Z-Squad

Z-Squad (Korean: 크리스탈요정 지스쿼드, The Fairies of Crystals Z-Squad) is a South-Korean-Canadian magical girl computer-animated television series created by Enemes, CJ Entertainment and Nelvana.

Plot
Z-Squad chronicles the adventures of three ordinary preteen school girls that they turned into cute superheroines and their newfound, cuddly alien counterparts, the Zoots, as they search for enchanted crystals to save the Earth and Z-Nation from a cast of bumbling baddies. It is aimed at kids aged 6 to 9 and there are 26 x 30-minute episodes available. Girls will cheer the competitive-spirited heroines; boys will back the sarcastic preteen schoolboys called the Drop Dead Gorgeous Three (the DDG3), as well as the powerful Prince Aramis and the wise King Woolaf.

Why It Will Call In The Z-Squad

 * 1) Wonderful opening theme song.
 * 2) Adorable character designs.
 * 3) Superb and top-notch voice acting from the main Canadian voice actors like Alyson Court, Ashley Botting, and Sunday Muse with the supporting Canadian voice actors.
 * 4) Plastic and clean CGI animation with cel-shading that looks similar to Japanese anime and Western cartoons.
 * 5) Interesting characters, such as Chaney, Jeanie and Haemi, as well as the three Zoots (Zora, Zuma and Zef).
 * 6) Amazing plots and stories.
 * 7) Wonderfully animated transformations.
 * 8) Cute and entertaining, just like Sailor Moon and Cutie Honey.
 * 9) The finale is heart-warming and emotional though it's hard to say goodbye to Bernice.
 * 10) The English dub by Nelvana was very good.

Bad Qualities

 * 1) While it's plastic and clean, the CGI animation with cel-shading can look a bit dated by the early 2000s.
 * 2) Bernice's design can be scary for some people.
 * 3) Some of the foreign dubs are very bad, such as the Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Thai and Turkish dubs.

Trivia

 * The series was originally released on July 15, 2004 as an original CGI-animated TV pilot at the 2004 Seoul Character Fair trade show with toys, plushies, books, comics, bedding, furniture, apparel, footwear, etc.
 * The behind-the-scenes footage was released as a promotional preview of the series.
 * Enemes produced Z-Squad using Alias Maya 3D software. Editing was done with Adobe Premiere Pro and Avid DS. Rendering was done with Mental Ray, while layers were composited together with Maya Vector. Most characters and backgrounds were modeled and animated in 3D, with geometry sculpted with Maya Artisan and texturing done with Adobe Photoshop; one method of replicating the source material's visual style was through black edging 3D models and objects with Toon Shader. There were also visual effects created with After Effects and RealFlow for the transformation scenes.
 * After a year of production in October 2005, the series premiered on December 4, 2006 on SBS in South Korea. The series also premiered on April 3, 2007 on CCTV-14 in China.