Just out of curiosity, have you seen KPOP DEMON HUNTERS yet? (I think I also recall you saying somewhere along the way that you headcanon'd either Arden Cho or Jenna Ushkowitz as Bonnie in your stories... and Arden Cho does the voice of Rumi.)
Yes! I did the classic Tumblr thing where I encountered out-of-context gifs and that persuaded me to watch it. My favorite part of the movie is going to sound like an insult, but: I LOVE how much the animation style shows the influence of TikTok!
Bytedance sucks, it spies on users, I don't even have a TikTok, I'm supervising research right now on how it deepens political polarization, yadda yadda, I know. BUT. Have you seen what the kids these days are doing with animation? It feels like the 1930s all over again, where the coolest videos out there aren't narrative but instead look at this cool thing visual art can do. Like, just look at how the Saja Boys dance:
They look right at the camera. They know it's there. They're looking out at you and they know you're watching them. It's menacing as hell, and it's dynamic in a way that's genuinely scary. Not only that, but look at how much the camera itself moves around, dragging the viewer with it, often right up into a demon's face:
By contrast, here's an old-school take on "character does a scary dance":
And that's... moderately scary, in that the contrast between his face not moving and the background moving is unnerving. But we don't get the sense Pennywise knows the camera is there and can see us watching him, and the camera itself is maybe rocking back and forth on a dolly a little.
Saja Boys' dynamism of dance, the dancing at the camera, and the camera itself being spun through the air like it's being controlled by Jinu's mind — that's something I haven't seen before. Even really good dance animations these days almost never draw a character looking at the camera, because why would you?
Well, unless you're drawing the ways that modern dancers have gotten insanely good at distorting and foreshortening their own bodies using a handheld phone camera.
Even animations that deliberately imitate something like a music video (where the dancer knows they're being filmed) don't have this degree of a character stomping or punching or grabbing and shaking the camera. It's so freaking cool, and TBH I think I missed most of the story because I was too busy going "oooooohhhh" over and over at the absolutely gorgeous dance sequences.
