Tales of good versus evil are tales nearly as old as written history, and typically, it's hard to screw the concept up. The presentation of the concept, however, is a lot easier to get wrong. To that end, after reviewing the test pilot of "TC Bears and Friends", the concept is sound, but the presentation needs a lot of polish.

TC Bears and Friends was created by a Catholic animator (with the intent of pitching the concept to more professional animation studios). The overall plot, as could be gathered by the pilot, is basically a young child variant on "The Chronicles of Narnia" by C.S. Lewis, and by young children, I mean anywhere from 6 to 10 years old.

The basic plot is about how there is another world where teddy bears and other cutesy animals are very much alive, only accessible by children who are pure of heart. Of course, there are beings in the darkest reaches that want to corrupt this world and even menace ours if possible, only possibly being repelled by a pure-hearted child who is able to resist their temptations.

For a plot concept, this is a sound concept for a young children's cartoon. It's cartoon drama for young children with a decent leavening of comedy given the age it's targeted at, and that's a good combination. Throw in the fact it clearly has a moral purpose given the Catholic influence, and I'd call that a good moral foundation for children's media.

Unfortunately, the pilot's presentation reveals a lot of issues.

For a pilot episode, the graphical and animation quality was all over the place. The intro was quite good and well-animated, looking like an animated stained glass window from a church. The rest of the actual show animation is a mix of rough pencil sketches and what looks like drawings by a young child. I get this is a pilot episode, but even then the art direction should be more concrete by this point.

My biggest problem was a lack of animation frames, making the action super choppy. The other problem is the art has little sense of scale. While the animations display a clear difference in size between human and nonhuman characters, the details need to be consistent for all characters. In fact, I'd say many need more details, as even the best stuff looks like crudely animated sketches. For example, the teddy bears need to look like they have fur, to make it more clear they are stuffed toys come to life.

The soundtrack and most sound effects aren't too bad for a first effort, though they need better pacing to keep in step with the character lines. The more dire problem is the lack of voice direction. Lines are not paced properly with their scenes, some characters sound like they are reading their lines while half asleep with little emotion, and the volume is not consistent between characters. The last could be due to poor sound recording.

The king character in the pilot was particularly bad at both sounding old and having actual emotion and dramatic effort. Most of the other characters would be much better sounding with consistent volume, more emotion to their speech, and if they kept pace with the tempo of the scenes they were in. There was a vocal song at one point, and the lyrics were good. Unfortunately, the singer was rather off-key, dropped sounds at the ends of lines several times, and kept a poor pace with the music playing in the background.

Overall direction needs work. Scene transitions are rather abrupt, fades or transitions would help with this issue. The subtitles were rather rough and needed editing, as some had clearly wrong words in several sentences.

For an amateur Youtube effort, it was better than I expected, having a clear plot direction and sound foundational concept. The presentation, however, is far from something I'd run by a professional company and needs a lot more polish and cleanup. I'd certainly be all for a wholesome children's cartoon with a good moral, the world could use more. Regardless, the creator needs to greatly improve on the presentation before I'd consider it worthy of professional attention, as the pilot states they were interested in.