CK's Cartoon Corner

[Captain K]

Didn't care for Ratatouille at all.

[Cmdr_King]

Summer Wars

At heart, Summer Wars is a very simple movie.  In the sense that it tends to be straightforward or obvious, and telegraphs heavily.

Which is good.  It's good to remember that simple things can be amazing.  That straightforward or obvious isn't the same thing as stupid.  That making something easy to follow and accessible doesn't make it somehow less.

Before delving into all that, it's worth noting the visual spectacle of the movie.  I mean, the Oz sequences ARE pretty cool.  Granted they're extremely similar to the director's first major work, to a degree I gather borders on shot-for-shot remake at times.  Which in a way is one of the weaker parts of the movie because the way the 'fights' in Oz play out don't always quite make sense with the narrative here where I'm sure they were just fine in a Digimon movie.  Like... what does flooding Love Machine do exactly?  Like the first part I can kinda translate into some logic, tricking the core of the AI into a private server and cutting it off from the rest of Oz where it couldn't do any more damage, but what exactly does damaging it in Oz's battle mechanics... eh, let's not dwell.  It's silly and doesn't make sense sometimes and is there to look cool and give urgency to the family drama.
The rest of the movie looks slightly washed out sometimes, but that might be deliberate thing to contrast better with Oz.  That said... I once saw a thing on one of the director's other movies, where he talked about how he liked to have characters cry.  And was one of the few animators where crying characters don't look adorable and noble when they cry, actually conveying 'inelegant blubbering'.  Which yeah, being primed to look for it, it's definitely a standout thing.  Also a big emotional moment in the movie anyways of course.

So Summer Wars is obviously about family, communication, and togetherness, and what's interesting is mostly how each level of the story reinforces it.  A lot of the characters are motivated by trying to serve the needs of the family, which is fine.  Except it's not.  Blood being thicker than water and watching out for your own is natural to people, but it's not enough, which is really repeated point of the film.  Kenji's own small family is fractured, but while this means he takes a certain joy in the liveliness of the Jinnouichis it also gives him a sense of perspective their large, close-knit clan almost missed.  We live in a world where all of humanity is one community, made literal with Oz in this world (if you're actually unfamiliar with the film, imagine if Facebook and Google joined forces and world governments and major corporations all decided to run their private security directly through them.  The whole internet as a single system.)  Even in times of trouble, turning your gaze wholly inward and ignoring the human community is wrong, even if nobody would fault you for it.  Granny calls it what it is, an attack by an enemy.  Here it's a single AI, but it's basic behavior is that of an internet troll; Humanity's enemy is spite, maliciousness, capricious destruction for the sake of it.  Ignoring it to focus on your own grief and lives is natural, but you have to fight against that instinct or it'll run wild until people really get hurt.

... okay wow that was not where I expected that paragraph to go.  Let's refocus.

Regardless of how it happens, people have to be connected and reach out to each other to make the world work.  Being isolated leads you to mistakes because you lose all sense of how your actions might affect others, while rallying around each other and making sure everyone knows what's happening and that they CAN help and CAN do more than they think is the most important thing.  There's little cycles of this through the whole movie; Natsuki gets Kenji in way over his head in the beginning, but Granny accepts his presence and tries to nudge him into believing in himself.  Wabisuke makes a troll AI to recoup the family fortune, Sakae rallies the country to work around the damage.  The family turns inward to prepare Granny's funeral, Kenji pushes them to realize that a lot more people could suffer the same.  The world basically gives up on salvaging Oz from Love Machine, Natsuki's card game inspires everyone to fight back on their own.
They really, really wanted to make sure you picked up on this.
Granted I can only assume Summer Wars is a bit more All Ages kinda audience, or is intended as such, so they're very careful to lay out all the later plot points so you know it'll be important later.  Still, as much as the hammer the point, it works because the whole cast always comes off as very genuine.  Yeah, I've met some of these people, these guys all make sense, y'know?

Much as the movie's disjointed sometimes, the parts all succeed really well at what they do and the recurring theme being very similar in each keeps it feeling like one overall story even though it could easily have not.

Rating- 8/10

[Cmdr_King]

Puella Magi Madoka Magica

So this finally happened.

I think the series has a strange interest in convincing you Madoka is the least interesting member of the cast.  The other four girls each get to set the tone for part of the series, while Madoka is generally cast as a bystander.  Which is true, but...

Actually, going through the cast down the line seems like the best approach.

Mami's episodes are almost entirely about deceiving the viewer.  Can't be an effective deconstructionist work if everyone knows you're playing it crooked from the first minute.  Mami herself feels more like a device than a character... mostly.  Really there's only two moments in the series that her facade of "Cool, Collected Sempai!!" cracks, and neither of them is when she loses her head even!  That one's more of a "Oh.  Huh." on her part.  But no.  One is way down the line in Homura's extended flashback, where she lives t  o see the proof that yes, you too can become an evil witch!  Which works there because when that happens in the current timeline, nobody's really alive to react to it once it's all over.  It's good to have a proper emotional breakdown over that one.  But important to the show overall, the other one is just Madoka babbling, talking about what she really wants is to help people... and she lets it drop.  This isn't glamorous.  It's lonely, and dangerous, and thankless, and you just watch people die and hope maybe you can save some of them and one day, you'll finally lose.  Really that's when you know (assuming you didn't anyways) yeah, she's dying in about 5 minutes isn't she.  Still, There's something I really like about that, they don't go "lol nope ded she was full of it", the let her say it herself, in response not to distress, but to renewed faith: Madoka was someone she could genuinely believe just wanted to help people, the first such person she'd probably ever met.

Sayaka really gets the bulk of the episodes to herself, but purposes of discussion we're calling 4-6 Sayaka focused while 7-9 are about her breakdown and how this compare/contrasts with Kyoko.  So first...

Weakest Episode- Miracles and Magic Are Real.  Madoka is one of those nice series where there aren't bad episodes, and every episode is important, but this one has the least forward motion and least in the way of character moments.  Basically the only important things are...
<Madoka> *wordless scream of existential terror*
<Sayaka> Yeaaaah that's totally fair.  But I'mma go be a superhero now!
And then a bunch of stuff that... just kinda happens.

And really that's the meat of this part, Sayaka wants to be a superhero and wavers on whether she can manage and bristles at the other characters for not being superhero enough to match her despite being way stronger as magical girls.  We can basically call this the "we have to give you a small window of hope that maaaaybe there could be a happy ending!  Otherwise the pain from the last knife twist will linger and numb you to this one." portion of the show.

Kyoko's fun.  As raging assholes go.  But that's more or less the point, she has to be endlessly cynical but without despair, to contrast Sayaka's downward spiral.  Her backstory is strange though, because basically she's someone who had her entire family die as a delayed consequence of her actions... and she has to go "Well... I'm... actually still better off.  Man that's messed up.  Oh well, hedonism is go!"  Strange concept.
But back to Sayaka's downward spiral.

Best Episode- I was stupid... so stupid.  The slow motion swan dive into utter despair works so well.  I think it's the back and forth of it.  Feel utterly isolated, tell off your best friend.  Hate yourself for telling off best friend.  Try to be happy for other friend starting new relationship, want other friend to die in a fire for stealing away dude you've been trying to support for years.  Remind yourself you have to help as many people as possible because it's the only thing you have, be reminded that nobody deserves to be saved.  That last part is worth highlighting for being some of the nastiest things I've ever heard in a non-exploitative work, but in a good way.  And seems especially appropriate for this show because y'know, I've seen some other anime made in the past 10 years, and more importantly I've seen the fans of those anime.  They need some dick punchin'.

Homura of course is where they tried to put all the twisty plot stuff.  And in general she's the character with the most overt attention paid to her development, and presumably intended as the fan favorite.  And hey, she's cool.  Although sometimes they oversell it, the lingering shots on her doing her best impossibly cool hair flip get a bit gratuitous.
It's strange.  Like, conceptually Homura is basically awesome but in practice she's very pandering is the best way I can put it.  Cool beauty!  But secretly she was a nerd the whole time!  Awesome at everything... because she tried over and over and cheated the system, like a video game!  She can do everything by herself because she has hax!  But it's all to save the fair maiden, like a badass knight!  YEAH!!  And it's unfair, because  in reality the obsessive nature she develops and determination to cut out everyone except the center of her universe are pretty clearly shown to make things progressively worse, if not for the ending.  The multiple levels of making her the avatar of the fanbase is another bit of misdirection.  But they spend an awful lot of time on it and it's a bit offputting sometimes.
Of course realistically a lot of that stuff exists to set up Rebellion.

Madoka... well now.  I almost immediately thought of this exchange when pondering how to approach the show.

They're doomed.
Yes.  But a thing isn't beautiful because it lasts.  It's a privilege to be among them.
You're unbearably naive.
Well... I was born yesterday.

Substitute 'born' with 'became god', it's really very close to the overall sentiment of the ending.  But it's important to remember that this is a compromise; she can't just make the world better.  But she can take on the burden of everyone who fell to despair trying.  The phrasing Mami has for how Madoka's universe works is very specific, she takes the magical girls when their curses almost equal the good they did.  Karma is rebalanced to very, very slightly add up to good. 

But the show is very coy about it all.  Madoka is of course overtly messianic, but for most of the show she's really a game piece, moved around by the other girls.  And they want to play this off as her just being hopeful and naive and wanting to believe the best of people when it doesn't make sense.  Which isn't untrue, but it's again misleading.  Madoka doesn't so much believe that everyone should be nice and kind and being nice means doing everything for other people as... she's someone who's genuinely upset that the world is unfair.  Not that it's unfair to her, that her life is miserable and it's terrible that she's no good at anything and she has a boring family  and all he friends love her mom except her mom's a raging alcoholic and they silently keep her barely functioning every day.  That doesn't even register for her, I don't think.  It's the fact that there IS inequity.  That something innocent can die pointlessly (One of the surest signs of The Kinda Show This Is: the original wish that lead Madoka to being a magical girl in most of the timelines is revealed... in the opening credits, without any actual explanation or indication of its significance.  Yeaaah), that the people trying to protect the world from witches are forced to fight one another to survive, that every wish you can make ends in utter despair.  And she spends the whole series chewing on it, everyone around her oblivious to the problem: this isn't right, the world is wrong, there has to be some way to fix it.

She couldn't make the world right.  But she could give everyone an honest chance at making it better.

And then when her back was turned a voice said "Get in the sack!"

I'll have to watch Rebellion.  But I'm expecting an EoE scenario.

Rating- 9/10.  Sorta on the lowish end of the rating but I have to err high when I spent the whole write-up talking about the cast and not even mentioning the character designs, art shifts, use of lighting, or music.

Oh yes, one more character isn't there.

Bunnycat- A dick.

[Cmdr_King]

The Slayers Next

OP2 (Give a Reason)- The single best remembered song in Slayers, and with good reason.  The intensity of it builds in a way that gets you to follow one rhythm just before it ramps again, and it's almost impossible not to move along with it.  There's also this very real sense of incredibly sincere emotion to it that I just don't.... quite know how to explain.  We're moving to Megumi's rhythm, but she's really baring her soul here, y'know?

ED2 (Jama wa sasenai)- Not an exceptional song, but a solid one.  The chorus stays with you well and the buildup is decent.  Not a lot of meat to it but a certain amount of that is normal in EDs.

Mmm.
Next upon rewatch is certainly better than The Slayers.
The trouble is that's true more because of production values and the show finding a more consistent comedic voice, so a huge chunk of it just kinda flows right over you.  This improves in the second half of the season... well, let's break.

Weakest Episode- The Unexpected End?  The Shocking Truth!  Kanzel and Mazenda just aren't terribly interesting and the threat level attached to them is tedious.  Combined with being the end of Alfred's thing and the engineered succession conflict in Seyruun the whole episode is basically saddled  with trying up a lot of crummy storyline.  The animation for the city outskirts being levitated is pretty bad too just for flavor.

Mostly because we stopped dithering and finally found a primary villain rather than just one-note minions.  So we have actual goals and a mounting sense of dread.  And in those conditions they start getting real character moments again (for people who aren't Martina, Martina is the most consistently good part of the season), and let's be real, we're all here for Lina, Gourry, Amelia, and Zelgadis.  In particular, there's something about Lina just immediately taking to Auntie Aqua that I really love; oh, Lina hates people when she can't take advantage of them, but older lady who gently ribs her excesses?  Loves her.  The battle with Gaav is also pretty nice, because they do a good job of establishing that oh okay actually we can throw our biggest guns at this and plan all day and it's just not going to work.

Actually, let's sidebar.  Part of the issue in the first half of this season is what I usually think of as the Shonen Problem; we have our big superhero actiony shows.  We want the main character to be the special snowflake with extra powers.  And the villains have to be able to fight those powers, so... only the main character can fight the villains.  And this doesn't have to be true, but it's a trap that the writers have to actively work against.
And one of the key reasons I remember the first season as better than it really is (other being the note about humor above) goes back to that.  They did so, so good at making sure the whole team was integrated into the fights, and Kanzel and Madenza threw all that out.  Nope, everyone else flails, only Lina's AWESOME NEW SPELL can do anything functional. 
The fight with Gaav avoids this by just making it such that actually even lina can't get this shit done!  and then...

Best Episode- The Souls of the Dead!  Lina's Final Decision!  I doubt anyone's terribly surprised.  Everyone dies horribly with great suffering!  Go To Next! I also considered of course but sharing the major speech with the Lord of Nightmares means we can judge based on the emotional bits, and I think Lina's struggling in the face of everyone dying horribly is a bit more affecting than Gourry's mad dash to pull Lina back from the kiosk.
Yeah I dunno if there's anything deeper to say really.  Slayers likes to repeatedly gutpunch the audience sometimes.  It keeps working.

Rating- 8/10.  I'm really underselling the stronger points of the series because humor just tends to be very hard to hold on to, at least for specific examples or analyzing why something is funny or how funny it is.  The overall strength of the cast and the clockwork running of their timing is very strong throughout and that makes the season.

[SnowFire]

Best Episode- The Souls of the Dead!  Lina's Final Decision!  I doubt anyone's terribly surprised.  Everyone dies horribly with great suffering!

Count me as surprised?  I mean, Slayers is great, but big demon lord final showdown stuff is almost never the reason to watch the show.  It's *needed*, yes, there has to be some overarching defeat-a-great-threat framing story or else our "heroes" would look more like crazed magical bandits than RPG heroes, but the best episodes are usually the rando "the team is travelling and runs into a weird situation, Lina inappropriately responds with violence" ones.   Srs bizness Slayers episodes are basically the weakest ones, with the possible exception of maybe the first half of Season 1 with Zelgadis & Rezo as villains.

Also I think that everybody agrees Slayers is perhaps a little too liberal with handing out invincibility to its enemy cast it wants an excuse to persist from episode to episode.  I recall Slayers Try being the biggest offender here but you're reminding me that Next did it too.

[AndrewRogue]

I'm gonna side with CK here.

End of NEXT just hits that perfect melodramatic pitch, in large part because it massively ups the stakes and Phibby is just a delightfully monstrous asshole. Plus, Lina's decision is so wonderfully in keeping with the series while still being... sympathetic, I suppose?

This isn't to say that -most- of Slayers' big emotional showdowns work. It is mostly that Copy Rezo and Phibby are great, everything else sucks.

[Cmdr_King]

The "I don't think you'll be surprised" part is referring to the fact that I rather consistently give the most nods to episodes heavy on the high emotional stakes and melodrama.  I'm a bit predictable.

But yeah.  Back during the first season, I figured it'd be a tossup between the episode I did nod and the showdown with Shabranigdu-Rezo.  The latter didn't hold up, the former did.  The trouble I have is that comedy, or at least Slayers' brand of it, isn't something I find super memorable, and quite often the stuff I laugh at the most in the moment isn't the stuff I remember down the line.  So... it's the big high stakes climaxes that have the biggest reaction because humor tends to be transitory, at least for me.
Also one of the weaknesses of Try.  It's still Slayers comedy, but it's got nothing else (unless I forgot something, we'll see!  Eventually!), and even in that department it's notably weaker than Next since... no Martina.

[Cmdr_King]

Thor: Tales of Asgard

Hmm, so this is only our second of these?  Well then.

So the whole Lions Gate Marvel thing is basically their answer to the DC Animated features, and the idea seems to be that since this is direct-to-video animation they can ramp up the blood and violence a bit and it'll be fine and give them a hook.

That's... a great theory?  And Planet Hulk is legit good.  This one is... not terribly good.

There's just a long list of issues, some fundamental, some nitpicky, some minor but really glaring.  I'll try to just take a couple from each set to save needless ragging on the film since it's not THAT bad.

- The animation is janky.  Lot's of very sudden movements, no real fluidity.  Normally this sort of thing would trim itself down if they were having budget problems but here we are.
- The violence level does not really help this particular story at all.  This is probably the biggest overall issue, the story itself sets off as an innocent youthful adventure that ends up being a lesson for Thor about the responsibilities of being a leader, which is a fine enough premise but I don't think showing the Sword of Surter (really?  you can't call it Twilight?  Because that's what that's called in marvel) burning the flesh from ice giant bones before showing the bones disintegrating is really advancing that story much.
- I gotta say, Thor finishing off the final battle by taking up Gungnir is a huge letdown.  C'moooon, you had Mjolnir in the vault!  Stop teasing me.
- In general the relative ages of everyone and characterization feels slightly off.  Thor and Loki I'm okay with since the main thrust is being the event that sets them on their paths into adulthood, but it's like they had a really specific story idea and jammed the other characters into it with passing reference to their usual personas.
- The Valkyries.  God everything about them is hard to sit through.

As noted, I do like the core idea, and Thor and Loki more or less work.  But everything else around them just feels off and there's a few parts that aren't fun at all to watch.

Rating- 4/10

[Cmdr_King]

Zootopia

God, how is there anything BUT Zootopia porn left on the internet.  This is the second furriest thing I've ever seen.

Okay, so there's a big gap there because I am CONVINCED the other thing is like... actually intended as pornographic sometimes, this just has some weirdly male-gaze-y stuff on Ms. Hopps at times. 

Otherwise, this is a Disney film and possesses all the many hallmarks of that legacy.  Details poured into aspects of production no regular viewer will ever notice, cohesive world design etc etc. 

I mean, it's good.  So, so much better than that trailer because honestly I had decided to avoid it based on that thing, fortunately while that scene is in the movie, it's cut down a bit.  And they actually pay it off somewhat later.

The main thing about the film though is that is has... seemingly by accident, though perhaps they decided on the broad themes in response to events from a year or two ago and it's just gotten EVEN MORE relevant in the past few months, become extremely timely.  The main thrust here, if you're not familiar with any of the advertising or world setup, is basically "animals evolved into cartoon furries, but remain somewhat divided by traditional classifications of predator and prey".  There's a lot of mistrust there, and broad stereotypes about each group, as well as specific ones to particular species (rabbits are cute (don't call her that, it's okay between rabbits but not so much when other mammals say it...), foxes are sly bullies, weasels are shifty criminals, etc). 

It does mostly work, and the way it informs the backstories and ongoing plot for the two main characters is great (hell, the rapport between the two of them is the best part of the film), but it can be reaaaaaallllyyyy on the nose at times, in a way that's distracting.  There's a bit of a mystery plot going on here, which sadly is pretty predictable about five minutes after they tip their hand on one even being there, but I guess that's probably just going to happen sometimes in your family films. 

In a lot of ways I suspect this one will feel sorta dated in a few years, despite "racism is bad and hard to counter!" being a pretty eternal message, because the specifics of it just feels very rooted in the 2010s specifically, along with having technology directly mirroring modern featured pretty prominently.  They also have some direct shoutouts to the current Disney run at a few points that will have the same effect overall.  Still, it's certainly enjoyable enough and, as noted, it's nice to have something that will be getting a lot of eyeballs dropping the racism hammer right now.  But it's just not an all-time classic in the making.

Rating- 7/10

[Cotigo]

Zootopia

God, how is there anything BUT Zootopia porn left on the internet.

… yeah that's getting immortalized as a signature when I get home.

This is the second furriest thing I've ever seen.

Okay, so there's a big gap there because I am CONVINCED the other thing is like... actually intended as pornographic sometimes,

Sonic the Hedgehog? Disney's Robin Hood?

[Cmdr_King]

Animalympics.



Imagine this for about a full minute of screen time.

[Grefter]

k

[Cmdr_King]

Teen Titans (Season 2)

Let's go ahead and knock this one out.

Weakest Episode- Every dog has his day.  Neat enough idea, but the off beat humor didn't quite hit the right wave length with me.  It indulges a bit in the "art shift to something creepily, grossly detailed to jolt audience" style (think Ren and Stimpy or Spongebob) and that's never been a real winner for me.  The role reversal at the end is cute at least.

Okay.  So while watching the first half of the two parter I was considering talking up the show's strengths for filler; like, the earlier Terra-centric episodes were... fine, and Terra is an interesting enough character, but I feel like the arc needed one more episode in there.  Preferably in the start of the season, like split her first episode over two parts with more camaraderie and maybe a tussle with Dr. Light or something in there.  This sort of storyline needs a certain baseline of normal, and they never quite get there for me.  Meanwhile, the filler episodes like Fractured or Winner Take All were just good superhero shenanigans.  Heck, I want to single out Winner Take All for actually taking the base premise of Robin and Cyborg being hypercompetitive jocks and butting heads over it and make it actually interesting.  It stands out compared to the first episode back in season 1.

buuuuuuuttttttttt

Best Episode- Aftershock (Part II).  Oh holy crap where was this show hiding.  The opening scene with Terra is a big reason I wish there was another episode for her, because I think her visions lose a little bit by not actually being shots from earlier episodes.  Or if they were I totally forgot and uh oops.  But everything else?  Man, the first action sequence is like something out of Batman, except with full super powers.  It's this amazing contrast to the normal state of the show.  No bright colors, no jokes, no anime, these people are walking demigods, they have no weakness, they know your every move, you will never see them coming, and you have burned your the last shred of mercy from their souls.  You're right there with Terra when she flees in abject terror of the Titans.
And it just gets worse for her!  I think they walked an absolutely perfect line for Terra's scenes with Slade.  It's clear that this is a violation, that Slade manipulated her into giving up agency, into saying yes when she didn't mean it, when she even thought she did.  But they never sexualize it or smother it with the usual giant flashing "THIS IS A RAPE METAPHOR" signs.  It is what it is, and they trust you're smart enough to recognize it.
The fight between Beast Boy and Terra is just amazing.  They put so much thought into how these two very different sets of powers interact and how they can counter each other.  It's just a joy to watch. 
The ending does feel a little contrived, but I'm willing to put it down to them being to quick in the last scene; her last attack against Slade didn't LOOK so strong that it'd go full supervolcano, but it is in line with the overall emotions of the fight so hey, minor animation let down.

I'm a little torn here at the end.  I'm finding i like the last episode even more as I'm writing about it, and the overall episode quality is definitely higher all around from the previous season.  But I'm not sure if I weight the end enough to put it the next grade above that or not.  Mmmm.  I dunno, I do feel like they got lucky and generate more emotion and payoff than they strictly earned.  We'll shoot a bit low on this one.

Rating- 7/10

[Cmdr_King]

The Prince of Egypt

Deliver Us- Nice contrast between suffering on a grand scale and sacrifice on a personal scale.  The little sequence of all the terrible perils Moses' basket faced is kinda interesting, nicely sets up the idea of his being chosen and protected by God from the outset.  Nothing amazing overall but it lets you know all the important context for the movie pretty efficiently.

I definitely find myself feeling like the sibling bond between Moses and Rameses is sold well.  The idea that Moses is somewhat uncomfortable with the excesses of the court is a smidge overplayed perhaps, but otherwise his being the irresponsible younger brother works pretty well.

All I Ever Wanted/(Reprise)- The song has nothing on the dream sequence.  I've got a serious soft spot for art shifts as you may have noticed, and this one is pretty fun.  But actually the bit with Pharaoh is the best.  Patrick Stewart plays it just right; yeah, he's not THRILLED with baby murder, but slaves aren't something you should lose sleep over years after the fact.  It is just the burden of duty, and not the heaviest of his burdens.

Through Heaven's Eyes- Montage!  Pretty effective one too.  The singer has a nice rich voice, letting Moses' goofballness show through to see why he'd be endearing to these folks and their pick of little moments to show between him and Tzipporah are pretty danged effective.

God's voice has never felt quite right to me.  I think it's Val Kilmer with another layer over it and to make that slightly less obvious they have him use this really weird cadence to all the lines.  The burning effect is pretty cool though.

Playing with the Big Boys- *yawn*

Something is way, way off with Miriam's voice and I don't know what it is.  She's... flat?  I dunno.  It's a big weakness in a lot of places because she tends to be the one to spur Moses to action a lot of times. 

I gotta give a lot of credit to the animators for the work on Rameses' son.  They give him a lot of personality for a character I don't think actually gets a speaking line.  He's... a kid, y'know?  It adds a lot to how utterly crushed Rameses is later.

The Plagues- I've always loved this one.  The chorus is great, it is great.  The visuals on the plagues are suitably horrifying to boot.

When You Believe- Super sappy.  I thought The Plagues had won the Academy Award, but turns out it was this one?  Weird.  I guess maybe the harmony parts appeal to those sorts of folks.

... helloooooooo animation budget!  The pillar of fire feels ALIVE, and the scope they manage to give the parting of the Red Sea is pretty amazing.  Yes children of Israel, you are right to stare in awe of this spectacle. 

Unsurprisingly they prettttty much stop the movie here with only the barest acknowledgement of the 10 Commandments.  Considering how heavy they'd been on the plight of the people and putting the emotional conflict in the sibling bond rather than the messiness of reality, the golden calf and other such events would really spoil the mood y'know.  But yeah, movie holds up about like I remember it, and... probably my favorite of Dreamworks' films that I'm aware of.

Rating- 8/10?  I might be shooting a little bit high there.  But sure, let's roll with that.

[dunie]

Zootopia


Okay, so there's a big gap there because I am CONVINCED the other thing is like... actually intended as pornographic sometimes, this just has some weirdly male-gaze-y stuff on Ms. Hopps at times. 

Rating- 7/10

They didn't pick a rabbit, timely for the 21st century, not to emphasize her round bottom and spunk. But, I think about how most female cartoons move or look, Nahla and her round bottom sitting, Gloria the hippo and her fat ass….

[Cmdr_King]

An American Tail

... oh yeah, this is more or less a musical.

There Are No Cats in America- Y'know, intuitively I feel like the breaks into cartoony visual shifts are a bit odd for Bluth.  Even though that's probably not actually true... just compared to Bluth's other early works.  I suppose it's a portent of later bits of his career really.  Anyway, as a crowd song with some intentionally rough singers, I don't have too much to say about it musically, but it has this interesting bit of misery olympics, which is strangely perfect for this.  "Y'all remember we're deperate refugees fleeing on the slim hope that AMERICA fuck yeah! is all we dream it to be right?"  "That ain't no reason to be down!  When I was little cats used to kill us and dance about on our graves!"

Never Say Never- I kinda feel bad for whatever poor kid is doing Fieval.  It's really obvious they have a legit kid doing the voice, and he sooooo hasn't had any true singing training, so they have to have him kinda whine through this song and let the dude doing the french accent try and cover for him once he actually joins in.  I don't think it quite pulls off what it needs to narratively though; like... he has to shift from hopeless to determined and I don't really see that moment in there where he's convinced about it.  He just sorta flips a switch.

I'm kinda digging the way they actually have Fieval work in this.  The way his naivete is just inherent to the character, and it can both get him into trouble and endear people to him.  The fact they pay off his love of the mouse-Rapunzel story to escape the sweatshop is cute and sells the character well.

Somewhere Out There- The placement of this is strange to me, mostly because it's not the first scene where Fieval and the Mousekewitzes miss each other.  I've been told that this scene is the one people remember from the film which is weird in an absolute sense since it's a very short song and the visuals aren't all that different from the movie as a whole.  But... An American Tail isn't huge on specific imagery or long spectacular scenes.  It's a small details kinda movie, and this song does probably the most to capture the overall emotion of the film.

A Duo- I love the way Bluth uses color shifting.  The manipulation of size works pretty well too and plays nicely with the idea of the song.  Not that it's a great song, for all Dom DeLuise is pretty fun.

WEWEASE... THE SECWET WEAPON!!

I have to say though, while I haven't hyped any of the songs (since they're trying to be in-character with them so these are rustic folks with untrained voices, y'know?) the rest of the music is quite excellent.  Sappy to be sure, but shit, we're trying to be a family movie about the totality of the immigrant experience, sappy is kinda the point.
Hence the glorious slow motion camera rotation against the fresh, coppery splendor of Lady Liberty and all that.

This movie runs counter to a lot of my own biases though.  It's much focused on introducing new characters and moving briskly from scene to scene, without much pause for character depth or emphasis of emotional moments.  There's one bit where the Mousekewitzes are finally clued in that Fieval was actually still out there, but the rest is very transitory in terms of plot or emotional beats.  It makes sense with the overall idea of the movie, but I apparently don't have a special emotional attachment to that particular american experience.

Bridget makes me smile though.

Rating- 6/10

[Cmdr_King]

They didn't pick a rabbit, timely for the 21st century, not to emphasize her round bottom and spunk. But, I think about how most female cartoons move or look, Nahla and her round bottom sitting, Gloria the hippo and her fat ass….

Oh, the design is awesome.  I just found the camera gaze a bit weird because it's so overt.

That said I uh... actually have a half-finished Fantasia write-up (I started it then realized I couldn't do some of the segments properly without doing them immediately after watching, mid-movie) so I'll have to see how they frame that.  Could be it's there too and I just missed it because Dance of the Hours is so damned strange to start with.

[Cmdr_King]

Tokyo Godfathers

To this day this movie amuses me on a conceptual level.  Probably the greatest Christmas Miracle movie ever made comes from a Japanese man who, so far as I can tell, was not among the ~2% or so of Japanese folks who adhere to any variation of that faith.  Satoshi Kon's fingerprints are all over the movie in terms of visual design and story focus, but the actual story told here stands out a lot from the rest of his work and the degree it resembles western works (apparently it borders on adaptation of a John Wayne western, although I'm not familiar with that film) and the less-than-ubiquitous-in-Japan Christian faith is a bit uncanny. 

Actually, I want to focus a bit on that.  The film in question is 3 Godfathers, and purportedly draws some inspiration from the tale of the three magi and their journey to (or flight from, a lot of magi stuff is in Orthodoxy which I'm substantially less familiar with) Judea.  But the sense that the film is drawing from some older story, and has a more mythological/folkloric arc definitely jumped out at me.  Like, the cycles each character goes through, how they get drawn into new trials by the whims of fate, the lessons they all receive while separated, just create an undeniable sense that this is not a modern story told in a modern format, despite the contemporary setting.  I can't be any more specific than that because I'm just not learned in those older storytelling forms, and maybe I'm completely fucking wrong here?  But it's definitely something I kept thinking of.

The Christmas Miracle aspects, and the movie's understanding of Christian values, are a bit more straightforward.  The first time I watched it I wasn't paying that much attention, but the characters remark a lot throughout about just how unlikely some events of the film are.  But it's delightfully low key until the very end.  It's pretty danged unlikely they'd happen along a yakuza boss trapped under his own car, or that Gin would run into a dying bum who just wanted to share a last bottle of saki with a kindred spirit before he passed, but hey, it'd been a weird ass day and stuff happens.  But it makes the end where a divine wind sweeps in to let Hana and Kiyoko float down to saftey really satisfying in its way; yeah, misfits you may be, but you did good.  Let all ye assembled know this woman and this child are blessed.

One of the things Kon was renowned for is the diversity in character models.  This stands out even more as time goes on and anime descends further down the rabbit hole of moe and creepy otaku milking, but many anime have two main faces, cute and ugly.  Kon's characters are to a much greater extent real people, instantly distinguishable however you dress them or change up their hair or what have you.  And while that ties into the philosophies behind all his work as I understand it, it seems especially prominent in Tokyo Godfathers because for all that every character in the film has a lot of complexity, the greater focus of the movie is really on... exposing the aspects of life and society a lot of Japan likes to pretend isn't there.  Apparently the scene where Gin is beaten up by a gang of college kids was a well-known news story at the time, and that's completely unsurprising just watching the thing.  "Oh, we're just cleaning up the park".  Miyuki had such a distant/strict relationship with her father she cracked and stabbed the man.  Hana...
...okay actually Hana's story is a common one throughout most of the world.  So we should all be pretty ashamed we ignore it.  It's telling she unwaveringly and to her detriment is the most moral character in the entire movie.
I don't think Satoshi Kon was super subtle guys.

But that's sorta the point.  You can't cope with the world and help the people in it without acknowledging the ugliness within it.

Rating- 8/10

[Cmdr_King]

Fantasia

Oh god what have I done.

Naaaah this should be okay.  I mean talking about one of the most influential movies ever made can't be that hard.

The thing about Fantasia is that it damn near ruined Disney.  They went all in here, and it shows.  The core concept is something that's been done later, and was parodied by Warner Bros. in their heyday, but even then Fantasia has a... seriousness isn't quite the right word.  Solemnity.  It's not just a strange concept, it's a silly one, and they even play with that in some of the introduction segments... but it never carries through.  We're doing something groundbreaking, serious, elevating our artform to a level nobody could possibly have believed.  And nobody DID in 1940, but here we are.

Actually let's get on to the individual shorts.

Toccata and Fugue in D Minor- “Well, we want the audience to know what they’re in for.  We better start with MAXIMUM DRUGS.”  Well, not actually, they actually linger on the orchestra’s shadows for quite a lot longer than you’d think, but the main bit is MAXIMUM DRUGS.  Although at one point early on once it switches to animation they have basically flying bridges.  Cute. 
Actually though, the introduction to the piece notes that it’s “music for its own sake”, and in that context it’s pretty successful overall.  The flying shapes are a bit off, but after a few minutes it settles into a sort of motion theme that’s actually really cool.  You kinda meander in time to the music, then suddenly start falling.  Then it moves into impressionistic styles that then suddenly punctuate with harsh colors and lights that make sense: you’re also getting jarred by sudden deep notes in the music.  It feels more like a proof of concept than anything else, but within that it’s quite effective.

The Nutcracker Suite- I get the impression a lot of the movement here is taken fairly straight from the ballet, so a lot of it is kinda dull comparatively?  Doesn’t help that the musically slow bits accompany the cast segments with the least personality (the dew fairies and angel fish). 

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice- Y’know, Yen Sid seems to have a less defined model than Mickey.  Feels a bit amorphous.  Although that kinda makes sense, I think they’d previously been rotoscoping (or some similar technique) human figures for these things and probably figured what Yen Sid was doing was a bit complex for that considering it’s a ~10 minute short. 
Of course this is a light piece to lead in to the one where everything dies, and Mickey’s suffering is in fact pretty funny.  I’m not entirely sure how you’re supposed to get that particular story out of the music as written, but I don’t think it works at all without Mickey’s desperation to punctuate the march of the brooms.

The Rite of Spring- This was also originally composed for a ballet apparently, but unlike Nutcracker suite this just makes sense as what Disney made it, a dramatic retelling of ancient Earth.  The whole first movement is downright violent, but with a lot of gravitas, it just makes sense as the background for lava flows and the formation of landmasses.  Once dinosaurs show up, there’s a definite sense of just letting the creatures operate in their habitat and the music waiting for them to act rather than some larger story trying to force its way in.
That Disney would go on to produce large numbers of actual nature documentaries is utterly unsurprising.  Huge amounts of attention are given to how the dinosaurs move, particularly mouth movements as they eat.
In general though this short has the most technical skill on display.  They blend a lot of layers of cells here to get some of these effects, and while a couple of the seams are really obvious for the most part it’s a gorgeous (if often bleak) piece. 

The Pastoral Symphony- Hello drugs.
This feels the most Disney-esque of the shorts in Fantasia.  To an extent it’s just because it’s a very colorful and the characters are fairly consistently done in a very Disney style.  And each movement of the music has its own shorter story in it, which all match well to a certain sort of classic Disney short where it’s about… how to put it.  Daily struggles with just a little cartoon edge to them I guess.  The youngest Pegasus can’t quite work out how to fly and has to haul his ass up by his own tail to get it done?  Something about that is quintessentially Disney to me.  Drawing on the Greek pantheon is also in character for them at this time
But in some ways that makes it stand out.  It’s this sustained marathon of a short, where the others in Fantasia have long stretches where there’s no characters on screen, so they animators could just have stuff happen in time to the music rather than having to write stories for each bit of the song.

Dance of the Hours- So Nutcracker Suite I’m not terribly fond of since it feels like they just arbitrarily had a bunch of plants do the original ballet.  Dance of the Hours is overtly drawing from the ballet (they’re in fucking tutus here) but… they’ve added an entirely different character and plot atop of it.  Or Dance of the Hours is awesomely fucked up.  But even if it is, it still doesn’t have dancing hippos.
Since I said I’d be on the lookout- they definitely emphasize the fatness of them hippo asses sometimes, but this short never uses cinematic camera angles as we understand them… although at the time this was released, I’m not sure cinema used cinematic camera angles as we understand them, at least not in as ubiquitously (Although APPARENTLY Gloria was the hippo from Madagascar.  This hippo is apparently Hyacinth.)  Of course Dance of the Hours doesn’t particularly anthropomorphize the cast.  They just walk on two legs with no other particular anatomical changes.  Strange shit.
(Obviously DRUGS is a major theme of this short as well.  I mean you can find them in all the shorts, everything moves rhythmically all the time, but.

Night on Bald Mountain/Ave Maria- Holy shit did they actually draw those skeletons in chalk?  That grainy translucence is fuckin’ weird man.  The pettiness of Chernabog in tormenting his servants is kinda neat actually, emphasizes that this is really just a celebration of his own evil for him.
Probably the most interesting thing here is actually the transition between the two songs, where they use a lot of lighting and color changes on a bunch of different characters which you just don’t see too much of at this time.  In fact I’m not sure it’s a thing normally.
Then again Ave Maria is pretty worthless soooo I dunno.

Even though I pick on Nutcracker Suite, it has to be emphasized that every bit of Fantasia is ambitious as all get out and brings in something new and revolutionary.  Even for all the DRUGS bits, you can feel how badly Disney were trying to push themselves and make this entire crazy operation work.  And even where I can’t trace any of the precise lineages, I do feel like animation would have taken years to make the strides it did in the late 40s and 50s without Fantasia and the techniques and sheer ambition it took to create it.

From deep within his icy bunker beneath Cinderella’s Castle, old Uncle Walt smiles at the legacy this film carved through the medium.  And for all there’s not always characters or plot in any traditional sense, it’s hard not to get swept up in that at times.
Rating- 8/10

[Dark Holy Elf]

Nice. I need to watch that again, I was a big fan as a kid and I probably haven't watched it in around half my lifetime now.

I didn't like Bach much when I first saw the film as a child but it really grew on me the older I got until the point where I would generally call it my favourite; it's an awesome piece of music and I love the way the movie just seems to use it to bring images to life. Beyond that... I mostly second many of your thoughts from what I remember. The movie is an amazing concept in general and pulled off very well on the whole IMO, though there are definitely some weak patches (and it is a shame the film ends on one).

[Cmdr_King]

Tiny Toon Adventures: How I Spent My Vacation

I knew I'd seen this at the point after they cut it up for syndication, but only really remembered one of the plot threads.  This was only partially true: a couple of the smaller stories I remembered just fine, but thought they were independent episodes. 

For example, this is where we get the marvelous THUD audio test.

The Audience is Now Deaf.

There's also an above average Elmyra sketch (for whatever that's worth to you) and one of the rare Fifi-centric parts of the series, which is a damn shame really because spending the whole movie building up to her apocalyptic telling off is great.

The Buster and Babs end I... legitimately did not remember like any of.  I couldn't tell you why!  It's... okay.  The initial gag to kick off the soaking contest is actually quite good, but the escalation is just kinda there and the downriver trip... there's a few episodes along those lines and it's pretty average among them?  There's just a sort of disconnect for some of it.  Are possums particularly carnivorous?  Why do the bellegators have to marry Buster to devour him?  They go on some long walks to set up Babs' gags and it doesn't quite work. 

I do wish I had a little counter that could tick at the corner of the screen for "Better Superman than DCEU Superman" though.

So naturally the highlight of the whole feature is Plucky's trip to HAPPY WORLD LAND (Happy World Land!).  Hamton is unusually low-key in this one, but I don't think the show did better sight gags than in this plotline.  Like... okay, we just have to quote the movie here.
"Could crank up the AC?"
"Can't do that, burns gas.  I'll just crack the window"
"Don't you dare!  People will think we can't afford air conditioning"
Plucky stares deliriously out the window.  We zoom out or the car to see the road is between volcanoes and lava flows.  As they drive out of view, a new crater opens up in the middle of the road.  Another car drives up and tries to stop, fails, flips over, and lands in the open lava pool therein.

I don't think I've cracked up for purposes of these reviews like that in months.

Plucky suffers so beautifully.

Rating- 7/10.  Still, while the trip to Happy World Land is absolutely a cut above, a lot of the rest is pretty average as Tiny Toons go so I don't want to go too much higher than the norm.

[Cmdr_King]

Millennium Actress

Y'know, I feel like Kon is just showing off in this one in a way the other movies of his I've seen don't.  There's a very cinematic quality to the way a lot of the framing and editing are done, especially the transitions between different settings.  It's appropriate to the movie of course, but I feel like the things he's doing with costume changes, setting swaps, and rapid shifts between them at certain points and the sense of shift in time and between reality and fantasy it creates have a small barb to them.
It kinda says "hey, other anime directors!  Do you even realize how hard this would be on film and how easy it is for us to do it?  Why aren't we trying harder to use the advantages of our medium here?  Step it up!"
Or maybe that's just me.

To an extent, Millennium Actress relies on the audience to add complexity to it, which is interesting.  Like... we get to see exactly once what this looks like from the outside, an old lady and a middle aged dude pantomiming their way through old movies and getting way to into it.  And that's the natural interpretation of it, so the movie makes a point to say "yeah, there's nothing unusual going on here", but it just invites you to make more of things than is there.  So you see each transition from era to era and the temptation to read entirely too much into everything just keeps gnawing at you.  Did Chiyoko actually bump into the Man with the Key when filming the samurai movie?  Is she losing her grip and remembering events from her movies as parallel to things that actually happened to her?  Is her memory and performance so captivating even the camera gets confused?
Well no, we just said those didn't happen.  Don't be silly~

But really the only word for it all is charming.  These are kind, interesting people.  They lead fascinating lives.  As the audience we just hope that maybe everyone can have a happy ending.  Isn't it a movie?
Not as such, no.

The run to Hokkaido is one of those perfect little film moments, where a single sequence captures the entire spirit of the film.  Granted it's like 7 minutes long in an 85 minute film but hey.  Hope turns to longing, longing turns to frustration, frustration turns to desperation, desperation turns to determination.  Determination turns to hope.
Chase after it.  A love you can never forget.

Rating- 8/10.  Satoshi Kon can pretty much sucker punch you in the feels whenever he damn well feels like, but he's so good about making sure he's earned it anyway, because he respects the artform and the audience.

[Cmdr_King]

Who Framed Roger Rabbit

Ahh man.  This movie.  Let's talk the technical bits first.  There are very few movies animated with the level of detail the toons in Roger Rabbit are.  A recurring fact I bring up when we revisit Disney is their tendency to sink ridiculous time and effort into things the average viewer won't notice.
The film industry refers to this as the Roger Rabbit Effect, because they bloody well should name it after this movie.

What's easy to forget is that there's this much thought and detail into the entire movie, not just the animation.
I mean, the movie's entire first act is just one day.  Eddie drinks in every single scene in it.  They only draw attention to it in some of them.  This dude does not give a fuck, he's entirely too drunk to have any fucks left to give.  And you don't get to forget that.
That sort of conspicuous detail is all over.  The arrangement of the glory days photos and newspapers is carefully arranged to reference later scenes.  The layers of dust on Teddie's desk are correctly manipulated when Roger interacts with them.  Christopher Lloyd does not blink and only moves at sharp angles.

This is one of the secrets really.  It is a work of love.  How does the audience respond except with love?

The rest of course is that all that detail works with the sort of story it is.  It's a noir-ish mystery punctuated by hi-jinks and with a distinct undercurrent of war-era race relations.  It's an epic bow to all the great characters and animators of the golden age of cartoons.  The meticulous detail and overt fanboyistic background events are all there to service the story and lead the audience through all the twists.  Of course Doom is the villain, nobody's surprised about that.  But then it turns out he's not even human and oh god that explains everything doesn't it?  Of course Eddie's a detective for toons, he's a retired police officer who was raised in the circus. 

And of course, I don't want to diminish the more blatant crowd pleasers.  The piano duel between Daffy and Donald is magnificent.  Saying to hell with it, we'll guarantee Mickey and Bugs get equal screentime by always having them on screen together makes Bugs' gags work; Mickey setting him up for punchlines is a stroke of brilliance.

One of the features on the bluray is that entire sequence side by side with Bob Hoskins on the blue screen.  I really recommend it, because it drives home how amazing he really was in this.  He has to go through a series of wire falls, tumbles, and all this, have dialogue with four different characters, interact with rooms... 100% of which are animated and only one of which (the flagpoll he grabs) has a prop to work with.  It's him wandering around a mostly empty set and having one sided conversations with voices that were dubbed in later.  It's tremendous.

It feels a little incomplete to cover Roger Rabbit and not talk about Jessica but... I dunno.  The movie's really very upfront with who she is as a character, while being just ambiguous enough that the audience has that hint of doubt.  But I guess owning herself like that is rare enough that it's enough, maybe.

Rating- 9/10.  Maybe a teensy bit high, but yeah, few films nostalgia bomb me quite as hard as this one.

[Grefter]

Teensy bit low more like.

Also good take on Millenium Actress.  For me at the end of the day it wasn't important what was real and what was a movie.  The real story is that even if this is just things in the movies it is still an amazing story of the person that made those movies.  The blurring of the line between amazing unbelievable things from movies and amazing unbelievable things people did from that era of cinema is very much part true to life.  Film making back then was a very adventurous strange beast (in no way impugning modern film either).

[dunie]

How is the viewing experience different between VHS WFRR and Bluray WFRR? I didn't know they re-released it, so after a quick google, apparently the bluray removes some elements that may be nostalgic to the medium: scratches, etc. Since you reviewed this, I nom Howard the Duck for a review sometime this year.