#animatedminds

[animatedminds]

How About a Little Disney Trivia?

Here’s a challenge, without hitting the movie (or reading the book, if you’ve got the original story): about halfway through Alice in Wonderland, Alice meets the Caterpillar and he tries to make her recite a poem. What is it? Answer at some point tomorrow!

[animatedminds]

Top Five: The Greatest Fights of Popeye the Sailor!

An AnimatedMinds original!

In the interest of bringing top shelf animation references to you guys in these very animated times - and hey, it’s an excuse to use some of that free time to watch a few cartoons! - here’s a video from the Animated Minds.

Popeye the Sailor: he’s been everything from an underdog to a champ, a roughneck to a prince. He’s gone up against everything from thugs to sea witches with nothing but a good diet, a stubborn inability to give up, and the occasional deux ex machina. And though it all, he biffs and boffs and always outroughs everything he goes up against.

He’s not the first thing people think of when they think awesome fight sequences but... maybe he should be up there. The fight animation in classic Popeye - particularly the Fleischer shorts - could be absolutely epic, and while there’s loads more to love about Popeye than just the fights, we had to make a vid homaging them. From the original Bluto to the live action film, here’s some of our favorite punchy Popeye moments - plus a few extras! Credits: Writing / Host: Ayinde I. Ricco SFX & Video Editing: Ayinde I. Ricco Media Referenced:

The Comics: “Thimble Theatre / Popeye” - 1919,1933 E. C Segar, Bud Sagendorf

Film Shorts/Cartoons: I Heard (Betty Boop) (1933, Fleischer Studios) Be Kind to ‘Animals’ (1935, Fleischer Studios) Pleased To Meet Cha (1935, Fleischer Studios) Hold the Wire (1936, Fleischer Studios) Never Kick A Woman (1936, Fleischer Studios) Popeye the Sailor Meets Sindbad the Sailor (1936, Fleischer Studios) Organ Grinder’s Swing (1937, Fleischer Studios) Paneless Window Washers (1937, Fleischer Studios) My Artistical Temperature (1937, Fleischer Studios) A Date To Skate (1938, Fleischer Studios) Taxi Turvy (1954, Famous Studios) Hill-Billing and Cooing (1956, Famous Studios)

Feature Film (let’s have another!): Popeye: The Movie (1980, Paramount Pictures, Walt Disney Productions) Stay spinach strong, Popeye fans!

[animatedminds]

Today On Tangled The Series:

“We have all these character designs for Cassandra and by god we’re going to use them!”

Anywho, liked the plot. Failure can be a powerful motivator, and I liked what they showed about the Captain - both how he feels he failed, and why he feels he failed (and he totally did - not the best way to address one’s wayward daughter) - plus the message about how failure is only real once you accept it and let it control you. Plus great animation, as per the usual this season. And yet another to add to the pile of magical artifacts in the Tangled universe that can totally wreck your day if you’re not careful.

[animatedminds]

"Whatcha See Is Whatcha Get" - The Film

All credit due to Stax Records and the Dramatics. In fact... Music Credit: Whatcha See Is Whatcha Get Composed By: Anthony Hester, Tony Hester Performed By: ...

After reviewing and reaction to so many bits of media here on the blog, maybe it’s time we made our own. This here is a short film made with the idea: what if songs made just for listening to, were actually in musicals? What would they look like if the singers were characters, and their words were actually part of scenes. It’s a fun idea, and most of our ideas for it were elaborate and would have taken a heck of a lot more work, but we finally found a workable one. Inspired by classic shorts like Johnny Bravo, this short follows the short and very unsuccessful attempts of a Smarmy dude to try and push himself onto a very much not-having-it woman. He gets what he deserves, and hopefully the audience gets a laugh or two. Check out the directors at their twitters: https://twitter.com/RiccoTheGriot, and https://twitter.com/NeveraDought/. And a few more credits - as the music, of course, is not ours:

Whatcha See Is Whatcha Get:

Composed By: Anthony Hester, Tony Hester -

Performed By: The Dramatics, 1971

Released By: Volt/Stax Records

And if you liked this change and want to see a little more of this sort of thing, let us know!

[animatedminds]

Eh... don’t get me wrong, this is all well and good and well overdue, but it also feels like missing the trees for the forest. But bluntly, there’s no reason their initial plan wouldn’t have worked if their output was better... or more accurately if their output was tailored more towards encouraging the kind of hype and support they needed. Some hardcore Star Wars fans have this conceit that every movie needs to be his isolated event that shakes the heaven - which resulted in a lot of complaints at first - but that shouldn’t have caused the misstep it did. It wasn’t the number of movie’s fault their big start was a false start. It was the fact that those movies failed to accomplish what the franchise needed and instead tried to fly to the sun on unfinished wings. Something more revivals should take to heart is that, it doesn’t matter how iconic or ingrained in popular culture something is: if you’re bringing it back, treat it like you were introducing it to the public for the first time. Reacquaint the audience with the themes and the setting, put a new slant if need be while focusing on putting out the integral substance of the property - again, as if it were its first release all I’ve again. That’s how Marvel got where they are: they clawed open a niche for their characters by vibrantly introducing their worlds on their own - if you’re a fan of these characters your experience is enhanced, but not strictly necessary to immediately connect with them in the way the movies want you to. Disney Star Wars did the opposite: they focused on capitalizing on the Star Wars name, and expected it to be all the foundation they needed. I’ve mentioned before that Disney Star Wars is less newbie friendly than it should have been: several of the films rely at least in part in the audience already being fans of Star Wars in order to engage them. Essentially, they rode on the hype rather than creating it, and the fuel ran out. Like DC or the Dark Universe did, they focused on what the MCU was doing and not how they were doing it. Hell, I love Solo and have been vocal here about how it got a bad rap and why, but it’s very clear the plan to throw out a bunch of individual movies movies about random iconic characters for the audience to lap up was a bad idea for where the franchise was at. You can go wide and tall at the same time, but when you’re first starting out it’s risky, and you should never go overboard with both at once. But like blaming the number of films is the same as blaming, say, Spider-Man 3’s failure on the number of villains. It’s missing what actually went wrong - the issue was, as always, a flawed execution of an idea that could have worked with a wiser approach. I’ve been a diehard Star Wars fan since maybe four years old, and I think the sequel trilogy is fine - but there’s no denying it has flaws, and most of those were in the execution. I feel like it behooves us to focus on the right things, and on ensuring that each individual film that comes is as good and as resonant as it can possibly be no matter how many there are, to ensure the series puts its best foot forward.

[animatedminds]

Just A Few 90′s Animation Thoughts

I’m a 90′s kid, and like a lot of 90′s kids I’m pretty nostalgic for 90′s animation. And for a long time, I’ve done a lot of thinking about why that is, why even after looking at it more strictly I still feel like the 90′s were a particularly great era to grow up watching animated television, and why the current era of animation has reminded me so so fondly of it for so long.

That is, after all, the basic idea that made me make this blog in the first place: looking at those gut feelings and trying to see if they make sense - and if so, why they make sense. But this is ultimately just the musings of a nerd, so don’t take it too seriously. I’m not making a call for the good ol’ days, here. Just writing down a bit of thinking.

To be blunt, I don’t think the reason is quality, specifically. I never have. Some people will talk about how 90′s cartoons were all better, but we had our clunkers. Some really, really crappy ones, too. I think the comparison is quantity. Look at this:

(Speaking of quality, there’s a sharper version of this on youtube, but tumblr refused to embed it. My apologies). This is not just a perfect cross section of 90′s Cartoon Network. It’s a perfect idea of what 90′s animation looked like in general. A lot of companies were churning out animated series in the 90′s. Big ones, and small ones. Then you had the older series, tried and true ones from decades before: some of the characters in that video were over sixty years old when it aired (namely Popeye and Bluto), and you still watched them not just on occasion, but just as regularly as your Street Sharks and Dexter’s Lab. Thinking back on it, most of the shows I watched when I was a kid were rerun for at least half a decade by the time I first started watching them. You basically got a mashup of tons of different kinds of series from the past to the present. As a kid, you could parse through everything. And with it, larger selection of both good and bad (or in between).

But eventually that stopped being the case, at least to such an extreme extent. Networks slowly started hosting less syndicated animated series. Cash cow franchises began to edge out less performing ones, and instead dominate the runtime of their networks. Older series started being passed on to secondary networks and beyond additional charges, rather than being on the regular networks.

So the basic difference was not that the shows were better or for worse, but that if a show was bad, it was more identifiable. Bad shows in the 80′s and 90′s were easily forgotten under the many, many other options you had. But in the 2000′s, it was easy to point to a clunker and say “that’s always on, so clearly these whippersnappers’ animation is all crud” even though that wasn’t actually true. And since that was the case for so long, it was easy for some to allow their nostalgia to turn into outright dismissal, even though in doing so you sometimes end up missing out on the gold that is there.

Which is why I’ve latched on so well to the way networks are operating now, with a lot more creator freedom, slowly more range in the kinds of shows being presented, and more options in general. Netflix and other binge outlets are adding to it: Netflix, especially, has that titanic range of things that are both crap and amazing all at one’s fingertips, and the one saving grace of the rush for everyone to try and get their own streaming service (my wallet will not thank me) is that it will present the same options across a wider area. If - for example - Disney+ lets me watch Ducktales 1987 and Ducktales 2017 at the same time, that’s great. But more importantly, if it, then, lets my kids watch all those different things, get inspired by all those different things, and find a wide array of favorite series all across the board, then that’s even better. And outside streaming services, it’s why the announcement a few weeks ago that Nickelodeon was going to try to diversify its television lineup going forward made me grin ear to ear. The networks have the potential to deliver more (literally, more content), and it’s nice to see they’re starting to realize that: even the trend of nostalgic remakes has, as an aftereffect, resulted in the reairing of older properties as well beside the new (hence Kim Possible returning to Disney Channel).

The wider your net goes, the more fish you catch… this being a universe where a fish might like to be caught in a net and think fondly about it in it’s fishy millennial years.

[animatedminds]

Good Tidings! (And All That Jazz)

So, after a false start on Wordpress, here I am. Here's hoping I like the tumblr neighborhood.

Maybe I should explain what "here" is: all my life I've loved storytelling - which most often came my way through cartoons. Like most people, I grew up on animation. I'm also really nostalgic, so it's not uncommon for me to think about an cartoon I used to watch and get all wistful about it. But I'm also not one of those folks who immediately dislikes modern cartoons just because I grew up on ones a couple decades ago (I have my own opinions on trends, but that's another story), so I pretty much watch everything.

And so for years, one of my habits has been to suddenly remember an old cartoon (or be introduced to an newer one) and just binge the whole thing... more or less once a month for about a weekend or so - with lots of remembering what I liked about it (for older ones), thinking about what's good or bad about them and why, etc.

One of the best things about gaining age and perspective is now I can put to words things I only felt back then. When I was a kid, I might've thought something was boring, or something felt off, or liked some quirks more than others, and now I can understand why those things gave me that impression.

And, since that habit of mine is such a huge distraction, I figured it wouldn't hurt to get an outlet out of it and share my thoughts

Basically, these are going to something along the line of reviews or just various opinions. I'll watch most or all of the episodes of a certain show, then do a short overview about them. Later on, I'm thinking of doing a "let's watch" / MST3K sort of thing where I watch a single episode of a certain show and comment about it. And some general posts about tropes and trends in animation as a whole.

Should be fun. At least, I hope you all enjoy my ramblings.

'Til Next Time!