#animation critical

[miss-rum-hee]

Thinking about this one comment from this one video criticizing that new Superman cartoon & i think it kinda hits why some writers attempts at trying to ape off anime feels off

Quick edit because I forgot this one too:

[rwde-chibi]

RWBY’s MLM rep or lack thereof?

Oh boy, gay men in animation…

So I can’t really fault RWBY specifically for this problem, cause it’s just sort of something that’s plagued animation for a while now but… gay men basically just exist to be father figures in animation.

While RWBY has touted itself as progressive, it’s lack of M/M relationships is really about on par with what the rest of the animation world is doing outside of a few exceptions like Kipo. If you’re a gay man, you’re either the sassy friend (EX: Micheal from the Proud Family) or you’re a dad (see: Basically every Disney and Nick TV show with gay dads). Beyond the atrocious handling of Scarlet’s random relationship in one of the books, and Miles admitting out loud to regretting not doing bury your gays… RWBY is just kinda one of the norm on this.

And this probably is going to sound a tad bitter, but every time there’s a new hot show that’s “pushing LGBT rights even further” it’s always a W/W relationship. First it was Korrasami, then it was Catradora, and then it was the girls on the Loud House, then it was Garnet in Steven Universe and then it was Lumity and then it was Bumbleby and it’s just… exhausting? Kipo is cool and all but when the next biggest M/M relationship in animation is the shit V*ltr*n pulled with Shiro… it’s sort of exhausting and demoralizing?

Young Justice (despite getting a new season and going way more into adult topics) couldn’t even managed to let two male characters be explicitly gay, so we have shit like having to confirm a gay relationship… in the same series with another gay male relationship that exists for 5 seconds. Meanwhile it’s fully content to brutally murder a woman of color over and over again because “she can regenerate”.

Like heavens forbid we write a gay relationship with men in it that don’t exist to just be a main characters pair of dads, that actually gets to stay around and be a main focus for something. Apparently that’s just too hard for people or studios to accept.

[kittensinsocks24]

Idk man, with Incredibles 2 out I’m just feeling a lot of complex emotions towards it. Because while I know it’s not really for me, I think it says something about the new philosophy of animated films and the direction of Pixar itself that this has been self-described as “just a popcorn film”. There’s nothing wrong with popcorn films, hell, Marvel’s popcorn films make billions on the regular, but if everything starts becoming popcorn films, and I mean everything thats mainstream accessible, then we’re gonna have a problem. I guess my frustration comes in part from having held Brad Bird to a higher standard (which is probably where my downfall began in thinking he wouldn’t go softer and fluffier), especially with how important Incredibles 1 is to me. Incredibles 1 is, hands down, one of the most fundamentally important films to the way it helped shape my creative process, because it was the first film I could ever recall that treated me, despite being a child, like a human being, capable of processing and understanding serious topics. In a world that ridiculed me for my youth and the perceived naivety that went along with it, Incredibles respected me, a concept I had rarely ever found in media geared towards me at the time. A lot of media producers seem to think kids are incapable of handling serious plots, serious implications, but I can tell you kids both can and enjoy being challenged with serious plots. I remember how much my school peers ate up the darker, grittier Terra and Raven’s Father arcs in Teen Titans. It’s the same reason kids have been drawn to the Goosebumps books of yesteryear and the Creepypasta Wikis of today, kids love being both scared and challenged, presented with heavy implications and serious consequences. 

Even today I can recall some truly standout scenes in The Incredibles that made it one of my favorite films due to how “adult” it made me feel:

- The KRONOS scene with the listing of flat-out murdered superheroes set to that brilliant score along with Bob’s horrified realization 

-The scene where Bob holds Mirage in a chokehold and threatens to break her neck/spine with the ease of a “toothpick” as Syndrome goades him on and calls him a coward afterward for not having the guts to murder an innocent

-The entire plane scene with Helen screaming for Syndrome to disengage the missiles as the plane goes down and Bob believes his entire family has just been shot down and killed

-The part where Helen sits the kids down and explains to them that the goons on the island can and will murder them despite being children if presented with the opportunity 

-GAZERBEAM’S SKELETAL CORPSE 

And it’s the lack of this sort of respect that makes me a little disappointed in The Incredibles 2. It’s not a matter of me having gone in expecting the movie to have aged with me. It’s not for me now, I know that. I mean, shit, I just recently turned old enough to vote with how long its been. But what makes me so disappointed is that while it’s perfectly fine to make an entertaining popcorn flick, I believe the children of today deserve to be awarded the same respect and sincerity we were given as children, especially in a world of media that seems increasingly apt to shove random-humor comedies into their face without presenting them with any other options that might be geared towards that depth most kids crave in a way. Is Incredibles 2 fun? Yes. Will I give it my money? Yes. But that doesn’t mean I won’t slightly grieve, in a way, for what seems to be one of the larger steps towards the slow death of higher-stakes children’s media, and for the children who will miss out on what could have been something similar to the respect-induced epiphany I experienced as a child. 

[miss-rum-hee]

Does anyone else think that we're stuck in an ever-growing cycle of constant reboots, remakes, revivals & adaptations that nobody asked for or wanted or am I just running my mouth in a half-assed attempt to make a point about Hollywood?

I mean, think about it. Disney pumping out 8 million live action remakes & sequels, Netflix shitting out live action adaptations & revivals of old shows (ATLA, Good Times) & then proceeding to neuter & sanitize anything that could be "problematic" so it ends up bland as fuck (or in the case of Good Times, they somehow manage to make it racist & offensive to the people they're trying to appeal too), paramount making another ren & stimpy revival (& letting the new writers push out the OG cartoonists who worked on it because they were old white guys, not kidding.) & now we got this.

Like, I'm not even a fan of Gumby or anything - I'm really not - but Jesus christ, hearing this being announced makes me want to hit the executives who greenlit this shit with rolling pins (or alternatively frying pans). When I think claymation or just stopmotion in general, I think Gumby. Making Gumby in 2D is like an angel without wings. It's just unnatural. Hell, wasn't Gumby's whole appeal was him being in stopmotion? You take that away & what do you even have left? And of course they had to give it this ugly beanmouth style that Hollywood just won't let die for some ungodly reason. It's on par with that stupid geometric style that companies like Google LOVEEEEE using.

And I just got me thinking, ".....We really are just stuck here, huh?"

At this point, it feels like every single company in Hollywood right now is just on a never ending quest to see how long they can go remaking & rebooting the exact same shit over & over again with worse & worse quality until people inevitably stop tuning in to see it.

Conclusion?

We should section off the entirely of LA from the rest of California & just firebomb it wit extreme prejudice until it's a smoking crater.

[portezibestuff]

The Defintion of Hypocrisy

When Disney turns Jumba Jookiba into a villian:

THIS IS UNEXCUSABLE!!!! DISNEY NEEDS TO BE PUNISHED FOR THIS!!!

When Dreamworks turns Agent Kitty into a villian:

Moral of the story: Humans as a species need to start reading more books then rotting our brains on garbage like The Bad Guys films.

[portezibestuff]

Me with DreamWorks Animation after reading the plot synopsis of The Bad Guys 2 that was uploaded on Wikipedia today:

[portezibestuff]

Question:

Is there anyone in the world who also thinks that The Bad Guys is one of DreamWorks Animation's worst films since it feels like that I am the only one?

[portezibestuff]

Hot Take!

Animation fans are impatient reactionary hypocrites who rather complain about studios being evil while either skipping on good movies and wait for them to be released digitally or liking movies that are really poorly written tripe like The Bad Guys or Helluva Boss.