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The new episode of The Amazing Digital Circus is really good.
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May 4, 2024 04:24
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The gummy sharks were extremely cute and that toy is tempting.
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May 4, 2024 04:54
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Also, WOW. Y'all should watch that Foodfight! documentary. Lots of production materials and crew interviews, plus a topless render of Lady X that the director apparently jerked it to. Incredibly horrible stuff!
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May 4, 2024 05:11
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Well I found out there's a CGI Garfield movie from an Olive Garden commercial, and Jon looks incredibly loving weird as he got the full on Sonic eyes.
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May 4, 2024 05:15
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Das Boo posted:Also, WOW. Y'all should watch that Foodfight! documentary. Lots of production materials and crew interviews, plus a topless render of Lady X that the director apparently jerked it to. Link?
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May 4, 2024 08:04
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It was a YouTube link on the last page
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May 4, 2024 13:53
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Das Boo posted:Out of curiosity, did Hercules: The Legendary Journeys get the same vitriol about accuracy? I never saw it, but maybe it was more rapey and murdery than I had assumed. I liked the Hercules TV show as a kid and watched the movies when they were on. The movies were way more rapey and murdery than the TV show. Was massively embarrassing and got in trouble with my parents for asking to watch those.
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May 4, 2024 15:04
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Thanks!
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May 4, 2024 17:46
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Das Boo posted:Also, WOW. Y'all should watch that Foodfight! documentary. Lots of production materials and crew interviews, plus a topless render of Lady X that the director apparently jerked it to. most of the stuff that happened (except perv stuff) reminded me of Titmouse before they unionized. also Kasanoff's refusal to understand how animation works or how the pipeline is structured reminds me of every showrunner who comes from live action ever
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May 4, 2024 17:47
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https://x.com/bfredmuggs/status/1786792363647733946?s=61&t=-vp9P7i8Kl2W3uKiLPEWrA
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May 4, 2024 17:48
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Regalingualius posted:https://x.com/bfredmuggs/status/1786792363647733946?s=61&t=-vp9P7i8Kl2W3uKiLPEWrA the Grevious hunting the Jedi scene in that show is totally bad-rear end, it's one of my favourite bits in all of Star Wars
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May 5, 2024 01:31
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 Just saw this in theater. For me it recaptures the feeling of watching Ghost In The Shell for the first time as a 23 year old A friend said it felt like more like Patlabor, another film by Oshii that is heavy on sci-fi philosophy. I should probably watch that again, I forgot most of it Steve Yun fucked around with this message at 03:31 on May 5, 2024 |
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May 5, 2024 03:16
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Just finished watching that tonight. I thought it was pretty great with a bunch of nods/influences (Ghost in the Shell, Blade Runner, 2001, etc...) but was let down a bit by the ending. I'm not sure the plot came together, but the journey was worthwhile enough.
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May 5, 2024 04:21
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Sleeping Beauty One of the fun things about experiencing a familiar body of work in chronological order for the first time, whether it's a filmography or discography or TV series, is seeing just how all the artistic elements of it that you already know came together. Disney made many great films before Sleeping Beauty, and would make many great ones after. But this feels like the moment that a lot of what I think of as a Disney Movie crystallizes, the start of something that will eventually evolve into the Renaissance and beyond. I called Cinderella the first true princess movie before because of all the elements it introduces that would become essential to the formula, and Sleeping Beauty feels like the other half of that formula. It also kind of feels like a soft remake of Snow White in some ways - a sequence of frolicking animals to show our heroine's purity of heart, an early song based meet-cute with the love interest, an evil sorceress villain with a crow sidekick, a sleep that can only be ended by true love's kiss - but with all the storytelling expertise that Disney had developed in the intervening decades so that we also get a bunch of different side characters with their own side plots, a prince with some personality, a villain who gets a lot more screentime to have fun with, and a story that feels big rather than just padded. Both artistically and chronologically, it sits right at the threshold between the first two decades of films developed under Walt and the Disney yet to come. Okay, but for all that, is it good? Hell yes. A dude fights a dragon! I mean, beyond that, it's also got a good sense of both drama and humor as needed, a fun set of side characters, particularly the fairies (including Verna Felton in one of her last Disney roles), and while its leads are probably the least substantial part, their dynamic is cute. Not a lot of songs, but "Once Upon a Dream" gets the most time and it's a good one. And then there's GODDAMN MALEFICENT. The archetypal Disney villain, all menace and flamboyance and having the time of her life while straight up calling herself evil. Plus she calls upon the powers of hell to turn her into a dragon. Maleficent rules. Every review of Sleeping Beauty is also legally required to mention the animation, but it really is both beautiful and beautifully directed. The scene where Aurora touches the spinning wheel is one of the many highlights there (and for the score). This is one for the top tier. Lord Hydronium fucked around with this message at 06:05 on May 5, 2024 |
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May 5, 2024 05:59
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Sleeping Beauty owns. Hands down the best Disney princess movie with Beauty and the Beast a close but well-deserved second.
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May 5, 2024 06:17
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JazzFlight posted:Just finished watching that tonight. I thought it was pretty great with a bunch of nods/influences (Ghost in the Shell, Blade Runner, 2001, etc...) but was let down a bit by the ending. I saw it last week and posted in the thread about it. I thought it was pretty good, essentially an inverted Ghost In The Shell (or a rip off if you want to look at it that way, but I think that's ungenerous). What didn't you like about the ending? I thought it was fairly tight -- humanity and robots can't coexist as long as robots are seen as products to be disposed of when the next flimflam fad rolls around. So, regardless as to whether they're being forced out or not, it might just be best for robots to choose to leave their broken system and search for something new. Humans can be left behind, left to subordinate themselves to systems that impassively marginalise them e.g. capitalism, or even biological frailty.
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May 5, 2024 08:52
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Lord Hydronium posted:Sleeping Beauty "Once Upon a Dream" is maybe the earliest example I can think of of what would become the archetypical "Disney Musical song", complete with Broadway-tier lyrics and production values. It benefits of course from borrowing existing music from Tchaikovsky but the lyrics are fuckin' great! They're playful and artful. They dance through the otherwise simple structure by playing with the poetic meter and rhyme scheme, using gentle twists on repetition of words to keep things light and moving. "I... know... you" at the beginning being reflected later in the stanza as "But if I know you" with enjambment straddling the musical line's beginning is just a delightful little fillip, like a lift in ballet. And then "You'll love me at once... the way you did once" toying with the varying meanings of that word. It's all surprisingly intricate and delicate and you can sort of see the whole modern Disney musical tradition harking back to it as a guiding light instead of the goofball gimmick songs from stuff like Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland. Also don't overlook just how modern the visual design was in Sleeping Beauty. Coming at the end of the 50s when the minimalist, geometric UPA style was ascendant, it's a film whose visual look was carefully engineered to catch the modern wave and ride it away from what was starting to feel stale and dusty in their older, softer, more lavishly hand-painted looking movies. You get some fascinating stylization in things like the opening credits and in how the horses of the soldiers are rendered. If you look up the developmental art where they were playing around with impossibly tall castles and fairy-tale tree canopies hundreds of feet high, figures looking layered on top of each other like construction paper cutouts, it was maybe the first time Disney was really consciously trying to invent a new and bespoke look for a movie. It was incredibly ambitious and really caught a lot of people off guard at the time, just as much as The Little Mermaid did 30 years later making people go "whoa! Where the hell did THIS come from?"
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May 5, 2024 13:38
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Open Source Idiom posted:I saw it last week and posted in the thread about it. I thought it was pretty good, essentially an inverted Ghost In The Shell (or a rip off if you want to look at it that way, but I think that's ungenerous). I dunno, looking online some other people felt the same way. Basically, I felt it was leading to a bigger conspiracy that just never materialized. Also, I love movies with downer endings, but just killing off your lead with barely any buildup or twist was a bit of a wet fart. What made the movie feel less impactful at the end was that the main characters ultimately had no real role in the story. Sure, Carlos kills his friend/the Royjacker CEO, but other than that, they didn't solve or prevent anything in the plot at all. Everything happened with them or without them. More of a visual/audio feast and less an original story that I'll be thinking about in the future. The basic plot/philosophy stuff was done better in a lot of the media this pulled from. EDIT: I will mention that I've watched quite a bit of sci-fi/cyberpunk media, so the average viewer wouldn't constantly be thinking "oh, I've seen this before." Like, just watching all of Ghost in the Shell: SAC covers a ton of interesting transhumanism topics. JazzFlight fucked around with this message at 15:59 on May 5, 2024 |
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May 5, 2024 15:54
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JazzFlight posted:What made the movie feel less impactful at the end was that the main characters ultimately had no real role in the story. Sure, Carlos kills his friend/the Royjacker CEO, but other than that, they didn't solve or prevent anything in the plot at all. Everything happened with them or without them. FWIW, I think this is the point of the exercise. The leads really only make two or three choices throughout the piece -- she to turn her sobriety sensor off, and he to gaolbreak himself, and then to leave with the other robots. The film's about the way these highly automated systems remove the human element from the equation, making it harder and harder to opt out of even smaller choices. So when the leads capture the CEO at the end of the film it's irrelevant because the systems in place overrule his existence. It's the ultimate extension of Noir's "Forget it Jake. It's Chinatown" ethos. For individuals, people without access to support or solidarity, the only choice is whether to leave or to stay. (Not that this is a particularly socialist film.) I mean, obviously if it didn't work for you it didn't work for you though.
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May 5, 2024 16:15
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JazzFlight posted:More of a visual/audio feast and less an original story that I'll be thinking about in the future. The basic plot/philosophy stuff was done better in a lot of the media this pulled from. I just got back from Mars Express and this is also my initial take but man, what a feast it is The major beat I saw was Neuromancer, with the AI liberating itself and ascending into space but I was okay with it because everything was loving cool If I had to describe it with a gun to my head I'd say it was like Phillip K Dick wrote an episode of Batman Beyond
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May 6, 2024 01:13
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BioEnchanted posted:Something interesting about the Greek myths is that they actually involve a secondary Goddess who doesn't get much discussion, Lyssa, the goddess of insanity. Whenever a God wants a mortal to be driven mad, they defer to HER skill to make it happen, so when the hunt goddess (at least I think it was Artemis, not sure) was spotted naked by the hunter who got ripped apart by his own dogs, it was Lyssa that Artemis asked to drive his dogs mad. What's your source for this? I want to ask the Scion discord server about it, it sounds interesting.
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May 6, 2024 11:51
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There's a few places, as I mentioned I first heard of her because she was a boss in the Legends of Troy game although it gave no context, just Ajax goes crazy and the final boss for the character is labelled as Lyssa, but there are other sources such as Wikipedia, or this other website: https://www.greekmythology.com/Other_Gods/Primordial/Lyssa/lyssa.html
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May 6, 2024 13:19
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Data Graham posted:Lol fantastic. I have been seeing this with a friend of mine who is not artistic at all but has been going nuts with AI art, trying for literally months to refine and perfect this one image he's been iterating on over and over and over and over. It is simply not possible to "refine" AI art, not in the way we would naturally assume. You can't just use AI to get "in the ballpark" and then touch up the fine details. All you can do, if you're an AI prompter, is tweak the prompts and try again, starting again from scratch, and the AI has no idea of context or history or what you're actually trying to accomplish, what you liked of the previous thing and what you want changed, and to what. You're just tossing dice and hoping it just magically turns up the thing the client wants. Like the random number generator at Bender's execution. Oh hey! Perfect! You can actually totally do that with image to image. These people are just dumb and don't know how to use the tool they claim to be an expert in. They just want to use prompts without putting any thought or effort into the art it generates. Any braindead person can write a prompt.
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May 6, 2024 14:10
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Apparently not though because every art website is flooded with "how do you describe this art style/artist" questions that are fishing for prompts.
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May 6, 2024 14:18
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Mars Express was really solid. Not particularly remarkable and yes, derivative of plenty of the stuff we all love, but a really well-done version of what it is and I'm glad I was able to catch it in theaters. The ending touched a little too close on the latter seasons of Westworld for my tastes, but that's probably just recency bias. Plus, you play in such a archetypal cyberpunk arena and there's only so much new ground to cover. Visually, the animation was the first time I've ever seen a large amount of cel-shaded 3D actually successfully directed to vibe with 2D. The execution of the animation was pretty impeccable, especially when it came to the backround parallax and camera movements which is normally where these things bungle it—to the degree that I doubt the average viewer would notice how much 3D is in it at all. I liked the bright clean-ness of the lines and flatness of the style, which occasionally made me think of Scavengers Reign which is high praise. But maybe there was less 3D in there than I'm giving it credit for? I guess the fact that it's hard to tell is to its credit. Crisp stuff. That being said, the art direction was a bit bland. There were definitely designs, settings, backgrounds, and robots that I really liked the look of, but they were going for a groundedness in presentation that I find a bit dull. Not everything has to blow it out like Akira, but I could have used a little more audacity and moodiness and hyperreality. Would adore a lengthy BTS video on the animation. Still, I can only complain about it because the rest of the execution was so good. Reminds me a lot of how I felt about the art direction of Pluto. Anyways, give me a TV series of this world, stat. e: Great news, a lengthy BTS video series! Looks like they haven't uploaded all of it, though, unfortunately. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKu_-VbQOQ0 feedmyleg fucked around with this message at 04:10 on May 7, 2024 |
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May 7, 2024 03:16
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One thing in Mars Express that made me point at the screen like meme Leo DiCaprio was a freaking split diopter shot. In an animated movie!
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May 7, 2024 03:31
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One Hundred and One Dalmatians One Hundred and One Dalmatians is in many ways the polar opposite of Sleeping Beauty. Where Beauty's animation was expensive and laborious, Dalmatians was made with the new process of Xerography that made it cheaper and quicker. Beauty is set in the vaguely medieval past in Fairytaleland, while Dalmatians is set in 1950s London. Beauty has the tone of a grand epic, and Dalmatians is a smaller, cozier, more grounded movie. Beauty's score is inspired by Tchaikovsky, Dalmatian's by jazz. Even the aspect ratio has changed back to the Academy ratio. The one thing that isn't different is quality, because Dalmatians is one of my all time favorite Disney movies. This is such a warm, charming movie in every way. You feel it from the opening credits, which have an upbeat, jazzy energy over sequences of animated dogs and abstract motifs of Dalmatian spots. The characters, both dog and human, are a lot of fun and filled with personality. Pongo's face in particular is incredibly expressive while still remaining fundamentally dog-like, and the movie has a good sense of when to use those more exaggerated or human-like moments without overdoing them. Unlike Lady and the Tramp, we actually get a fair amount of development for the human owners, and there's these wonderful little bits of character animation to make them feel more real, like Anita's sideye when meeting Roger or Roger jamming on his trombone to piss off Cruella. And speaking of the animation, while it was cheaper than Sleeping Beauty, it's not by any means cheap in the bad sense, and I'd say it's actually a real strength, as the lush painted look of Sleeping Beauty, or even the less ornate but still refined look of Lady and the Tramp, would fit with this movie as poorly as the scratchy style would fit with those. The look, which feels like a hand-drawn illustration, just works here, giving everything this grounded, down-to-earth feel that fits well with the rest of the tone. This is Disney's second movie after Dumbo in a contemporary setting (if you don't count the package films), but whereas Dumbo was designed to feel more timeless, Dalmatians is very much rooted in its specific time and place, and that just makes it feel all the more unique among the Disney canon. And we get our second all-time great villain in a row with Cruella, who's just a delight in both her character animation and Betty Lou Gerson's voice acting, commanding every second on screen. Her over-the-top flamboyance is balanced by some villainy that's pretty dastardly by Disney standards, with a lot of explicit talk about killing and skinning puppies. Plus she gets one of the first great villain songs, Roger's diagetic diss track that apparently goes on to become a big hit, which is pretty funny to think of people being really into this song about how much some random rich lady sucks. Horace and Jasper are solid counterparts to her, switching between bumbling henchmen playing comic relief and some genuinely menacing bits when they get into dog-killing mode. The idea of the dog society is also a fun one, right down to old veteran dog colonels with cat sergeants. Yeah, I love this movie. Probably one of my top ten of the Disney canon.
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May 7, 2024 04:23
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I've heard that 101 Dalmatians was one of the things that inspired The Simpsons, specifically the bit where the puppies are crowded in front of the TV; television characters watching television. Heh, and I'm reminded one of the core traits of Lucky in the 90s cartoon spinoff was that he was a TV addict, I suppose it's not unfitting. And I think that might strike to the core of how Disney's forgotten what made their bones; they used to experiment with all kinds of different styles for different things, with movies built around particular tones and aesthetics, both for practical pipeline purposes- if you want to make a cheaper movie, you make a movie that suits a cheaper style- and artistic ones. But nowadays the executive obsessions with brand identity and demographics mean everything gets flattened into house styles and micromanaged into uniform mush unless it happens to fly under the radar of the bloated c-suite enough to have its own identity.
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May 7, 2024 06:50
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101 Dalmatians is also the first place where what we think of as the "Disney look"—particularly for animal characters—came to the forefront. It isn't Milt Kahl's first movie but it's the first one where he really brought to bear his strength with animal face construction, and it completely took over the studio.Data Graham posted:I mean look at this:
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May 7, 2024 13:04
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Jasper and Horace are such archetypical villain mooks. One tall and skinny, one short and chubby; both of them by and large charmingly incompetent. I love them.
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May 7, 2024 13:35
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With Cruella they make a pretty classic comic villain trio. And I think the occasional menace is helped by them being idiot bullies who fawn towards anyone with the slightest amount of power over them, and relish the chance to exercise the slightest power over anything else.
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May 7, 2024 13:39
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Ghost Leviathan posted:[...] idiot bullies who fawn towards anyone with the slightest amount of power over them, and relish the chance to exercise the slightest power over anything else. Good thing there aren't people like that out there in real life! I mean, can you imagine? 
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May 7, 2024 13:42
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I’ve always loved the little segment showing the “What’s My Crime” tv show. It just feels like a funny little snip of satire. 
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May 7, 2024 13:49
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paradoxGentleman posted:Jasper and Horace are such archetypical villain mooks. One tall and skinny, one short and chubby; both of them by and large charmingly incompetent. Ghost Leviathan posted:With Cruella they make a pretty classic comic villain trio. And I think the occasional menace is helped by them being idiot bullies who fawn towards anyone with the slightest amount of power over them, and relish the chance to exercise the slightest power over anything else. They became pretty influential in anime, in a similar way that Dick Dastardly was. You can draw a pretty clearly line from Cruella, Jasper and Horace to Yatterman's Doronjo and co. and then on to Pokemon's Team Rocket.
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May 7, 2024 15:20
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People tend to think Disney's influence on anime starts and ends with Osamu Tezuka's style, but it's definitely more than that. Also What's My Crime is just a nice little bit of satire of the kind of banal panel/quiz shows that populated TV in that time.
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May 7, 2024 17:04
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Schwarzwald posted:They became pretty influential in anime, in a similar way that Dick Dastardly was. You can draw a pretty clearly line from Cruella, Jasper and Horace to Yatterman's Doronjo and co. and then on to Pokemon's Team Rocket. Was thinking exactly that. On that note, Gerry Anderson is pretty much the other half.
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May 8, 2024 16:29
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Jack Bandit posted:I’ve always loved the little segment showing the “What’s My Crime” tv show. Unfortunately little of that charm made it into the next movie. The Sword in the Stone I wish this was a better movie. Hell, I remembered it being a better movie through the haze of nostalgia and was notably disappointed when I first rewatched it a couple years ago. It's not terrible exactly and there's some bits that do work, but on the whole it's just uninspired. The movie doesn't start off on a bad foot necessarily. Yeah, the opening credits are much less fun than those of Dalmatians, but after that we're back to the traditional storybook opening and get some sung narration about swords and stones and kings and destinies. That sounds like a fun movie! It's not the one we'll be getting, though. The problems start with the animation. Like I said, I really liked the style of Dalmatians, because it meshed perfectly with the tone and setting of that movie. With this type of fantasy, though, the scratchy look just feels out of place. And it doesn't help that it feels cheaper overall than your usual Disney fare, with a constant flatness to the image and some really blatant animation reuse. There are a few moments that do stand out positively, including a nice shot of water reflections in one scene. The best aspect is the character design; there's lots of scenes where characters turn into various animals, and the animators do a nice job of translating their basic designs into a variety of shapes while keeping them recognizable through facial features and color. But the biggest problem is Wart/Arthur. He's just not interesting, and when the movie is ostensibly about him learning the lessons needed to be king, that's a problem. At the end I have no idea why he should be king beyond pulling the sword - even he doesn't want it! - and that makes his journey there not particularly compelling. Which is doubly a problem because his lessons take like two thirds of the movie. Merlin is a pretty fun character and keeps things lively enough on his end, but a lot of the middle just drags. For the first segment I like the designs of the characters as fish and there's a decent little ditty, but the squirrel scene is just long and not particularly funny. And then Madam Mim is fun and livens things up in the final segment, but it's kind of too late by that point; I think the story would really benefit if she was in the rest as well as a recurring antagonist. All of this is supposedly about teaching Arthur, but he doesn't develop at all or even have any agency and it's not clear what Merlin is even trying to teach him, so it just kind of wastes time. In the last ten minutes we get back to the titular sword, but again, everything here seems to happen by accident, and we have to trust Merlin when he says that Arthur is going to be a good king, because it sure isn't because of anything we've seen. I've spent way too long talking about a movie I don't like that much, but this just feels like wasted potential. Disney and King Arthur should be a great combination, and there's bits that feel like this movie could be better. Merlin's probably the highlight here. The rest...eh, above the package films but not much else. Lord Hydronium fucked around with this message at 05:19 on May 9, 2024 |
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May 9, 2024 05:16
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The movie also ends before it can get interesting plot-wise. This kid spent the whole movie turning into animals and now he's the king. They could have done something where none of Merlin's lessons taught him how to lead a state and he has to go it alone while Merlin hangs out in present day (60's) Bermuda.
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May 9, 2024 05:27
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Creepy-rear end squirrel plot.
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May 9, 2024 05:43
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Something I do like about Sword in the Stone (and this extends to Bedknobs and Broomsticks with Substitutiary Locomotion) is that it makes Merlin's magic seem powerful because of how difficult it is to control. While Bibidi Bobidi Boo is a more well known and liked song, the Fairy Godmother's magic feels really easy and very basic which is fine but narratively uninteresting (because it's not about her and so it's allowed to be it's literal wish fulfillment) but Higgitus Figgitus and Substitutiary Locmotion are a chaotic mess that makes it really feel like a human is trying to force the universe to break a few of it's rules - you have to make the universe listen because it doesn't care about your priorities (the witch in Bedknobs has to learn to add enough of a flair to her recitation to make it impressive), if you lose control for even a minute things get disastrous (around the middle of both songs the characters lose control of the spells because they lose concentration, resulting in the magic leaking out of the house in Bedknobs and Merlin being pulled off his feet in Sword, and in Sword Merlin lays down the law right at the start with "No no no, Books are always first, you know that!" and by the end Merlin's voice is becoming panicked as he tries to keep control). I always find that really charming and fun as it makes magic feel like a FORCE rather than a tool. Higitus Figitus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tb75RjpvBIk Substitutiary Locomotion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpmshIjeSv8
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May 9, 2024 05:47
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