Based on the 1997 comic by Douglas Gayeton and adapted for Teletoon, the series follows four amnesiac young adults living together, who upon waking up with no memories of their past all discover special psychic powers and the ability to enter the "delta state", an alternate dimension from our own. With these powers and under the tutelage of the mysterious Brody they must fight to defeat Rifters, other super powered beings from the Delta State who seek to control all human minds. Taking the original comic's premise and running with it, along with heavy influence from similar sci-fi of the era, i.e. The Matrix, the entire series is rotoscoped in its animation, having most scenes filmed in a greenroom by live actors in Montreal, and then edited and animated over in Paris. At a reported $11 million dollar budget and taking over two years to create the series was a bit of a flop, replaying enough on some Canadian television for me to briefly remember it growing up, but not enough to get subsequent seasons beyond the first. In its 26 episode first season it never really answers anything about the Rifters or the Delta State, preferring instead to make up new pseudo-science jargon each episode and giving hand wavy logic of convenience rather than consistent world building. The series does finish in a sort of grand finale, obviously leaving some things open in hopes of making future episodes, but closing up enough that it felt justified, however the plots episode to episode were so bad it didn't ultimately matter, and the acting so dry I couldn't even pay attention to what they were saying most of the time. The show tries to be edgy and definitely thinks its very cool, in an angsty teenage kinda way that was just laughable. All the shots throughout are at dutch angles so everything feels off kilter, and they even supposedly filmed at a thinner aspect ratio and then stretched out to fullscreen during animation to give a sort of warped perspective. The rotoscoping was intended to be used as sort of trippy representation of teens questioning reality, much like very recent Undone which I would highly recommend, but it comes across as jittery and bland, with any nuance of the actors portrayals lost to flat animation. I cringed a lot over its run, and had more fun reading its wikipedia page than I did watching the show, so unless you're really into groundbreaking Canadiana animation and have already seen ReBoot I can't really recommend this.
Review of Delta State
