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Return to the Planet of the Apes Review

Return to the Planet of the Apes is a 1975 animated television series based on the titular book and the previous film series. It’s a major disappointment.

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“We have to stop the humanoids

from conquering the planet of the apes“

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Most of this series follows very closely the original movie series and that I liked as I am a huge fan of this franchise, but the divergences that it took were mostly poor, especially the unnecessary addition of dinosaurs. Sometimes the show just seemed too straightforward with not enough originality and momentum to its storytelling.

The characters are faithful to the previous iterations and all are well developed and solid. The voice acting, though, is very poor. Sometimes I was just baffled how somebody could act so horribly as certain emotional scenes were not backed up properly by the acting, which itself was lacking emotion entirely. It was dull and one-note throughout.

Let’s talk about the animation because there is a lot to talk about here. I loved the art behind it. Some of the imagery felt like genuine works of art, which I definitely appreciated. The design overall is splendid and pleasing to the eye.

However, the character movements are simply horrendous. In fact, this is the absolute worst offender of this show and the one thing that made it difficult to sit through. The characters either move sluggishly or they don’t move at all. Couple that with their terrible facial expressions and you’ve got one very obviously cheap production that simply destroyed any potential that this property had in the first place.

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I did like the score and the sound effects. The dialogue is good and the themes are well explored as are the conflicts and character interactions. The world building is also solid as is the attention to detail, but the pacing was bad and the direction was mediocre.