What most of the naysayers regarding CGI fail to realize is the amount of time needed to do stop motion animation with models, in addition to the time needed for the preparation of sets and model design, which, in the case of the original Womble series, took a year prior to shooting the first episode. Falling between traditional hand drawn cell animation and stop motion animation, CGI is able to combine elements of both. The difference (as one post put it) is that watching stop motion animation is like watching a toy (real model) come to life, whereas traditional and CGI animation is watching a drawing come to life.

I’m glad to hear that Bernard Cribbins will be involved, provided he’s still with us when the time comes to record the dialogue. His involvement has been cited as a sine qua non to watching the new series for many fans. His absence was one of the most heard complaints of the 1997 Cinar series and his involvement (or not) is already trending as the most common (…sorry…) comment submitted to the various news articles regarding the new series. I think the new series needs him for more than his voice, however. He brings with him a lifetime of storytelling for TV and audiobooks; he knows how to tell a story so that people – especially children – will listen. In an age of shortening attention spans, learning how to listen to a lengthy spoken narrative with visuals, as opposed to a soundbite, becomes even more vital. He can advise the writers as regards the personality of the individual characters because he not only voiced them, but was tutored by Elisabeth Beresford as to how to portray them, since most of them were based on members of her family.

Further to this, he can make suggestions as regards vocabulary and story line, which will prevent the oversimplification that robs the charm of the original books and TV series. While the new series is being made for a preschool audience specialty channel, there is no need to “dumb it down” to the point of alienating older viewers. (Montessori schools are noted for using the proper names for things instead of using “baby language” e.g. horse vs. horsey, duck vs. ducky, toilet instead of potty. It allows children to converse with adults using the vocabulary that they will use as they mature instead of one that traps them in a specific age group and stage of verbal development.) The original series included adults as the intended audience, as it was known that the show would precede the supper hour news, and occasionally made reference to that fact. That scheduling would not be possible today and, as Filmfair owner Graham Clutterbuck said in an interview shortly before he died, a childrens’ program would now be automatically relegated to a specialty channel for children, which is indeed the case with the new series.

Part of the charm of the original series was Cribbins improvising dialogue (asides, muttering to themselves, speaking their thoughts, singing snatches of song) to add depth to each character and fill up the gaps of silence between the original scripted dialogue.

I don’t know if the episodes will feature some of the wonderful music that Mike Batt wrote but inventing a back story to showcase specific songs (as was done in the Beatles A Hard Days Night movie and especially the Monkees TV series) would be a great basis for writing a script for an episode.