The new Chester Cheetah is creepy.

February 12th, 2009 by cbwilkins | Posted in Video blog |

It’s an increasingly digital age, and one of the sad byproducts of that is that cartoons are falling by the wayside. At one point, animation was everywhere, cartoons on TV, cartoons at the movies, cartoons in commercials, but now, you really never see traditional cartoons anymore, aside from a very few TV shows. What they’ve been replaced with, computer animated models that we now consider animation, can look cool. Pixar does an amazing job making modern animated movies that not only look cool, but are just plain enjoyable. But a lot of stories that would probably do well with traditional animation, are waylaid by their lack of sophisticated modern animation.

And that’s the point; not everything needs to be done in this modern animation style. A perfect example of this is Chester Cheetah. Here’s a Cheetos commercial from 1991, with the old school animation Chester:

Now granted, it’s not the best commercial ever, and yeah, Chester is a little creepy. But, it did, and would still today, appeal to kids. Now check out a couple of these new Chester commercials:

So Chester’s creep factor has been taken to the max, and his appeal to kids is completely gone. What the heck are these? Who is he supposed to appeal to now, social deviants? I won’t deny that I have these kind of social justice urges, but if watch these commercials, it seems like Chester is a figment of their imagination. So this creepy CG Chester is some kind of mental breakdown that wants them to take vengance for minor social missteps. Who came up with this?