#puck speaks

[itgirlwife]

your f/o’s source material but it’s filmed like the office and during the confessionals they talk about how they have a huge crush on you and the cameras zoom in on their face whenever you enter a room send tweet

[canatrix]

okay so now that I’m on break, I was browsing through Tubi and I decided to watch the boxtrolls. It looked cute and it’s from the studio that did coraline, which I love, and kubo and the two strings, which I watched forever ago but remember enjoying. And anyway, I have Thoughts.

So the premise is, in the town of Cheesebridge, a baby is taken by the boxtrolls, very ugly and endearing creatures. The boxtroll exterminator, one Archibald Snatcher, goes to the lord of the city, a posh man who ignores civic problems to focus on eating fine cheese. He gets the lord to promise him a white hat, the most coveted sign of status in town, if he can exterminate all the boxtrolls. However, the baby wasn’t killed but raised by boxtrolls. His name is eggs, and he and the lords daughter Winnie go on to save the trolls.

It’s very cute! Unsurprisingly, the visuals of the world are striking and delightful—the boxtrolls turn out to be fantastic inventors who live in a world of incredible contraptions. Everything is filled with so much whimsy and charm and personality, from the architecture to the characters.

Aaaand, this is where the problems begin. A lot of times to give characters whimsy and charm, you make them kind of “ugly”—moles, eyebags, wonky teeth, scrawny arms and fat torsos, and so on. And, our protagonist and deuteragonist are fairly conventionally attractive little kids with button noses. And this is a social satire so society in general, represented by these wonky “ugly” people, is opposed to our conventionally attractive protagonists. This would be a more minor nitpick, the sort of license animation is allowed to take, if it weren’t for snatcher.

Cause Archibald Snatcher, the main villain and architect of boxtroll extermination, has a very pronounced hook nose and long greasy hair. The secondary antagonist, the lord, looks a lot more conventionally attractive and conventionally Anglo-Saxon. Snatcher has a more pronounced lower class English accent, the lord speaks more properly. It gets worse.

As it turns out, the boxtrolls didn’t steal baby Eggs, his father gave him to them because Snatcher was threatening the baby to get the genius father to do his crooked will.

Every time Snatcher eats cheese, the symbol of wealth, he has a severe and grotesque allergic reaction, turning him into a physically monstrous figure as reflective of internal ugliness.

And, to top it all off, there’s a whole plot point where the nobles have the hots for this aging and ugly showgirl, and she turns out to be Snatcher in disguise, with thick and ugly lines of makeup and a grotesque wig. The lord eventually finds this out and is disgusted by his previous attraction.

At the end the poor, fat, hooked-nose, previously crossdressing villain explodes from eating cheese. The posh, rich, conventionally Anglo-Saxon lord who enabled the extermination and has been neglecting the problems of the city gets, not redeemed exactly, but he lives with some degree of improvement.

And it’s like, wow you made the most irredeemable villain kind of Jewish-coded and very much a transphobic stereotype and poor and shabby and also suffering a disfiguring disablement, in ways not a single other villain in the movie is. (In some ways it kind of reminds me of the substance, where to become disfigured is treated as something sort of uniquely pathetic and horrible, when like, people whose faces look “weird” do just exist and try to live well regardless).

Everything about the villain sort of signhandedly brings this from a charming minor animated film to something not really fun to watch. The great fun of animation is characters who look exaggerated and whose appearances match the larger than life personalities of the screen—but maybe animators should goddamn think before they like a bunch of stereotypes of minorities exclusively to their worst and most irredeemable villain.

[beaniebaby]

hlvrai is almost five years old…. 🧎

[lonelyoakenshield]

I love watching this show and seeing mulder/scully yell “federal agent” at someone they’re chasing, who is literally an alien, as if that would mean anything to them??

[heelfinn]

how nice of them to honor naomi with the pitch black match

[alexandrias-genesis-evangelion]

horrid little menace, awful gremlin (affectionate)

[thecreaturecrossroads]

I very friendly otter wanders up to Puck, tapping his knee for attention and motioning to the fish he just caught. Seems the little guy wants some.

"Hello there. Ye want some, aye?" Puck smiles and rips the fish in half. Handing one half to the otter.

"There ye are."

[bog-sucker69]

What are all these numbers