#review everything

[prettyflyshyguy]

I survived Kaicon

Highlights:

-Customer on day one who I met last year that returned and brought me a gift (absolute legend)

-the SCP MTF cosplayers who looked absolutely scary and intimidating in full tactical gear but were so incredibly friendly when I told them they looked really cool

-the Jacket cosplayer (hotline miami) who waved and pointed at me, fully silent and in character (terrifying, covered in fake blood) when I said he looked amazing

-the SCP-079 cosplayer who came to my table wearing one of my lanyards and keycards (I DIED THEY LOOKED SO COOL they did an object head style cosplay of him with a CRT and a screen covering their face it was fantastic I yelled)

-another return customer who was buying something for their cousin and we shared a mutual love for Supernatural (I recognised their necklace)

-literally everyone who bought something off me everyone was so sweet

-all the old friends and new friends I got to meet. Everyone was so friendly and sweet I'm filled with joy. My table buddy from the first kaicon event I went to brought me a chuppa chup during bump out and I'm forever thankful.

Once again the SCP fandom pulled through for me - I am SO EXCITED to make more products and attend supanova later this year, and I'm fired up to make so much more art.

[topknotstrunk]

Currently making my way through Sabrina: The Teenage Witch. This Episode, Jenny's Non-Dream, has a scene where two telegenic brains in jars that are married to each other and can be told apart by the color coded water they float in have gotten into a fight over a book they read in Zelda's Book Club, causing the wife brain to shove the husband brain off the table. Zelda attempts to comfort them while the repair man that's visiting to fix the Magic dryer chases the lint demon across the house, Hilda in toe, because the lint demon has stolen a pie she baked. There's this wonderful level of absurdity that this show has that I never picked up on as a kid and it's my favorite part of the show so far.

[viva-la-topknot]

Oh My Gosh The Proud Family: Louder and Prouder Is So Pretty

Spoiler Warning: This review talks about and shows the art, story, and other details of all three of the first episode of The Proud Family: Louder and Prouder.

This is a snippet of a longer review I made mostly for my own entertainment, but I wanna share me geeking out about the way the show looks here on my Tumblr.

The show is really nice to look at. Pretty color pallets, interesting textures, consistent background style, and the shading. Oh my gosh the cell shading.

The show has lots of little stylistic flairs that are just fun to look at. Like how the line art of the backgrounds [and sometimes the foregrounds] don’t match the color that fills them in, like they’re on to layers that are slightly offset, but that the outlines are the thing that determines where that thing is in space.

Check out this scene of Oscar in his car here to see what I mean about the cell shading.

So the yellow circle is where the light source is coming from. If we just look at the cell shading Highlights, the lighter part of the left side of Oscar’s face, the top of his left arm and hand, those are all lit up from the cell shading. But his torso doesn't have a highlight because it’s below the window of the car, where the car door would be blocking it, and his right arm doesn't because the rest of his body is covering it. I’m trying to remember if I’ve ever seen cells shading like this in a cartoon. The highlights also change color depending on the lighting, it’s awesome!

Let’s take an example from Family Guy for comparison. All three characters are lit consistently from the moonlight coming in through the window, but Quagmire shouldn’t have any highlights on him below the neck, because that’s where the window stops. He’s lit on his left arm, leg, and foot. They're all highlighted but he should only be lit from the neck up because everything below that would be shadowed by the wall under the window.

Or how bout this shot from Kipo: Age of Wondersbeasts where Kipo’s left leg is lit as if the guitar wouldn’t be blocking the light, and how the shading is consistent from just before this bird shows up and there’s a big, sunny hole in the wall to after the bird shows up, where the bird should be blocking most of the light the scene is lit from.

I’m making a big deal of pointing this out because I can’t remember if I’ve ever seen lighting like this in a cartoon. It’s fantastic. It shows a really deep understanding of how light works and how to light a scene, and Proud Family: Louder and Prouder has tons of little details like this.

There’s this spray paint texture that keeps showing up throughout the show. They use it for depth, for texture, and for visual flair.

Here’s some dry brushstroke type paint to make Penny’s bonnet have a fabric texture.

Here’s a more textured paint look used to make Maya’s jeans look distressed.

Here’s some more dry brush style to show the curl texture of the girls’ natural hair.

There’s a couple different ones here, with the texture used on the trees being consistent from tree to tree and a different one for the roofs.

Look at how amazing Michael’s hair looks! The spray paint texture at the roots of his locs gives his hair texture and depth, they even gave him a lighter version of his base brown on the sides of his head to give all his hair some texture.

And here on Penny’s coat, they’ve used something chunky and multi colored with a splatter texture [reminds me of Procreate’s Splatter brush if it had a baby with the Flicks brush, Splatter’s color mix and Flicks’ texture and shape] to make glitter.

They sometimes also use texture for hair and don’t use an outline, which I’m partly pointing out so that we can appreciate the mix of lineless and lined styles in this show, and mostly because I had to show you Baby Penny because she is the cutest thing I’ve seen all week.

I really like all these textures they’ve put into the art, it gives the show a look that feels, approachable? Familiar? To a digital artist like myself. I can see myself emulating some of these techniques in my own art.

The fun and consistent characters carry over from what I remember of the original show [I re-watched most of the first season before the reboot came out so my memory on this count might be inaccurate], as does the fun and absurd cartoon sitcom writing. I’m glad they went for a chill cover of the OG theme song because trying to do better than it would probably have been impossible. Both the baby’s updated character designs are super cute, as are the main teens. Most of them aren’t /that/ different, other than Michal and Zoe most of the teen’s updates are in proportion and simple outfit changes.

The show is just super pretty and I look forward to getting to look at more episodes of it.

- Topknot

[topknotstrunk]

Review Everything 30 - Sweet Tooth, Season 1

It has been a good, long while since there was a post-Apocalyptic thing I really liked has been airing.

Which is unfortunate because that’s the genre that originally got me seriously into worldbuilding, which is now one of the things that’s most important to me and I spend a lot of time doing.

Gus is an interesting protagonist for this genre. We’ve had Kids to The Apocalypse Before [one of my all time faves is The Girl Who Owned a City, Green Angel by Alice Hoffman stuck with me when I first read it as a pre-teen, The Hunger Games is a series I have mixed feelings about but was wildly popular, and I’d argue that The Last Of Us falls into this category too, and it’s pretty widely loved] but I don’t know if we’ve had boundless optimist kid being the protagonist like this. At least, not in anything I’ve seen/read.

Gus sort of feels like an anime protagonist in a weird way, like the main boy in a Shonen anime. Sure, he has his moments of fear, and doubt, but ultimately he’s going to have his mind set on the most hopeful outcome and push to get there no matter what.

I find an element of this slightly grating, though. Gus never seems to learn anything from these situations he throws himself into. He picked up some farm steadying skills with his Pubba and can feed himself [we never have seen food be an issue for him so far, though he always eats like it’s the first food he’s seen in weeks he also never complains of hunger or has flagging energy due to lack of food]. No matter how many times charging head first into a situation put him in danger, head first he continues to charge. Same thing for trusting people. Despite the world outside his little homestead showing itself, and plainly, to be dangerous to Gus he continues to act as if he’s a little boy alone in the woods with only people who love him to concern himself with.

The reason I find this odd is that I jumped into this show without really knowing what it was. I have been lamenting not having “a show” because all my favorite cartoons got canceled or cut short basically all at the same time recently. A reviewer I like offhandedly mentioned, “And hey, season 2 of Sweet Tooth is airing, so go watch that.” Then an ASL interpreter I follow shared a scene from season 2 that’s ASL heavy and I went, “Oh yeah, I should watch this.” From those two tiny exposures to the show I had no idea there were other characters that the movie would follow, or that most of them would be adults. I thought it was gonna be a kid’s show. It’s not!  A character being static in something aimed at children is, for me, more forgivable then something aimed at older audiences. Which this show clearly is. Though Gus is ten and the show shies away from almost all sexual content and the fights are almost entirely bloodless, the subject matter and heavy focus on adult characters might bore kids Gus’ age. So I hope season 2 shows some growth for the kid beyond, “Wow, so everything isn’t on fire. Now let’s explore!”

I talk a lot in these reviews, I feel like, about my ability, or not, to guess at where a story is going. It’s just a thing my brain does when I consume media. To the point where, when I was a kid, I had guessed right one to many times and my Family forbade me from saying my guesses out loud. My gasp of realization less than halfway through a movie would draw glares from my family at family movie nights. I was even given a notebook to keep my thoughts to myself in for movie watching. They’re fun people. *eyeroll* All this to say, I didn’t find myself doing that much with this show. The reveal of Gus being patient zero, as it were, made sense, in a “Huh, I feel like I should have seen this coming” kind of way. I had been thinking, and only for that episode, that Birdie was gonna be patient zero, and give birth to Gus as the first hybrid kid. The only “called it” moment I had was like, 30 seconds before it’s revealed who Wendy was to Bear, when we see the back of her head as a little kid. That usually means the show is written well and doing its job, being too interesting for me to analyze in real time. Having too good a time with the show and being to distracted by how annoying Gus can be to make many guesses. XD

Something I find super interesting the the choices in how the hybrids look. I feel like characters that are important and that we’re supposed to empathize with the most are the “most cute” and most Human. Like, Gus has the tapetum lucidum thing going on, sure, but otherwise he’s a cute kid with deer horns and ears. There are about a billion OCs you could find on DeviantArt that look pretty much the same. He’s the deer version of a Cat Girl. Same thing for Wendy. But then we have, for example, the first character we see the new Doctor operate on and he’s got these big, ugly lizard eyes bugging out of his face, with the top part of his face being totally un-Human, with lizard tongue movements and animal like behavior. All the hybrid kids seem to have /some/ animalistic tendencies, but like, I feel like “we’re gonna cut you up now” might hit a bit harder if the lizard kid just had a little patch of scales and a normal kid face like Gus and Wendy have. IDK though, maybe that’s the point? They seem less Human so those scenes won’t be as upsetting.

Anyway, I’m really interested to know if there’s a reason some kids are cute animal gijinkas and some lean way more to the Cronenberg side of the “humans combined with animals” spectrum. Even if it’s just, “Genetics, some kids get more animal half, some get more Human half.” I’m SUPER not interested in quantifying the reasons and details of “weird deer shit”. I don’t want to know if lizard kids are exothermic if more than 30% of their bodies are covered in scales, I don’t wanna know if wolf kids need to eat an all carnivore diet if their teeth are sharp instead of flat, that shit. The show has some neat fantastical elements, I am happy to chalk up “their physiology is the way that it is” to “because”.

My only real critiques of the show so far are that the effects can be a little hokey, mostly the deer and other normal animals that show up, and that the kid acting can be well... Bad kid acting. Gus does okay most of the time but I have a real hard time feeling upset for him when he’s upset. He’s not great at fake big fear or fake crying, which are two things important to the story that he has to emote fairly regularly. Stefania LaVie Owen is doing an amazing job though, and so is Naledi Murray.

Looking forward to season 2. I like Birdie a lot and want to know more about her. I’d also like to hear about how Pubba felt taking Gus out into the wild, thinking she’d come, only she never showed up. I wanna see Wendy and Bear reunited. I also wanna know why almost every character in this show has a nickname or chosen name. Sweet Tooth, Big Man, Pubba, Bear, Pig Tail, Birdie, is this a thing the creator/s like or is there some meaning to it? I also really wanna know if our narrator is Gus all grown up.

In Summary: Cool world building, fresh take on the apocalypse [bold move making a plague movie while we’re still having a plague], a fun mix of science inspired story ideas and fantasy ones, I love me a good found family, animal kids are goofy but neat, and I wanna see more.

Overall: 6/10

[topknotstrunk]

Review Everything 35 - DC League of Super-Pets:

Cute, just interesting enough to be a good side monitor movie, got some chuckles out of me. The super villain was probably the most fun part of the movie. Not much to say about a movie that had not much to say about itself. 

In Summary: Even if you're a big fan of any of the pets in the movie I don't know that it has much for you.

Overall: 5/10

[topknotstrunk]

I get the stylisation they’re going for here, but I still cannot believe how bad and generic the character designs are. Particularly the fire elementals, when they’re standing in a group they all meld together because there’s no variation in color or texture, only size. It really looks like something that either a big budget studio would have put out at least a decade ago or that a low budget one might slip into the bargain bin of your local Wal*Mart. I can’t even really articulate why the fire and water elemental look /so bad/. Amateur? Unpolished? Someone more informed on character design help me out here.

It’s not that they’re simple, because simple can be great character design.

Like from another Pixar movie, Sadness is mostly round, and is blue which Americans associate with sad [you can say “Someone is feeling blue.” even to indicate that they’re sad]. Even if we just boil this down to their basic shapes, Sadness is an upside down tear drop, joy is a star, fear is a question mark, anger is a square, and disgust is a triangle.

Even if we take away their colors these all look like very different characters.

Here’s that same experiment with some fire elementals.

Ans some water ones. They don’t stand up to the same test. The water ones have more character variation in their hair, and benefit from not having to wear metal so they have more clothing options, but they look very homogeneous, very cut and paste.

I feel like I’ve seen Element City in a ton of other CG movies already.

I don’t think that’s because the city looks like something that already exists in a movie, exactly, but that it doesn’t look like its own thing, it looks like a pastiche of other fantastical CG movie. Like, if I didn’t tell you that the theme of this city is that elementals live here, I don’t know that you’d be able to guess that. It looks like a fantasy city with solar punk elements.

Also, “elements don’t mix”. Sure, it’s probably bad for water and fire to touch each other, but what about water and air? Is the argument that air and fire that air might blow out fire? Or air and earth? Or water and Earth? I think they saw a bit of this problem early in development because the earth elementals are more plant elementals, cause if they were made of rock fire would probably be fine. Water as an element and not a person would be especially important to a plant person, right? And the air elementals are depicted as clouds, which are, in the real world, made of water. I mean, sure, from what we see of the Water home an element that can’t swim couldn’t live in a water elemental’s home, but I can easily imagine a split level apartment where the lower level is flooded with a catwalk to allow an earth or air elemental cohabitating to get in and out, and since water can walk on land they could just go to the upper level to spend time with their roommate/partner/friend/what have you. Edit: Re-watching the trailer, the water home that we see is already a split level home with some raised, dry platforms and some flooded areas.

I am almost certainly hammering the logic of this cartoon too hard, and who knows, maybe the movie’s wrap up will present some of this stuff and say, “See, turns out we can mix!”

IDK, I hope the story really has something special in store or else I suspect it will be doing battle with The Good Dinosaur for Least Good Pixar Movie for me.

[topknotstrunk]

Review Everything 28 - Owl House Season 3

I can’t write a review that actually covers everything I loved about this season, and the show, because I’d be writing a novel length love letter. Like anything, I don’t love the show uncritically, but I do love it in away I didn’t really expect to. I didn’t think I’d ever see an animated character be what I felt was a positive representation of my own Trans and Non-Binary experience. Or that I would see a cartoon full of canon elder Queers. Or a cartoon where the Bi character gets to have an actual coming out scene. Where you can’t disguise that she’s bi, can’t cut those scenes out, can’t dub over her love interest to make her not a girl, can’t avoid the Pride pin her Mother wears in every scene after that. Where a Mother doesn’t even bat an eye at her daughter being Queer, she just loves her, because being Queer doesn’t change anything about why she loves her kid. A cartoon where the weird social outcast finds a realistic balance between “being weird can be good, actually” and learning how to be responsible with the way her actions effect others.

I cried at the end of the third episode of the final season. Not just because the story wrap-up is bittersweet, but because of what I feel like we, as fans, had taken from us.

This show being cut off at the knee caps the way it was around the same time Dead End Paranormal Park and Inside Job were just hurts. It hurts to see representations of myself, Queer, Neudrodivergent, not Male, being cancelled or discontinued or whatever, instead of being given the time to tell their stories. To have the creators lied to, “Here make us something great. No, not like that.” To have marginalized identities erased in media when American laws, the country these shows come from, are actively trying to erase us in real life. As a kid, the only character I could really see myself in was a fucking robot. And kids deserve to see themselves as people. They deserve to see themselves in sit-coms, and fantasy, and sci-fi, and YA, and every genre. They deserve to see people like them going on grand adventures with proper story arcs and the endings they were supposed to have, and for new shows to keep being made for them.

We deserve seeing ourselves in media, just like we deserve to exist. And watching them try to erase us, even in fantasy, is where most of my tears came from at the end of The Owl House.

I’m gonna miss this show. I’m gonna miss what it represented. And I’m gonna hope that this doesn’t become an era I miss, too.

In Summary: This show was a delight. I looked forward to every new episode, and didn’t begrudge starting it over twice to watch it with friends. The pacing issues with the end weren't the creators fault, so I chose not to knock them for that.

Overall: 9/10