Modern cereal box art features beloved characters rendered in a certain overdone pseudo-3D style. The technique: slickly-gradated shadows with intense highlights. When done well, the result offers the vividness and "pop" of computer graphics, without losing the hand-drawn warmth of a traditional 'toon.
Done badly, and it causes goosebumps. Take the Fred Flintstone on this cereal box, for example. Those too-shiny highlights are applied, as if at gunpoint, over a too-realistic stubble texture. Like a corpse dipped in urethane, it has all the gross realism of Untooned Homer.
Bonus creepy! Check out the latest rendering of Smokey Bear, the once-cute mascot of the U.S. Park Service.
Smokey is now highly-enriched nightmare fuel. But it's not those dead eyes, melted reactors deep within the CGI exclusion zone, that will haunt you. It's the neat row of human milk teeth, glistening in the reeking forest stool pit of his mouth.
Previously: Badly-drawn cereal characters & What the heck is this weird skin flap on Boo Berry?
