have the trend to milk The Swan Princess (up until 2023 where the last two sequels were made) and lesser to extent, Alpha and Omega (before Splash Entertainment would do the last three sequels due to Crest's bankruptcy) for money with their poorly written and cheaply animated, direct-to video CGI sequels just to get a quick buck as well as in the former’s case, nostalgia pandering, instead of creating an entirely new film franchise, with Ribbit being the only original film being made by Crest in the 2010s. Very recently, here is what they have done:
- Four Alpha and Omega sequels (including three more done by Splash Entertainment)
- Nine additional Swan Princess sequels.
- They made some bad animated films (even before 2010) such as the Alpha and Omega franchise, the CGI Swan Princess sequels, The King & I, The Trumpet of the Swan, Arthur's Missing Pal and Ribbit.
- Not only that, but they also made some bad tv shows with Splash Entertainment, such as Pet Alien.
- Since they started to make CGI movies in 2006, the Maya CGI animation in most of their films are extremely cheap and ugly that was comparable with Norm of the North or Happily N'Ever After 2 (in which Richard Rich was involved) to the point where the characters that were transferred to CGI like the Swan Princess sequels and Arthur’s Missing Pal look ugly and uncanny, especially compared to their original films/show which both were hand-drawn. However, this can be excusable since Indian films don't have that much budget when compared to other films.
- Speaking of, they were originally going to produce Norm of the North before Splash Entertainment (which currently owns most of Crest’s assets) and Assemblage Entertainment took over the production of that movie due to Crest's bankruptcy.
- Some of their films (most notably the CGI Swan Princess sequels) heavily relies on nonsensical and inconsistent writing with extreme uses of anachronism in their CGI sequels that have been milked for money as if the writers have never done any research on the settings the franchises set in before they wrote their scripts. They even steal stuff from other media like for example.
- They decided to bring back the Swan Princess franchise after its last film in 1998 to cash in on the "2D to 3D animation" trend in 2012 with the 4th film, The Swan Princess Christmas, which was met with universally negative reviews from critics, audiences, fans of the franchise, internet reviewers, and possibly even Richard Rich the creator of the franchise (who is said that he didn’t want to make a fifth film after how the Christmas movie turned out), mostly due to many reasons such as the fact that it was completely unnecessary since the third film that was released 14 years prior, The Mystery of the Enchanted Treasure, was meant to end the franchise on a high note, the character designs in 3D style were a bit uncanny to their original 2D designs, many uses of anachronisms, and that the characters got flanderized in this sequel onward (especially Sir Rothbart) and made 8 additional sequels afterwards, providing that they barely listened to the negative criticism that the Swan Princess Christmas had, to the point where the Swan Princess could be seen as a cash grab franchise to many people. Thankfully this trend stopped when the 12th film, Far Longer than Forever, was conformed to be the final film of the franchise which was released in 2023.
- The characterization in their CGI films are poor compared to their older films, especially in the Alpha and Omega sequels and The Swan Princess: Princess Tomorrow, Pirate Today! all the way to Kingdom of Music where the protagonists of the original films were replaced by their children (the Pups and Alise) as the main stars while the existing characters in the two franchises were reduced to neither supporting nor minor roles.
- Just like Dingo Pictures, Splash Entertainment, and WowNow Entertainment, their films and shows (mostly their CGI sequels) often have recycled many plot points, assets, and characters from another one of their films, for example, the Christmas star model that was on the gas station clerk's Christmas tree in Alpha and Omega 2: A Howl-iday Adventure was reused from the Swan Princess Christmas (another film from Crest Animation related to Christmas which was released a year before).
- Some of their sequels even reuse footage from the first movies, like the montages from the first film in The Swan Princess: A Royal Family Tale, only with them being animated in CGI.
- Very poor-quality sound effects as seen in their CGI direct-to-video sequels (with the Swan Princess sequels being the worst offenders of this) that sound like they’re taken from a stock sound effect website, which just shows how low the production values of these films really are.
- Loads of filler and padding that only serve to pad out the running time of their movies, such as the Scully scenes in some Swan Princess sequels after the fifth film.
- They sometimes contradict the events of their first films and acted if it didn't happen at all in their sequels as if they have short-term memory loss, an example of this is in The Swan Princess: A Royal Family Tale where in the first four films, the Forbidden Arts were a kind of magic one could learn. In this film however, It's somehow a sentient being, while the Forbidden Arts being shown as a being rather than an art could've worked if it was simply a being made as a result of the arts rather than the arts themselves, that's not the case here. As they're simply a living being and undermines the first one by implying that Rothbart spelled the Forbidden Arts' doom by turning Odette into a swan in the first place.
- Even though the soundtracks in their films were decent during it’s downfall, they weren’t as good as their older films due to their overuse of pop songs, especially the Swan Princess Christmas which overuses auto-tune in their covers of classic Christmas songs, which is very anachronistic since auto-tune doesn't exist in the setting the Swan Princess franchise takes place.
- Most of the humor and pop culture references in their CGI films can seem forced and nonsensical, like the Swan Princess Christmas where Lord Rogers and Uberta fight with lightsabers in a Star Wars-styled fight which feels extremely out of place for a Swan Princess movie.
- Ugly character designs, mostly not because of how they're modeled, it's because of the CGI film's animation when as in their hand drawn films where the characters models look nice and decent to look at.
- Horrendous scene editing in some of their films, especially since much like Free Birds, some scenes might've been put at very inappropriate timing, a great example is that three songs playing back-to-back after Odette and Derek confronts the kingdom that Alise won't speak due to her father's death without any breaks in between in The Swan Princess: A Royal Family Tale.
- Overuse of hallow log sledding scenes in their CGI films to the point where they felt like they're obsessive with these scenes which is weird since their films tries to portray hollow logs as good material to make sleds out of. When in reality, they're not.
- Unrealistic scenes are also in common in their films with the scene where a shotgun has enough firepower to rip a wired fence apart in Alpha and Omega being a example of this.
- They tried to pander to Chinese audiences with their two recent Swan Princess sequels, Kingdom of Music and The Royal Wedding in order to make foreign diversity just like Disney, but ends up portraying Chinese people in a mediocre way, while it's nice to introduce Chinese people in the franchise for a change, neither of the two sequels have explored more of their culture during medieval Europe unlike certain companies like DreamWorks Animation with the Kung Fu Panda films and Abominable, Sony Pictures Animation with Wish Dragon, Netflix with Over the Moon, Illumination with Minions: The Rise of Gru, and even Disney with the original Mulan film which handled Chinese culture very well, it shows that the writers barely done any research on Chinese culture before writing scripts of these two films in order to get more money from Chinese costumers.
Redeeming Qualities
- Much like Splash Entertainment, Even though they do a poor job with CGI animated movies, their 2D animated movies are actually decent such as the first three Swan Princess films, Muhammad: The Last Prophet, K10C: Kids' Ten Commandments, the Animated Stories trilogy, and The Scarecrow (2000).
- They also made the only CGI movie that's decent looking which is The Little Engine That Could.
- Some of their movies (even some of the worst ones) have actually good/decent voice acting from various voice actors with a few expectations such as The Swan Princess: A Royal Family Tale.
- They used to be good from 1986 to 2009 until they eventually milked the Alpha and Omega and Swan Princess franchises in the 2010s, but thankfully after the 12th Swan Princess film, Far Longer than Forever, with Streetlight no longer milking their Swan Princess franchise, they'll potentially make new franchises and possibly redeem themselves after a decade of milking their franchises with direct to DVD CGI sequels.
- Some likable characters can be occasionally found here or there, even if their franchises' characters weren't flanderized in the sequels like Speed and Bridget (with the expectation of the Swan Princess Christmas where she was reverted to her first movie self) from the Swan Princess franchise.
- Despite their CGI animations being cheap, many of the backgrounds are admittedly pretty beautiful.
- Even before they made CGI movies starting in 2006, they made a few decent CGI animated shows, like Jakers! The Adventures of Piggley Winks (with Splash Entertainment) and 9 episodes of the first season of Back at the Barnyard.
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