#it has some of the best presentation and storytelling in any anime I’ve seen | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

writteninlunarlight-years · 6 hours

Note

Hullo! Been stalking your blog for a day or so- really enjoy everything I’ve seen :3

Might I request a matchup for BG3 and Harry Potter?

Gender: Genderfluid

Pronouns: anything goes!

Sexuality: Pansexual

Appearance: 5’10” with a chubby/curvy figure. Short, wavy black hair, hazel eyes, pale skin w/ freckles everywhere. Got some scars on my arms, hands and legs + stretch marks.

Personality: I am a system, hence my username. Most of the time I am a sarcastic person, with a chill demeanor. I do care very deeply, about people, animals, nature, etc. I do my best to be kind, loving and such. I figure I’m rather intelligent. Absolutely would pick a fight for my friends, and I know how to throw a proper punch. Kind of a weirdo on the outside and a softie on the inside.

Likes:

Good stories. Seriously any good storytelling has me in a chokehold.

Baking/cooking

Artistic outlets (painting, drawing, Minecraft, writing)

I have a certain fascination with knives :)

A good cup of tea

Dislikes:

Unmerited violence. Dont hurt folks unless they deserve it.

Government

Most of my family (they’re crazy)

Sitcoms

Lies

Fun fact: I know how to do DIY medical procedures

Any character goes!

(BG3 extras)

Race: Half elf, Drow

Class: Paladin (Oathbreaker)

Alignment: Chaotic Good

(Hogwarts extras)

House: Slytherin

Year: 7th

Wizard job: Whatever the hell Newt Scamander does (genuinely I love all his beasties)

Love your blog! Keep up the good work, you’ve got great skill.

~~~~~ MATCHUPS ~~~~~

BG3

Karlach

~~~~~ HEADCANONS ~~~~~

Karlach lives for the chaos of who is gonna come out today. She will be the first to ask you daily who is presenting and what pronouns need to be used. She admits that everyone respects this; if they don't, she will either let you handle it or bite whoever messed up.

She thinks you are a fantastic leader and enjoys your ideas for the band of misfits.

She is a bit overwhelmed at first when she notices her feelings for you, especially since she knows she will not be able to touch you.

She tries really hard not to overwhelm you, but one day, she overwhelms herself and confesses.

As soon as she can touch people, you are her first hug.

She works hard to follow Damien's instructions to stay by your side.

She tells you of her travels and life before and even during Avernus

She also likes to participate in baking with you (even if her treats end up a little extra burnt)

When she was informed the only way to fix her engine was to go back to Avernus, she begged for you to stay on the sword coast cause she didn't want you hurt

When you chose her through and through, though, she was emotional and loved you even more.

~~~~~ BLURB ~~~~~

Traveling through Avernus was challenging, to say the least. However, nothing would surpass beating an elder brain and a group of raging illithids. The trip to Karlachs old engine master was difficult, and it was twice as tricky paying him off to fix her infernal heart without anyone knowing of your presence. However, all was well again once she was free of the infernal chains.

You guys have made your way back to the Sword Coast, eager to share the news of her being able to be one with society again and not working for Zariel. As you met at the arranged meeting place for all your old friends, you gave her a reassuring hand squeeze. She smiled at you and entered the tavern that was once home while you guys planned out how to end the elder brain.

Seeing all your old friends again brought back so many memories, from Astarion using the wrong name to Laz'el horribly pronouncing words you tried to teach her. It was a pleasant feeling. Overall, you felt happiness seeing everyone back together and patting Karlach on the back, not being afraid she would combust. The one you love more than anything was now safe and 100% yours.

Harry Potter (Golden Era)

Luna Lovegood

~~~~~ HEADCANONS ~~~~~

She understands people looking at you like you are crazy; she, however, looks at you like you hung the moon and stars.

She likes to tell you stories about her mystical creatures and gives you unique trinkets and artifacts to combat them.

She loves watching you draw or paint; she thinks it is fascinating.

Extra points if you paint or draw the things she can see that no one else does.

She helps you with people being haters. Luna is the ultimate girl of all haters are actually just fans.

She likes to sneak into the kitchen with you and bake goods for the wildlife or yourselves

When the war starts, she is apprehensive about you being close to the golden or silver trio. She doesn't want to see you get hurt

when she is kidnapped, and you pointed out the irony of her comments. She just gave you one of her signature side eyes.

She loves to make you smile and laugh; it is music to her ears.

When school finally lets out, she turns to creative writing, becoming a well-known writer. She fully supports you with your journey of cataloging mystical creatures.

~~~~~ BLURB ~~~~~

Luna and you had snuck into the kitchens for the fourth time this semester. You knew the kindness of the house elves was wearing thin just because lying to Filch was getting harder and harder. As you two took station in the kitchen, ready to make a sweet treat for one of your shared friends' coming birthdays, you noticed Luna missing a shoe. You had heard Malfoy earlier that day laughing about stealing her sneakers. However, you thought once you and her came out about your relationship, he would knock it off. Sighing, you took your shoes off as well and went back to work. She looked at your shoes and smiled as well, standing next to you.

As you two finished baking in the kitchen, you looked at Luna again, except this time, she seemed taller. She had never looked over you before. Looking down, she had adorned your shoes and attempted to look down on you. Rolling your eyes, you kiss her cheek, and she promptly backs down to being close to the same height as you as she smiles brightly.

0 notes

i-draws-dinosaurs · 3 years

Text

David Armsby’s ‘Old Buck’: A Review

youtube

So by now most of you are probably aware of the short film Old Buck by David Armsby (AKA Dead Sound) that came out today and has singlehanded become one of the best pieces of dinosaur media I have ever seen in my life. I haven’t really done a review-format-type-thing before but this really make me want to give it a shot. So, in advance, my short review is that this film is absolutely incredible, and you should all go and watch it a million times over like I have. Now, to say that in a much more long-winded way!

I’ve been a fan of Dead Sound for years, ever since I was introduced to his first dinosaur short Sharp Teeth, which is the precursor to this series in a lot of ways. I’m also a huge fan of his Autodale series, set in a dark retrofuturistic dystopian world, that slowly uncovers the mechanisms behind why the world is the way it is and who is secretly pulling the strings.

Old Buck tonally and visually feels like a direct successor to Sharp Teeth, exploring similar themes and being presented in a similar way, but as great as Sharp Teeth is I feel like Old Buck is in every way more mature and superior to its predecessor.

Visually the film is absolutely spectacular. I’m always a complete sucker for a limited colour palette and the blues and greys and pinks that Armsby has chosen are stunning. Trans Rights Styracosaurus is beautiful and I love it. His modelling and texturing of the animals has gotten more and more detailed over the years he’s been making films, but they still retain a lovely simplicity and stylisation that works fantastically with the unshaded flat coloured style.

The dinosaurs are, simply put, absolutely top notch. These are unreservedly the best dinosaurs I have ever seen on film. The protagonist Old Buck is absolutely overflowing with character without ever being overly anthropomorphised, with the broken horn, plant-matted horns and scars making him feel old and weathered and worn but still full of strength and steel.

I genuinely tried to come up with enough nitpicks to fill a paragraph in this review and I do not have enough! That is just how well Armsby has done his research, and while there’s a couple things I personally might have done differently that is 100% an art style thing, and has nothing to do with accuracy or scientific validity. Just,,, wow these dinosaurs are so good.

There’s also some wonderful variation between members of the same species in the Styracosaurus, with different arrangements and forms of horn and different colour patterns, which must have been so much extra work to put in but it’s so worth it. It makes them feel like a group of individual and varied animals.

The way that the dinosaurs are treated within the frame of the story is fantastic too, and it’s one of my favourite things about Armsby’s work in general. He often includes running themes of nature being neither benevolent nor malevolent, that there are no heroes or villains in nature, simply animals trying to survive. The Old Buck is our protagonist, but he is not the Hero. The rival male is the antagonist who opposes the Old Buck, but he is not the Villain, nor are the Daspletosaurus that watch from the sidelines.

Another thing I absolutely love is the decision to not have any narration. Sharp Teeth had a poem as narration, and while that poem is great I think removing any narration for Old Buck was absolutely the right choice to make. It lets the visual storytelling stand on its own, and that visual storytelling is lovely. I particularly like the part where the rival male uses the same move on his first opponent and on the Old Buck, but when he attempts to use it a third time Old Buck has learned from it and changes his strategy, turning the tide of the fight. That’s the kind of thing that could have been made blatantly obvious with narration, but the visuals are strong enough that they do not need it and the film is absolutely better for that!

Speaking of visuals, I’m just gonna end this review off with some of the absolutely stunning cinematography and composition in this short because if me gushing about it for 700 words hasn’t convinced you to watch it then you should at least see how insanely pretty this film is. This was all made by one person by the way.

So yeah, this is an absolutely stunning and beautiful outing for David Armsby’s Dinosauria series. Everything about it is such a breath of fresh air that dinosaur media desperately needs, and I am beyond hyped for the next instalment!

#old buck #old buck film #dinosaurs #dinosauria #dead sound #david armsby #paleoart #palaeoart #palaeontology #paleontology #review #styracosaurus #prehistoric #palaeoblr

3K notes · View notes

canmom · 2 years

Text

flashbacks

Thinking about the character establishing flashback since i have been noticing a lot in, well, mostly a certain subset of Japanese media but that might just be sampling bias.

Still, the more I encounter the more it seems that a lot of manga-adjacent storytelling has this curiously earnest, direct, perhaps you might say theatrical quality. Like, it doesn’t seem to hide its artifice, how the pieces are arranged to set up an emotional payload.

I think it’s most apparent in earlier works like Ashita no Joe. In the first episode of Dezaki’s anime adaptation (I haven’t read the manga), we are introduced to Joe, a drifter who’s good at punching, and Danpei, a former boxer and boxing trainer who has met with little success but fixates on Joe as a chance to live vicariously through success at sports..

Soon after establishing our characters and premise, Danpei intervenes to protect Joe from the yakuza, getting severely beaten up in the process. In Osamu Dezaki’s anime, the interactions in this scene are not at all interested in being naturalistic: everyone’s loudly declaiming their intent (“You’re my tomorrow! Tomorrow’s Joe!”), and cuts are generally short and very direct.

The next episode, as Danpei recovers in the hospital, we get an extended flashback in which we see the backstory that led him to this point, explaining his motivation with Joe. In a work like this, lines will be repeated such that they become a kind of recurring motif or catchphrase, and the whole cadence of dialogue has a kind of very deliberate ‘beat, answering beat’ feeling.

Nobody would talk like this, of course, but that isn’t a failing, any more than the fact that people don’t break out into song like they do in musicals.

I’ve seen similar devices deployed in a lot of other settings. and I guess my curiosity is in how best to deploy it. Especially since it seems to cut against the general sentiment I’ve received that artful writing should be indirect, heavily use elision and implication, write dialogue naturalistically, and avoid contrivance.

Kunihiko Ikuhara and his protégé Tomohiro Furukawa certainly seem fond of such flashbacks - and it’s worth noting both are highly influenced by Dezaki. we might note a couple of accompanying devices here. one major one is an object associated with a key character establishing moment which becomes symbolic of the relationship. take for example Karen and Hikari’s two hair pins in Revue Starlight:

Likewise, episode 7 is - in classic kishōtenketsu mode! - a full backstory episode changing our perception of Nana. (More on kishōtenketsu shortly since it’s a key piece of the puzzle.) Revue Starlight also showcases another very common element of this structure: a promise made years ago, often a minor thing but imbued with great significance since it becomes, once again, symbolic of those characters and their devotion.

Its predecessor Utena is built heavily around such flashbacks, at least in its first half. each duellist confronted by Utena will be introduced with an episode setting up their particular conflict before returning to the present where they fail to defeat Utena and the matter is resolved. Utena meanwhile is gradually given various flashbacks of her childhood where she fixated on the whole ‘prince’ ideal.

I recently started rewatching Attack on Titan after Thursday’s Animation Night, and the impetus of this post is seeing this device crop up there also. In episode 6 of Tetsurō Araki’s anime, we get a flashback to Mikasa’s childhood. Her parents are murdered, and she is kidnapped with the intent to sell her into sex slavery - those handy anime rapists who show up whenever someone needs some justified violence done to them I guess. A young Eren tracks down the kidnappers and stabs two of them, but a third one grabs him. Mikasa comes to a realisation, accompanied by a flashback within a flashback: essentially that the world is cruel and the strong will always prey on the weak unless stopped by force, accompanied by a montage of bugs eating other bugs. She stops crying and stabs the guy holding Eren.

Afterwards, Eren and his father offer to take her in, and Eren presents her with a scarf, which she wears ever since, a symbol of her devotion to him. We return to the present where Mikasa is a cold force of violence, reminiscing on these events.

This flashback serves several functions. It’s a direct statement of the themes of the work: a rather familiar meditation on power and ‘necessary’ violence, although more commonly found in the mouth of a villain (c.f. dracula) - honestly I have no idea why anybody was surprised to find out the author had nationalist politics lol. And in more immediate terms, it answers the crucial ‘why’ question - coming after Mikasa confronts a merchant endangering a group of civilians, it answers the question of why is Mikasa like this? - and sets up some dramatic irony: at this point it seems Eren is dead, but Mikasa is saying she can do anything as long as he’s at her side. Soon she’ll find out and we’ll see the fireworks.

So what exactly makes up a character? We may write down a great deal of stuff about visual design, habits and personality traits, but the crucial element as far as having a story is concerned is a desire or intention - the thing that pushes them to act. And, to me, a great mystery of life is where these motive forces come from. The character-establishing flashback serves as an illustrative case: a precise encapsulation of where a guiding principle forms.

Final Fantasy XIV actually makes this kind of flashback an explicit event in narrative. The main character has a power called the Echo, which causes them to receive sudden visions of the memories of people nearby, always at dramatically appropriate times. This is associated with certain visual and audio cues, and it allows the player character to relate information received in such flashbacks to the others. As such, FFXIV uses this storytelling device in just about every storlyine. (It doesn’t even always use the Echo; sometimes it just runs a flashback cutscene as is.)

The recent Shadowbringers and Endwalker expansions found some clever ways to make these kinds of flashbacks playable, without breaking from a linear story. In Shadowbringers, you visit an elaborate simulacrum of a past society created by the expansion’s villain, which serves to considerably flesh him out. In Endwalker, you actually time travel into the past and interact with the same characters (with a convenient memory wipe at the end!), and later, the arch-villain of the series has you fight through another constructed tour of her motivating experiences.

Another series heavily constructed around such flashbacks is Ranking of Kings. This series drops a tragic character backstory almost every episode, starting with the characters immediately around Bojji such as Kage, whose backstory is delivered as early as the second episode. (In fact, this flashback is moved forward in the anime compared to the manga!) These flashbacks are typically surprisingly dark for such a cute show: Kage’s flashback sees him survive a genocide followed by poverty and mistreatment, establishing his cynical attitude when he meets Bojji; his subsequent arc sees him become fiercely devoted to the kind prince who he initially sees as a total rube.

What’s fascinating about Ranking of Kings to me is that it goes out of its way to give basically all of its characters relatively sympathetic motivations: gradually we get to see the contours of a complex web of loyalties and obligations. Characters who at first seem simply cruel may turn out to be acting out of a warped kindness, characters who seem kind may be traitors, and a lot of the time a recontextualising reveal is followed by an extended flashback.

Another example is of course NieR Replicant/Gestalt. From playthrough B onwards, you are introduced to flashbacks concerning nearly every enemy explaining how they came to oppose you, and also for your own companions. This begins, naturally, with one of my favourite points in the game, Kainé’s prose section where we see her childhood with her grandmother. The remake adds a similar scene for Emil right after he blows up the Aerie, and the short stories in Grimoire NieR arguably add even more, each one seemingly designed to add more pathos to scenes in the game. Automata uses this device in a similar way, filling in the stories of characters like Simone and the King of the Forest.

(Both games also feature a significant flash forwards. This happens relatively early in Replicant (the first half with the younger Nier is never revisited) and quite late in Automata, but in both cases, the conflicts and relationships set up in the first half pay off in the second.)

All of these flashbacks serve as a new element which recontextualises what came before, which brings us to...

Kishōtenketsu

OK, so I said I’d go into the subject of kishōtenketsu, which is said by some commentators to be the underlying structure of the vast majority of Japanese storytelling. This divides a story into four beats: an introduction (起 ki), whose consequences are developed (承 shō), then a twist (転 ten) is introduced, and finally it is brought together by a conclusion (結 ketsu). This might be applied to fiction, but also to arguments in a debate or indeed jokes.

The universal applicability of anything is always questionable, and in Japan kishōtenketsu is applied sometimes to Western fairytales as well rather than being seen as some kind of unique national character: we might want to ask how far you’d have to push a story for it to be possible to not fit its elements into this rubric with a little effort. Still, it definitely seems to very naturally apply to examples like yonkoma manga, with the four panels typically mapping to the four stages.

The most distinctive step for me though is the ‘twist’, ten. In Western storytelling a ‘twist’ is usually applied to an ending: a new piece of information which causes us to reevaluate what we saw in the story so far, commonly used in horror (surprise: this character was really a ghost). This can sometimes be very effective, but I think its popularity waxes and wanes; a propensity for twist endings can become a joke as in the case of M Night Shyamalan. In these cases the ‘twist’ doesn’t really require explanation or further resolution: it’s obvious as soon as we see it what it means for the rest of the story and that’s usually where it leaves off.

In Wikipedia’s examples of kishōtenketsu, the ten generally serves as introducing a third, seemingly unrelated element which the conclusion then links to what came before. Here’s an example attributed to Confucian philosopher Sanyō Rai:

Ki Daughters of Itoya, in the Honmachi of Osaka.

Shō The elder daughter is sixteen and the younger one is fourteen.

Ten Throughout history, daimyōs killed the enemy with bows and arrows.

Ketsu The daughters of Itoya kill with their eyes.

The ten step at first seems like a non-sequitur, but then it’s brought back into relation with the other elements. by the conclusion.

Within fiction, we can see that this backstory flashback is arguably a fairly natural way to set up the ten step in an arc, and naturally often seems to come fairly late in the story: we take a brief break from the main flow of events in order to introduce a new element, and then when we return to the ‘present’ we’ll see how these past events are finally resolved.

The ‘twist’ isn’t necessarily going to be a non-sequitur here, but it may recontextualise what happened before and change our expectations for resolution. Let’s take Puella Magi Madoka Magica which follows a very clear kishōtenketsu structure: Homura enters the series as someone aloof and mysterious, acting with violence against Kyubey; the characters get gradually drawn into magical girl battles and realise that they’re getting exploited by Kyubey, and a large threat draws near; these might be assigned the ki and shō steps although they have their own smaller kishōtenketsu arcs within them.

Then, we get a whole episode flashback where we learn that Homura is a time traveller who keeps resetting the timeline in order to save Madoka, which completely changes our view of the story so far; this could be attributed the ten step. Finally we return to the present and find a resolution to the timeline in which Madoka uses the built up karma to change the rules of the universe, but abandons Homura in the process, the ketsu.

Kishōtenketsu is often called storytelling ‘without conflict’ or at least deemphasising conflict, but instead based on causality. For example, on tofugu Rudy Barrett writes this about kishōtenketsu:

Instead of having goals and subgoals that carry the plot from beginning to end, the classical Japanese story grammar is guided by a series of actions and reactions that lead a character to a thematically significant resolution. Causality, rather than conflict, is the vehicle in this type of storytelling. These stories move based on character actions (or often actions outside of the control of the characters) and the motivations are often irrelevant or not elaborated upon. Matsuyama posits that the lack of a goal structure is due to the traditional Buddhist value of eliminating worldly desires, which is in direct contrast with the very goal-oriented ideas of the West. Japanese protagonists tend to be unmotivated by an initial goal in the interest of making them more classically “good” in a Buddhist sense.

This seems... honestly seriously overstating the case to me; rather both seem to be more like interpretative frames than different types of story. Causality and conflict are both the basic ingredients of a story; it is possible to dispense with one or other of them but it’s a major restriction. And to say Japanese characters are usually unmotivated just doesn’t accord with much fiction I can think of, nor is it uniquely Japanese - c.f. the endless discussion of a passive hero awakened to adventure by an inciting incident caused by the villain.

So by the same token I disagree with this video, in which a youtube anime critic attempts to describe how Your Name (Animation Night 44) is a kishōtenketsu story based on causality rather than conflict, noting primarily that the major event - the meteor strike and the link across fate - is 'well outside’ the main characters’ control and can’t be prevented. It seems like a huge stretch though to suggest that there is no conflict as a result, and a misunderstanding of the nature of dramatic conflict. The film is full of conflict (which we could mostly put in the ‘person against nature’ and ‘person against society’ bins if we wanted): conflicts manifest whenever characters want things which are not easy to achieve, or characters have conflicting desires.

The characters wish first of all to figure out whose body they are swapping with, and then when the mystery reveals that they are actually linked across time (Taki lives several years after Mitsuha’s death) and there is to be a meteor strike that wipes out Mitsuha’s town, the second half of the film is concerned with their efforts to evacuate the town and rewrite the timeline against obstacles like Mitsuha’s overbearing dad.

To return to Madoka, there is a clear conflict between Madoka and Homura’s desires, with both wishing to sacrifice themselves to protect the other (and in Madoka’s case, magical girls at large). There is also the conflict of the magical girls vs. Kyubey, and the broader hostile world they find themselves in. And every character has their own driving conflict in their particular arc, all full of thwarted or misguided desires. It’s brimming with all the ‘classic’ conflicts: magical girl vs society, magical girl vs self, magical girl vs magical girl, and these conflicts are how the plot unfolds within the ‘causality’ of kishōtenketsu.

Nevertheless, the kishōtenketsu concept is hardly irrelevant: in its most basic form it reveals a pattern we can deploy to create a satisfying story. We introduce one thing, develop it a bit to get people invested, introduce a second thing, and then tie them together in a conclusion.

Back to flashbacks

Plenty of Japanese examples; what of the West? My lens will mostly be limited to animation,

A couple of examples of a similar mode of character-establishing flashback appear in Avatar: The Last Airbender. A key one, delivered in the second season, concerns Prince Zuko and Princess Azula: we see how their treatment as children set up their conflicts in the present. This helps change our view of Zuko from ‘antagonist’ to ‘deuteragonist’, and renders tragic his obsessive pursuit of Aang from the first season; not surprisingly, the concluding arc of the second season which pays off several of these flashback setups is considered one of the high points of the series.

The third season offers one of Katara’s childhood, and the death of her mother, leading to a question of whether she’d take revenge in the present, but this strand is fairly quickly dropped. (We might also see this season as a kind of failed implementation of kishōtenketsu: the Lion Turtle represents an unexpected new element, but rather than recontextualise what we’ve seen so far in a new light, it offers merely a convenient ‘out’ to the moral dilemma the show set up.)

A couple of more or less recent science fiction books, such as Ancillary Justice (Ann Leckie) and The Fifth Season (NK Jemisin, who I have beef with after the Helicopter Story incident, but her book does serve as a good example lol) have taken on a kind of two- or three-stranded structure. We’re introduced to a character in one period, and then a parallel story about the same character in a second period.

It may not immediately reveal that these are the same character (Jemisin’s book waits til the very end of the book to tie her three strands), but ultimately this structure serves a similar purpose: we see events play out and the motivation driving them side by side. By spreading out the motivating flashback across a whole book, it has a lot more space to breathe, and we also get the payoff of the final inciting incident (e.g. the death of Lieutenant Awn) and its consequence (Breq attempts to assassinate Anaander Mianaai). For both books, their sequels took on a much more straightforward linear structure, and I would say this might be part of the reason they were so much weaker.

So, suppose I want to deploy a character-establishing flashback... actually, looking at the stories I’ve written, it seems I’ve ended up doing this without really conceiving this as a definite technique. In chapter 3 of VECTOR, I establish CORAL’s motivation in this way; in Pocket Healer (soon to be finished?) I seem to have landed on the same two strand structure.

Actually I think a large proportion of my stories have that ‘introduce a premise, flashback, resolve’ approach at least somewhere in them? Funny to realise! I tend to write my stories a lot like film anyway, with frequent POV changes serving a similar role to a scene cut, and a wish to describe strongly impactful images for each ‘shot’. So perhaps the character-establishing flashback emerges as a kind of natural consequence of writing for a visual medium, or perhaps it’s just a certain familiarity with this device making it come naturally to me.

Still, what if I want to make it stronger? The key element is of course how strongly the flashback relates to the present events. We should leave the flashback with a new understanding and sense of impending tension to be resolved, and the information received in the flashback should continue to shape everything else we witness.

I could also probably stand to take advantage of the element of indirection. A promise or an exchange of a gift acts as an indirect (and visual!) way to talk about the relationships between two characters. There’s nothing wrong with keeping it simple - in fact, making it a simple gesture imbued with great meaning by context can do a great deal. We recently watched a backstory arc from The Ancient Magus’s Bride in which we met a wizard who had promised to return a book to a former crush; when he dies, he asks the protagonist to carry it through in his stead. The simple act of returning a book allows the recipient, now an old woman who’s clearly on her deathbed, to reflect on the whole relationship. Call it sentimental perhaps, but done well, this kind of device is undeniably effective (for many readers at least!).

I rarely give my stories much planning (mostly writing by intuition; for better or worse, this seems to best suit my adhd), but I think recognising such a device is perhaps valuable because I’ll know it’s in the mental ‘toolbox’ and I can deploy it consciously. And, I don’t know, it’s always interesting to see how storytelling devices evolve and cross-pollinate.

#fiction #anime #manga #writing #kishotenketsu #plot structure #ousama ranking #revue starlight #ashita no joe #ffxiv #kishōtenketsu

33 notes · View notes

animebw · 2 years

Text

Short Reflection: The Heike Story

It’s possible that Naoko Yamada is the greatest anime director of all time.

To some, that statement might seem like blasphemy. What about Miyazaki, and Hosoda, and Kon, and all those other acclaimed directors with long and storied careers? Yet the more I think about it, the more I realize just how singularly untouchable Yamada’s career has been. Her first role as director was with K-On, a show that single-handedly revolutionized the slice-of-life genre and still remains its best entry to this day. Then, with the first season of Hibike Euphonium, she helped spearhead Kyoto Animation’s greatest work of art ever. A Silent Voice broke down international barriers and achieved mainstream Western acclaim in a way only Ghibli films used to be able to do. Liz and the Blue Bird is the single most beautiful expression of intimacy ever put to film. And while I haven’t yet seen Tamako Market or Tamako Love Story, most of their fans seem to hold them in equally high regard as any of those shows and movies I just talked about. Yamada hasn’t just been cranking out masterpieces since before she was thirty; every single project she’s directed has been a masterpiece. Her track record is unimpeachable on a level that no other anime director can really match. Not even Miyazaki hits it out of the park every single time, but Yamada makes it look easy.

In that sense, it’s no surprise that The Heike Story is as good as it is. Why wouldn’t it be, coming from a director who’s never once fallen short of mastery? Not to mention this is yet another Yamada collaboration with Reiko Yoshida and Kensuke Ushio, the writer and composer who helped bring Silent Voice and Liz to life. You’d have to be crazy to fail with a team that talented. And yet, even by Yamada’s standards, The Heike Story is a mind-boggling feat. It’s an adaptation of a work of classic Japanese literature on par with the Iliad and Odyssey, a tale of the Heike clan’s rise to power and fall from grace. The original story is a sprawling epic full of massive battles and complex political machinations, with countless characters and moving parts to keep track of. At least that’s what I’ve heard; I haven’t read the original story myself, so I have no immediate context for what was changed, added or removed. All I can do is listen to people who have read it and trust their word on the subject. But what I can tell you for sure is this:

This adaptation seeks to tell that story in eleven episodes.

No, you didn’t misread that. The Heike Story condenses the entirety of its source material into a scant eleven episodes. It flows through huge stretches of time with the transience of a leaf on the wind, foregoing the original tale’s epic scope in favor of intimate character drama, rich thematic imagery, and searing portraits of the humanity behind the larger-than-life characters. It focuses not on the sprawling battles and the political scheming (though both are present here, just in smaller doses than you’d expect), but on the turmoil and tragedy of those caught up in the sweep of history, borne inexorably toward their fates. The Heike’s leaders and the ambition that leads them to folly. The Heike’s sons who inherit their fathers’ messes, alternately repeating their mistakes or desperately struggling to escape them. The Heike’s daughters who suffer at home under their society’s sexist expectations while the “great men” who set those expectations lead themselves to ruin. And at the center of it all is a new character written for this adaptation: Biwa, a girl with a cursed eye that can see everyone’s tragic futures bearing down on them, unable to do anything but bear witness as they march ever closer to their inescapable doom.

It’s a work of such staggering ambition that you can’t help but wonder if it’s even possible. Such a titanic story, such a lofty pedigree, trimmed down to just about five hours of atmospheric, deliberate storytelling? Surely not even the greatest artistic minds alive today would be able to pull that off. And to be fair, you can feel the show’s midsection bulging from the stress of everything it has to fit in. There are so many characters, so many locations, so many moving pieces to keep track of, and it can be very easy to lose sight of who’s doing what and why they’re doing it if you’re not playing close attention. Even now that I’ve finished it, I’m nowhere close to remembering every character’s name and place in the narrative. It reminds me a lot of A Silent Voice, which similarly truncated its source material by stuffing 64 manga chapters into just two hours of film. That movie, too, had a bloated midsection as a result of needing to fit so much content into a much smaller package. Perhaps this particular team of creators just likes trying to retell long stories in shorter forms than they’re really designed for. What can I say, every artist has their quirks.

But that’s the thing, folks: this isn’t just any old director we’re talking about here. This is Naoko Fucking Yamada. This is the woman who turned a mediocre 4-koma gag manga about four girls sitting around and sipping tea into a soaring treatise on the magic of friendships forged in youth. This is the woman who took a minor subplot out of its original context and turned into a stand-alone movie that’s one of the best parts of its franchise. Yamada has built her career on spinning gold out of seemingly impossible circumstances. And make no mistake: this anime is as unmistakably a Naoko Yamada anime as Devilman Crybaby was a Masaaki Yuasa anime. It’s so thoroughly filtered through its creator’s sensibilities, fascinations, and perspective that it might as well be a completely original story, an old tale made new by a fresh pair of eyes. It takes a literary work as archetypical as Homer and distills it into something far too specific, far too personal, and far too emotional to get hung up on the occasional awkward spots. A more straightforward, more complete adaptation might have been interesting in its own right, but something tells me it wouldn’t feel nearly as special.

Because just as Yamada and her team accomplished with A Silent Voice, The Heike Story’s truncated narrative is only a minor distraction from an otherwise jaw-dropping triumph. What it lacks in the original’s epic scope, it more than makes up for with the breathtaking intimacy of its animation and direction. Where it stumbles in the finer details of its plot, it covers for with the aching humanity of all its characters and the complex, broken paths they walk. It’s a searing portrait of human weakness and vulnerability, a haunting exploration of the transience of life and the fear of death. But it’s also a celebration of life, and its ability to persevere through grief and loss. It’s a story of love tested in despair thick enough to choke the air from your lungs. It’s a story of finding hope and forgiveness even when the world is being swallowed by cruelty. It’s a story of men who fall short and drive themselves into ruin, but also of those who carry on through blood and tears to seek a better tomorrow. You may not remember every character’s name, but the story makes you care so fucking much that it barely even registers.

And because this is Yamada we’re talking about, that beautiful story is brought to life with some of the best presentation and production this medium has to offer. The show’s cinematography is brilliant, its editing is stunning, its imagery and symbolism bury into your soul and refuse to leave. The watercolor-brush aesthetics, courtesy of Science Saru, drape the proceedings in a potent sense of temporal beauty. The soundtrack is yet another unbearably serene accomplishment from Ushio, with instrumentals that seem to resonate from within your very ribcage. The cast is a murderer’s row of fantastic seiyuus delivering some of the best performances you’re likely to hear in anime all year (Aoi Yuki’s portrayal of Biwa might be one of her best roles ever, and that’s saying a lot). It’s the kind of show where something as simple as a character’s body language, or the placement of a single shot, is enough to make emotions well up within you, just from how beautifully they convey meaning. And the way all these different aspects play off each other culminates in a final act that turned me into a sobbing wreck. God, I’m still not over those last few minutes. I don’t know if I ever will be.

2021 has been a truly remarkable year for anime. We’ve been blessed with some of the most imaginative, impactful, and boundary-pushing works of art this medium’s had in a while. But even among the likes of Sonny Boy, Sk8 the Infinity, Wonder Egg Priority, 86 Eighty-Six, Oddtaxi, and the final Evangelion Rebuild, The Heike Story is a truly singular achievement. It’s my favorite non-sequel anime of 2021, losing out only to Re:Zero and Gintama the Final as my favorite overall of 2021. And if you know how fucking much I love those shows, you know I don’t make that comparison lightly. But really, who else but Naoko Yamada could challenge two of my favorite franchises for the top spot with a massively paired down literary passion project? That, folks, is why she may well be the greatest anime director of all time. And if you’ve let this show slip under your radar, I can only urge you to fix that oversight now. The Heike Story deserves to be seen and celebrated by as many people as possible. It’s a retelling of an old story that will linger for many years to come, passed down through generations like the songs plucked from the strings of a traveling musician. Life is fleeting and all things will one day fall to ruin, but stories this beautiful will remain alive forever, just as enrapturing centuries from now as they were on the day they were first spun. And I give The Heike Story a score of:

9/10

What a wonderful year it’s been. Here’s hoping the anime of 2022 keep kicking ass!

#anime #the anime binge-watcher #tabw #the heike story #heike monogatari #fall 2021 sr #fall 2021 #fall 2021 anime #naoko yamada

21 notes · View notes

jostenneil · 4 years

Note

I would like some shoujo recs! I haven't read any in a longtime. I don't mind if they have love triangles or love quadrangles as long as the dynamics are good.

i’m sorry for getting to this late! and i hope it’s okay to rec some josei as well, the only difference between shoujo and josei strictly speaking is the age demographic, otherwise both traditionally cater towards women (not that other ppl can’t read these obv!)

princess tutu (anime) - this is one of the greatest pieces of shoujo i’ve ever been exposed to. it centers on a rly clever and cathartic adaptation of the swan lake mythos, and what’s most interesting about it is its focus on storytelling. the primary tag line of the show is “may those who accept their fate be granted happiness. may those who defy their fate be granted glory”. it’s all about the characters making choices and realizing their own ability to write the story that follows, rather than remaining shackled to the insidious story penned by the primary villain, drosselmeyer. the relationships are complex and dark but also rly healing in the long run, and the ballet aesthetics are exquisite!

kanata kara (manga) - this isekai manga centers on noriko, a girl suddenly dropped into an alternate world where she’s referred to as “the awakening”, fated to awaken the monstrous sky demon. everyone in this world is bent on getting “the awakening” first to use it to their own benefit, but noriko is actually found by the sky demon, a boy named izark, and they start to travel together through various countries while on the run. the rly charming point of kanata kara is that noriko doesn’t magically know the language of the world, she has to learn it entirely from scratch. she’s also someone who works rly hard to be useful and a source of solid support for izark and the friends she makes, and i think that coupled with the narrative message of each person having their part to play in the betterment of the world is rly inspiring to read about

akagami no shirayukihime (anime/manga) - shirayuki is a girl with rly vibrant red hair, and the prince of her country wants her as his concubine bc of it, so she decides to run away to the neighboring country. there she meets the country’s second prince, zen, along with his friends at the palace, and she makes a new living for herself as a palace pharmacist. it’s a rly sweet manga that i appreciate for delving into the behind the scenes part of court politics, particularly bc we tend to think that fantasies imply battles, but that’s not necessarily the end all, be all of relations between countries. there’s also a wonderful focus on shirayuki’s work as a pharmacist, and how her knowledge of plants and medicinal herbs helps her support zen as he works to become a prince more involved with his people

legend of basara (manga) - this series focuses on a post apocalyptic japan ruled by an oppressive emperor. a child of prophecy is fated to be born into a village and save the country, and when twins are born, the villagers assume the brother is the fated savior. when they grow up, however, one of the emperor’s sons, the red king, kills the brother, and so his sister, sarasa, has to pretend she’s the one who died so she can carry on the revolution as her brother, else all hope is lost. all of this is tied in with the fact that in her rare free time, sarasa happens to meet a boy named shuri, who is actually the red king! neither of them know each other’s real identities or that they’re the ones facing each other on the battlefield, so it makes for a rly angty romance, coupled in with excellent political commentary on privilege and oppression. shuri has one of the best antagonist to protagonist developments i’ve ever seen, and sarasa is a great example of a character vested with so much responsibility, who wants to bring her people to freedom but also be just a normal girl

honey and clover (anime/manga) - this is one of my all time favorites! it follows some university students attending art school and their day-to-day life as they struggle to create, maintain relationships with each other, graduate, etc. i think chica umino’s works in general can be exemplified by her portrayal of every day life, and how it’s not so mundane and actually carries a lot of emotion. there’s so much catharsis present in this work for me bc it really reaches out to people who feel lost of purposeless or alone in their lives and feel like they have no reason to continue creating or moving forward. i think it also has a rly realistic portrayal of romance in the sense that its focus is on how characters grow through romance rather than whether they end up with a certain person. esp if you’re a college student, i think it’ll rly resonate with you

kobato (manga) - this was serialized in a seinen magazine for some reason but i think most ppl agree it feels shoujo in delivery. it’s probably my personal favorite clamp work. the floral aesthetics and artwork of angels is absolutely gorgeous, and it features a rly endearing story about a girl, kobato, who must collect “healed hearts” in a bottle in order to return to a certain place. i can’t really reveal what i most enjoy about it without giving away serious spoilers, but there’s that classic clamp execution of the binding nature of contracts and weighing the things we want against the things we must do, which makes for some rly heartfelt, angsty progressions. mostly i just love seeing the narrative unfold kobato, as she starts off as is this seemingly naive girl who we come to realize is actually hurting deeply inside

lovely complex (anime) - this is a classic so if you’ve already heard of it i wouldn’t be surprised but nonetheless it’s probably my favorite in that area of early 00s shoujo romcoms. the story follows risa and otani, who are known as a comedic duo in their high school bc she’s unusually tall and he’s unusually short. there’s lots of gags and kidding around, but ultimately the story delves into how both of them subconsciously fall for each other despite treating each other like gag men at first. there’s comedic love triangles and plenty of miscommunication galore, but i think it takes these shoujo tropes and puts a rly refreshing twist on them that drives you crazy in a way that’s actually very entertaining. the infamous bear curry gag has practically been immortalized in shoujo fandom

yumeiro patissiere (manga) - this is another one most people have probably heard of BUT, that’s usually bc of the anime. the manga is actually much shorter and different in some ways, and at the end of the day i think i prefer it, esp art wise as the charm in matsumoto’s art style is just impossible to replicate anywhere else. it follows a girl named ichigo, who has a very sensitive taste palate and is spontaneously selected to attend a patissieres academy, despite the fact that she can’t cook for shit! she’s placed in the a-level class alongside the academy’s three genius students, commonly called the “sweets princes”, and they befriend and gradually help her hone her skills until she’s at a level where she can compete with them on a team. all in all it’s a rly endearing story about perseverance, hard work, and the desire to make ppl happy with the food you make for them (kitchen princess is also a predecessor to this series that i think may even have heavily inspired it and i would recommend it, too! it’s just a little on the darker side in terms of dramatics)

this is just the start of a list tbh but these are some of my all time favorites that came to mind! do let me know if you try out and enjoy any of them, i would love to hear about it ❤️

#princess tutu #kanata kara #akagami no shirayukihime #legend of basara #honey and clover #lovely complex #yumeiro patissiere #not really but that's the only tag i can think to put it in #mine:recs

468 notes · View notes

ot3 · 3 years

Text

i watched red vs blue: zero with my dear friends today and i was asked to “post” my “thoughts” on the subject. Please do not click this readmore unless, for some reason, you want to read three thousand words on the subject of red vs blue: zero critical analysis. i highly doubt that’s the reason anyone is following me, but hey.

anyway. here you have it.

Here are my opinions on RVB0 as someone who has quite literally no nostalgia for any older RVB content. I’ve seen seasons 1-13 once and bits and pieces of it more than once here and there, but I only saw it for the first time within the past couple of months. I’ve literally never seen any other RT/AH content. I can name a few people who worked on OG Red vs. Blue but other than Mounty Oum I have NO idea who is responsible for what, really, or what anything else they’ve ever worked on is, or whether or not they’re awful people. I know even less about the people making RVB0 - All I know is that the main writer is named Torrian but I honestly don’t even know if that’s a first name, a last name, or a moniker. All this to say; nothing about my criticism is rooted in any perceived slight against the franchise or branding by the new staff members, because I don’t know or care about any of it. In fact, I’m going to try and avoid any direct comparison between RVB0 and earlier seasons of RVB as a means of critique until the very end, where I’ll look at that relationship specifically.

So here is my opinion of RVB0 as it stands right now:

1. The Writing

Everything about RVB0 feels as if it was written by a first-time writer who hasn’t learned to kill his darlings. The narrative is both simultaneously far too full, leaving very little breathing room for character interaction, and oddly sparse, with a story that lacks any meaningful takeaway, interesting ideas, or genuine emotional connection. It also feels like it’s for a very much younger audience - I don’t mean this as a negative at all. I love tv for kids. I watch more TV for kids than I do for adults, mostly, but I think it’s important to address this because a lot of the time ‘this is for kids’ is used to act like you’re not allowed to critique a narrative thoroughly. It definitely changes the way you critique it, but the critique can still be in good faith. I watched the entirety of RVB0 only after it was finished, in one sitting, and I was giving it my full attention, essentially like it was a movie. I’m going to assume it was much better to watch in chunks, because as it stood, there was literally no time built into the narrative to process the events that had just transpired, or try and predict what events might be coming in the future. When there’s no time to think about the narrative as you’re watching it, the narrative ends up as being something that happens to the audience, not something they engage with. It’s like the difference between taking notes during a lecture or just sitting and listening. If you’re making no attempt to actively process what’s happening, it doesn’t stick in your mind well. I found myself struggling to recall the events and explanations that had immediately transpired because as soon as one thing had happened, another thing was already happening, and it was like a mental juggling act to try and figure out which information was important enough to dwell on in the time we were given to dwell on it.

Which brings me to another point - pacing. Every event in the show, whether a character moment, a plot moment, or a fight scene, felt like it was supposed to land with almost the exact same amount of emotional weight. It all felt like The Most Important Thing that had Yet Happened. And I understand that this is done as an attempt to squeeze as much as possible out of a rather short runtime, but it fundamentally fails. When everything is the most important thing happening, it all fades into static. That’s what most of 0’s narrative was to me: static. It’s only been a few hours since I watched it but I had to go step by step and type out all of the story beats I could remember and run it by my friends who are much more enthusiastic RVB fans than I am to make sure I hadn’t missed or forgotten anything. I hadn’t, apparently, but the fact that my takeaway from the show was pretty accurate and also disappointingly lackluster says a lot. Strangely enough, the most interesting thing the show alluded to - a holo echo, or whatever the term they used was - was one of the things least extrapolated upon in the show’s incredibly bulky exposition. Benefit of the doubt says that’s something they’ll explore in future seasons (are they getting more? Is that planned? I just realized I don’t actually know.)

And bulky it was! I have quite honestly never seen such flagrant disregard for the rule of “show, don’t tell.” There was not a single ounce of subtlety or implication involved in the storytelling of RVB0. Something was either told to you explicitly, or almost entirely absent from the narrative. Essentially zilch in between. We are told the dynamic the characters have with each other, and their personality pros and cons are listed for us conveniently by Carolina. The plot develops in exposition dumps. This is partially due to the series’ short runtime, but is also very much a result of how that runtime was then used by the writers. They sacrificed a massive chunk of their show for the sake of cramming in a ton of fight scenes, and if they wanted to keep all of those fight scenes, it would have been necessary to pare down their story and characters proportionally in comparison, but they didn’t do that either. They wanted to have it both ways and there simply wasn’t enough time for it.

The story itself is… uninteresting. It plays out more like the flimsy premise of a video game quest rather than a piece of media to be meaningfully engaged with. RVB0 is I think something I would be pitched by a guy who thinks the MCU and BNHA are the best storytelling to come out of the past decade. It is nothing but tropes. And I hate having to use this as an insult! I love tropes. The worst thing about RVB0 is that nothing it does is wholly unforgivable in its own right. Hunter x Hunter, a phenomenal shonen, is notoriously filled with pages upon pages of detailed exposition and explanations of things, and I absolutely love it. Leverage, my favorite TV show of all time, is literally nothing but a five man band who has to learn to work as a team while seemingly systematically hitting a checklist of every relevant trope in the book. Pacific Rim is an incredibly straightforward good guys vs giant monsters blockbuster to show off some cool fight scenes such as a big robot cutting an alien in half with a giant sword, and it’s some of the most fun I ever have watching a movie. Something being derivative, clunky, poorly executed in some specific areas, narratively weak, or any single one of these flaws, is perfectly fine assuming it’s done with the intention and care that’s necessary to make the good parts shine more. I’ll forgive literally any crime a piece of media commits as long as it’s interesting and/or enjoyable to consume. RVB0 is not that. I’m not sure what the main point of RVB0 was supposed to be, because it seemingly succeeds at nothing. It has absolutely nothing new or innovative to justify its lack of concern for traditional storytelling conventions. Based solely on the amount of screentime things were given, I’d be inclined to say the narrative existed mostly to give flimsy pretense for the fight scenes, but that’s an entire other can of worms.

2. The Visuals + Fights

I have no qualms with things that are all style and no substance. Sometimes you just want to see pretty colors moving on the screen for a while or watch some cool bad guys and monsters or whatever get punched. RVB0 was not this either. The show fundamentally lacked a coherent aesthetic vision. Much of the show had a rather generic sci-fi feel to it with the biggest standouts to this being the very noir looking cityscape, which my friends and I all immediately joked looked like something from a batman game, or the temple, which my friends and I all immediately joked looked like a world of warcraft raid. They were obviously attempting to get variety in their environment design, which I appreciate, but they did this without having a coherent enough visual language to feel like it was all part of the same world. In general, there was also just a lack of visual clarity or strong shots. The value range in any given scene was poor, the compositions and framing were functional at best, and the character animation was unpleasantly exaggerated. It just doesn’t really look that good beyond fancy rendering techniques.

The fight scenes are their entire own beast. Since ‘FIGHT SCENE’ is the largest single category of scenes in the show, they definitely feel worth looking at with a genuine critical eye. Or, at least, I’d like to, but honestly half the time I found myself almost unable to look at them. The camera is rarely still long enough to really enjoy what you’re watching - tracking the motion of the character AND the camera at such constant breakneck high speeds left little time to appreciate any nuances that might have been present in the choreography or character animation. I tried, believe me, I really did, but the fight scenes leave one with the same sort of dizzy convoluted spectacle as a Michael Bay transformers movie. They also really lacked the impact fight scenes are supposed to have.

It’s hard to have a good, memorable fight scene without it doing one of three things: 1. Showing off innovative or creative fighting styles and choreography 2. Making use of the fight’s setting or environment in an engaging and visually interesting way or 3. Further exploring a character’s personality or actions by the way they fight. It’s also hard to do one of these things on its own without at least touching a bit on the other two. For the most part, I find RVB0’s fight scenes fail to do this. Other than rather surface level insubstantial factors, there was little to visually distinguish any of RVB0’s fight scenes from each other. Not only did I find a lot of them difficult to watch and unappealing, I found them all difficult to watch and unappealing in an almost identical way. They felt incredibly interchangeable and very generic. If you could take a fight scene and change the location it was set and also change which characters were participating and have very little change, it’s probably not a good fight scene.

I think “generic” is really just the defining word of RVB0 and I think that’s also why it falls short in the humor department as well.

3. The Comedy

Funny shit is hard to write and humor is also incredibly subjective but I definitely got almost no laughs out of RVB0. I think a total of three. By far the best joke was Carolina having a cast on top of her armor, which, I must stress, is an incredibly funny gag and I love it. But overall I think the humor fell short because it felt like it was tacked on more than a natural and intentional part of this world and these characters. A lot of the jokes felt like they were just thrown in wherever they’d fit, without any build up to punchlines and with little regard for what sort of joke each character would make. Like, there was some, obviously Raymond’s sense of humor had the most character to it, but the character-oriented humor still felt very weak. When focusing on character-driven humor, there’s a LOT you can establish about characters based on what sort of jokes they choose to make, who they’re picking as the punchlines of these jokes, and who their in-universe audience for the jokes is. In RVB0, the jokes all felt very immersion-breaking and self aware, directed wholly towards the audience rather than occurring as a natural result of interplay between the characters. This is partially due to how lackluster the character writing was overall, and the previously stated tight timing, but also definitely due to a lack of a real understanding about what makes a joke land.

A rule of thumb I personally hold for comedy is that, when push comes to shove, more specific is always going to be more funny. The example I gave when trying to explain this was this:

saying two characters had awkward sex in a movie theater: funny

saying two characters had an awkward handjob in a cinemark: even funnier

saying two characters spent 54 minutes of 11:14's 1:26 runtime trying out some uncomfortably-angled hand stuff in the back of a dilapidated cinemark that lost funding halfway through retrofitting into a dinner theater: the funniest

The more specific a joke is, the more it relies on an in-depth understanding of the characters and world you’re dealing with and the more ‘realistic’ it feels within the context of your media. Especially with this kind of humor. When you’re joking with your friends, you don’t go for stock-humor that could be pulled out of a joke book, you go for the specific. You aim for the weak spots. If a set of jokes could be blindly transplanted into another world, onto another cast of characters, then it’s far too generic to be truly funny or memorable. I don’t think there’s a single joke in RVB0 where the humor of it hinged upon the characters or the setting.

Then there’s the issue of situational comedy and physical comedy. This is really where the humor being ‘tacked on’ shows the most. Once again, part of what makes actually solid comedy land properly is it feeling like a natural result of the world you have established. Real life is absurd and comical situations can be found even in the midst of some pretty grim context, and that’s why black comedy is successful, and why comedy shows are allowed to dip into heavier subject matter from time to time, or why dramas often search for levity in humor. It’s a natural part of being human to find humor in almost any situation. The key thing, though, once again, is finding it in the situation. Many of RVB0’s attempts at humor, once again, feel like they would be the exact same jokes when stripped from their context, and that’s almost never good. A pretty fundamental concept in both storytelling in general but particularly comedy writing is ‘setup and payoff’. No joke in RVB0 is a reward for a seemingly innocuous event in an earlier scene or for an overlooked piece of environmental design. The jokes pop in when there’s time for them in between all the exposition and fighting, and are gone as soon as they’re done. There’s no long term, underlying comedic throughline to give any sense of coherence or intent to the sense of humor the show is trying to establish. Every joke is an isolated one-off quip or one-liner, and it fails to engage the audience in a meaningful way.

All together, each individual component of RVB0 feels like it was conjured up independently, without any concern to how it interacted with the larger product they were creating. And I think this is really where it all falls apart. RVB0 feels criminally generic in a way reminiscent of mass-market media which at least has the luxury of attributing these flaws, this complete and total watering down of anything unique, to heavy oversight and large teams with competing visions. But I don’t think that’s the case for RVB0. I don’t know much about what the pipeline is like for this show, but I feel like the fundamental problem it suffers from is a lack of heart.

In comparison to Red vs. Blue

Let's face it. This is a terrible successor to Red vs. Blue. I wouldn’t care if NONE of the old characters were in it - that’s not my problem. I haven’t seen past season 13 because from what I heard the show already jumped the shark a bit and then some. That’s not what makes it a poor follow up. What makes it a bad successor is that it fundamentally lacks any of the aspects of the OG RVB that made it unique or appealing at all. I find myself wondering what Torrian is trying to say with RVB0 and quite literally the only answer I find myself falling back onto is that he isn’t trying to say anything at all. Regardless of what you feel about the original RVB, it undeniably had things to say. The opening “why are we here” speech does an excellent job at establishing that this is a show intended to poke fun at the misery of bureaucracy and subservience to nonsensical systems, not just in the context of military life, but in a very broad-strokes way almost any middle-class worker can relate to. At the end of the day, fiction is at its best when it resonates with some aspect of its audience’s life. I know instantly which parts of the original Red vs Blue I’m supposed to relate to. I can’t say anything even close to that about 0.

RVB is an absurdist parody that heavily satirizes aspects of the military and life as a low-on-the-food-chain worker in general that almost it’s entire target audience will be familiar with. The most significant draw of the show to me was how the dialogue felt like listening to my friends bicker with each other in our group chats. It required no effort for me to connect with and although the narrative never outright looked to the camera and explained ‘we are critiquing the military’s stupid red tape and self-fullfilling eternal conflict’ they didn’t need to, because the writing trusted itself and its audience enough to believe this could be conveyed. It is, in a way, the complete antithesis to the badass superhero macho military man protagonist that we all know so well. RVB was saying something, and it was saying it in a rather novel format.

Nothing about RVB0 is novel. Nothing about RVB0 says anything. Nothing about it compels me to relate to any of these characters or their situations. RVB0 doesn’t feel like absurdism, or satire. RVB0 feels like it is, completely uncritically, the exact media that RVB itself was riffing off of. Both RVB0 and RVB when you watch them give you the feeling that what you’re seeing here is kids on a playground larping with toy soldiers. It’s all ridiculous and over the top cliche stupid garbage where each side is trying to one-up the other. The critical difference is, in RVB, we’re supposed to look at this and laugh at how ridiculous this is. In RVB0 we’re supposed to unironically think this is all pretty badass.

The PFL arc of the original RVB existed to show us that setting up an elite team of supersoldiers with special powers was something done in bad faith, with poor outcomes, that left everyone involved either cruel, damaged, or dead. It was a bad thing. And what we’re seeing in RVB0 is the same premise, except, this time it’s good. We’re supposed to root for this format. RVB0 feels much more like a demo reel, cutscenes from a video game that doesn’t exist, or a shonen anime fanboy’s journal scribbling than it feels like a piece of media with any objective value in any area. In every area that RVB was anti-establishment, RVB0 is pure undiluted establishment through and through.

#long post #really long post guys. look out !#rvb

205 notes · View notes

duchezss · 3 years

Text

Buckle in folks cause I’m about to put more effort into this than an english assignment Presenting Why Jurassic World Camp Cretaceous is actually an amazing show

Now what defines the term amazing you might ask? I’m talking about a show that goes above and beyond in plot, characters, storytelling, and overall experience. Nowadays most adult shows don’t meet my standards much less a kids show so if that gives you an idea how good this show is stop right now and go watch it if you haven’t. Spoilers ahead ofc but as an aspiring film major I will be diving into just about everything I love and this is gonna get long.

For your convince I will start with a simple bullet point list and then extend on them below, so if you only wanna see the big points and not my thoughts behind them this first parts for you.

Black mc

Diverse main cast (4/6 are poc)

Actual plot lines and a lot of suspense

Very dark for a kids show

Complex characters that develop

Fits in with the main Jurassic World series beautifully

Body language and facial expressions are top tier

Have genuine relationships (platonically and/or romantically) between all of the main 6

Phenomenal camera angles and use of special effects

Great with details

Amazing VA’s

Continuity

So the nose dives begins

Black mc: To some people this might not matter that much but holy cow this is so important and such a big step. The people complaining are just weird middle aged white people, like do you know how big of an impact a black mc can have on young black children. It’s so important and it makes them feel happy because someone actually looks like them. Clear evidence of this was Into The Spider Verse (which is also an amazing movie oml). Come to think of it the only black mc I think I’ve ever seen in an animated kids show is probably Static Shock (also an amazing show ily). Somehow representation has got swept under the rug in this day and age which is ironic really, but this show does an amazing job with tackling that and I love it.

Diverse main cast: I can’t think of any recent kids movies/tv shows, live action or animated, that have this much representation. In animation is also very easy for the show runners to make a character poc and then have a white VA, but jwcc is quite the opposite. Honestly the characters look so much like their VA’s that something tells me the animation team based the characters off them and not the other way around. Not only that but their names actually match with their ethnicities. So for reference or just anyone that doesn’t know, Ben and Brooklynn are white, Sammy is hispanic, Darius is black, Kenji is asian, and Yazmina is middle eastern. Sammy’s last name is Gutierrez, Yazmina’s is Fadoula, Kenji’s is Kon and Darius’s Bowman. Gutierrez is a common last name in Mexico and Latin America in general. Fadoula is found throughout upper Africa and the Middle East, Kon is rare name of Japense origin, and Bowman is a common last name among black folks in the US. So not only do they have a poc cast, voiced by poc people, but all the characters have realistic names. Not to mention they are very good on skin tone in the show, personally I think Yaz should’ve been just a bit darker but hey I’ll take it and run.

Actual plot lines: This seem like stating the obvious but work with me here. Most kids and even adult shows have a very episodic format, there’s nothing wrong with that per say but having a plot and conflict build up and having little things matter is much more satisfying in my opinion. Most kids shows have some conflict but its very PG which is also fine that’s what it’s meant for. But every once in a while you’ll find a show that had plot wise beyond it’s years and those are the golden ones. Easily and rightfully the most famous is Avatar the Last Airbender or ATLA. This show to this day is still one my favorites and truly nothing will ever top it, but in my years of watching kids shows after it jwcc might just be second. We can argue all day about what’s the best and it’s truly a matter of opinion, but to me atla and jwcc just achieve such a level of complexity that 99% of kids and even adult shows don’t reach.

Very dark: While this might not be exactly the best for kids it’s great for an olderish audience. Honestly it having a much darker element makes the show enjoyable for all ages while still keeping it chill enough so that children may watch. But come to think of it it’s hard not to make a show about dinosaurs dark, the show runners do a wonderful job at keeping it intense and exciting, but still kid friendly, and to me thats incredibly impressive. Not to mention since the show isn’t afraid to go dark they can do more (such as ben’s “death”, the hunters etc) which makes it go from good to great. Reminds me a lot of atla and I know I keep mentioning atla but know that is the biggest compliment ever. atla is easily the best animated/kids show of all time so the fact that a bring it up so much is huge. There have been shows in the past that have tried to replicate what atla (such as voltron..) and it just hasn’t worked. I think this show nails the boundary between too dark and not dark enough.

Complex characters: Oh yes. If there’s one thing I love more than an ensemble cast it’s a cast that grows and develops as the series progresses. Sure the main 6 might start off as typical character tropes (Darius the super fan, Yaz the loner, Sammy the extrovert, Ben the underdog, Kenji the arrogant, and Brooklynn the influencer.) but they become so much more than that. I’d say at least half of them are completely different people between the 1st episode and the latest one. An easy example being Ben and Kenji. Ben started off as a naive, timid, and terrified person and has become confident, independent, and brave. Kenji started off as arrogant, selfish, and apathetic person and became compassionate, driven, and concerned. All of them have had some sort of change even if it’s not super dramatic and that’s important. It makes the storytelling better because they grow as they go.

Fits in with JP/JW beautifully: In terms of shows connecting to movies this has gotta be some clone wars level s-tier stuff. Personally I have never watched clone wars but my sister has and she always raves about how well this show connects to the movies, and from what I’ve seen I completely agree. A youtube channel by the name of Silverscreen Edits actually put together the scenes from every time they overlap, mainly in S1 but also the cold open from Fallen Kingdom. I’d advise you to watch it because it’s just incredible. The show runners nail ever detail of these scenes and it truly feels like you’re watching the same scene from a different perspective. The set up is beautiful and I cannot rave enough about how amazing it is, my favorite easily being the dome scene because of all the small details. Not to mention this show actually connect JW and FK because it shows us that the cold open was 6 months later while the rest was 3 years later. Quite honestly I had no idea these two scenes were that far apart from each other, I thought the opening was from a years or two later not 6 months, so this show really connected the dots between these two movies and made them flow together much nicer. And I love all the countless references too old and new JP/JW movies. Overall this show is a great addition to the franchise.

Body language and facial expressions: You might be thinking to yourself, hmph that is a really odd point to make, let me tell you it’s not and I’ll explain why. When analyzing films I usually tend to stick to live action because one of my favorite parts of films is how characters react to things, and we animation we really don’t get that. Most of the time even if shows get this complex they won’t use both the way jwcc. What impressed me so much was how amazing they are at this, the animation team seriously needs more praise. Jwcc is great at facial expressions which I will say other animated shows know how to do as well, but they are also so amazing at body language which is rare rare when it comes to animation. It’s because it’s so hard and often times it just doesn’t fit, but they do an amazing job with this and it makes the characters feel so life-like. When a character is sad or closed off their shoulders hunch, when they feel scared they stiffen up and cover their ears (which is another detail I love so much, I never realized till this show that hardly anyone ever covers their ears and it makes a lot of sense because these dinos are very loud) and when they feel hopeless their shoulder sag and their head drops, do you see what I mean? You can quite literally tell what these kids are feeling and thinking without them saying anything that is so impressive and it makes the show that much better. It makes it easy to analyze and if it wasn’t clear around I love to do so.

Genuine relationships between all of main cast: I will not budge at this point at all, gonna say it right now if you disagree argue with the wall. I might have some bias on this but one, if not my favorite, part of any media is an ensemble cast. It’s something I actively seek out, and when I say ensemble cast I don’t mean a trio, I mean a full cast, my favorite being 6 but 4 or 5 will do. So when I found out this show had 6 main characters I was immediately interested. Not only because I love ensemble casts but I also wanted to see how they handled it. Ensemble cast are so rare because they are extremely hard to do and do well. I will even criticize atla on this. At one point they had 6 main characters and they never elaborated on more than a handful of the duos and just focused on the group as whole. But this is typical and easiest to do without giving up individual character development so I get that. But jesus christ jwcc does a phenomenal job with this, and I mean phenomenal. Out of the 15 different duos you can get between 6 characters then have elaborated on 11 of them, and it could easily be more this is just from memory. I might make a post elaborating on this specifically because it’s just amazing. This time they take to flesh out these relationships truly makes them feel like a unit and a family, instead of just a group of people all working towards the same goal. This is easily the most impressive and rewarding of any of the points on this list in my opinion. (coming from #1 squad lover right here)

Camera angles and special effects: This shows downfall for some was that it had strange animation, honestly it never bothered me and since I’ve watched dragon prince and rwby, it’s clear that bad animation never stops me from watching a show. But I think people just won’t give it a chance, because when you do you’ll see it’s actually very good. To me the coolest part of the animation is the dinos. They look incredible and so so similar to the cgi used in JW. That’s hard to do so more claps for the animation team I love y’all. They also have to work around the PG side of this show and do a great job at implying what happens but never actually showing what happens. This is all angles, not to mention they do a great job at showcasing the park and the scenery so that magic from the movies really translates to the show. Finally my favorite scene of the show from an avid slow mo lover has got to me when Ben falls of the monorail (idk why it is cause he’s literally my fav and I was so upset) The scene is just beautiful and the set up before hand makes it that much more heart breaking. The use of slow mo is amazing I literally cannot rave about this scene enough. It builds so much suspense and they used just the right amount, to much and the scene would move to slow, and to little the scene would be to fast. I need more great scenes like this in S4 (idk if I want the angst that comes with it too I’ll get back to you)

Details: To me details, in any show in general, is what makes it go from great to fantastic. An example of this is Harry Potter, something that hooked me into this franchise was how much small details mattered and it’s the same with jwcc. There are so many throw away lines that end up coming back and all us are hitting ourselves for missing it. Such as Ben saying early on he knows where the tracker beam is and when he “dies” and the crew can’t find it it shows how important he was. Those are details I love to see. Or the three dinos, one of which Sammy released, coming back all season. Of course toro as well and he always kept his burns. Not to mention the animation team always kept Ben’s scar in and I think that’s an important detail because he shaped who he is. Keep up the good work animation and writing team because I love what you’re doing with this (also I’m 90% sure the compass is another one of these details I’m calling it rn)

Amazing VA’s: Honestly VA’s in general do not get enough credit and they really should. But these 6 are pretty amazing let me tell you. If I’m not mistaken Ryan Potter (Kenji’s VA) is the only one with a notable history of voice acting as he played the title character in Big Hero 6. (fun fact I had no idea and when I found this out I quite literally screamed). But the others have also done things as well, most of it being live action though, and voice acting is much different. Honestly I just need to make a post about the various roles they’ve had cause looking into this has been an experience. Anyway all of them do such an incredible job with this ahh. I think the times where you can really tell how different they all are is when they lash out. This happens quite often and honestly it’s expected, I mean they’re 6 teenagers in a stressful environment of course they’ll last out. But all of them have such a different way of doing it, Darius is hopeless, Kenji is nervous, Yaz is emotional, Ben is harsh, Brooklynn is stern, and Sammy is level headed. Usually everyone lashes out the same way so the fact that they’re so different in just one aspect shows you how good they are. Each character is so individual and all of them have different goals and morals which is not only realistic but it makes way for conflict which is always interesting.

Continuity: Now this could arguable go with details but it’s slightly different so I’m making this a separate point. Continuity to put it simple it basically not have the show be episodic. Honestly that completely what I expected from this show because that how most kids shows are. In this show the plot not only progress each episode but so do the characters and their trauma. Most of the time the plot will progress but anything bad that has happened to the characters will not show and is hardly talked about (COUGH VOLTRON). To me it’s something that has to be addressed because if the characters don’t grow what was the point of it. And they’ve shown that characters grow based on the events that happen and I love that. Another thing about continuity is when show runners stick a pin in something and actually go back to it (COUGH RWBY). Jwcc is amazing at this and make a point to bring back just about everything that gets sidelined in the first place. It’s so impressive and make the show that much more enjoyable. There have been countless times where I get so caught up with the pins that shows just leave there and it makes me so mad, but jwcc is good at for the most part because of course some things will slip through. But they always get back to the important things.

The conclusion: Overall this show is phenomenal and if my essay hasn’t convinced you I’m not sure what will. The show is amazing at storytelling and plot and the lovable main cast makes it that much better. It is so much better than a good chunk of kids shows and honestly part of me wishes it was rated PG-13 cause I really wanna see that. But they do an amazing job and keep it kid friendly enough while still discussing mature topics. It’s the next atla to me and something that many kids shows now days try to be and fail. It’s impressive and complex and truly one of the best shows I’ve ever watched. Film major mara out, and if you actually read all of this ily mwah.

#jwcc #jurassic world camp cretaceous #jurassic world #jurassic park #jesus why did I write so much lmao #I have issues I spend more than 2 hours on this..#hyperfixations go hard ig

40 notes · View notes

nitrateglow · 3 years

Text

Favorite films discovered in 2020

Well, this year sucked. I did see some good movies though. Some even made after I was born!

Perfect Blue (dir. Satoshi Kon, 1997)

I watch a lot of thrillers and horror movies, but precious few actually unsettle me in any lasting way. This cannot be said of Perfect Blue, which gave me one of the most visceral cinematic experiences of my life. Beyond the brief flashes of bloodletting (you will never look at a screwdriver the same way again), the scariest thing about Perfect Blue might be how the protagonist has both her life and her sense of self threatened by the villains. The movie’s prescience regarding public persona is also incredibly eerie, especially in our age of social media. While anime is seen as a very niche interest (albeit one that has become more mainstream in recent years), I would highly recommend this movie to thriller fans, whether they typically watch anime or not. It’s right up there with the best of Hitchcock or De Palma.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (dir. Sergio Leone, 1966)

Nothing is better than when an iconic movie lives up to the hype. Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach, and Lee Van Cleef play off of one another perfectly. I was impressed by Wallach as Tuco in particular: his character initially seems like a one-dimensional greedy criminal, but the performance is packed with wonderful moments of humanity. Do I really need to say anything about the direction? Or about the wonderful storyline, which takes on an almost mythic feel in its grandeur? Or that soundtrack?

Die Niebelungen (both movies) (dir. Fritz Lang, 1924)

I did NOT expect to love these movies as much as I did. That they would be dazzlingly gorgeous I never doubted: the medieval world of the story is brought to vivid life through the geometrical mise en scene and detailed costuming. However, the plot itself is so, so riveting, never losing steam over the course of the four hours it takes to watch both movies. The first half is heroic fantasy; the second half involves a revenge plot of almost Shakespearean proportions. This might actually be my favorite silent Fritz Lang movie now.

Muppet Treasure Island (dir. Brian Henson, 1996)

I understand that people have different tastes and all, but how does this movie have such a mixed reception? It’s absolutely hilarious. How could anybody get through the scene with “THA BLACK SPOT AGGHHHHHHH” and not declare this a masterpiece of comedy? And I risk being excommunicated from the Muppet fandom for saying it, but I like this one more than The Great Muppet Caper. It’s probably now my second favorite Muppet movie.

Belle de Jour (dir. Luis Bunuel, 1967)

I confess I’m not terribly fond of “but was it real???” movies. They tend to feel gimmicky more often than not. Belle de Jour is an exception. This is about more than a repressed housewife getting her kicks working as a daytime prostitute. The film delves into victim blaming, trauma, class, and identity-- sure, this sounds academic and dry when I put it that way, but what I’m trying to say is that these are very complicated characters and the blurring of fantasy and reality becomes thought-provoking rather than trite due to that complexity.

Secondhand Lions (dir. Tim McCanlies, 2003)

The term “family movie” is often used as a synonym for “children’s movie.” However, there is an important distinction: children’s movies only appeal to kids, while family movies retain their appeal as one grows up. Secondhand Lions is perhaps a perfect family movie, with a great deal more nuance than one might expect regarding the need for storytelling and its purpose in creating meaning for one’s life. It’s also amazingly cast: Haley Joel Osment is excellent as the juvenile lead, and Michael Caine and Robert Duvall steal the show as Osment’s eccentric uncles.

The Pawnbroker (dir. Sidney Lumet, 1964)

Controversial in its day for depicting frontal nudity, The Pawnbroker shocks today for different reasons. As the top review of the film on IMDB says, we’re used to victims of great atrocities being presented as sympathetic, good people in fiction. Here, Rod Steiger’s Sol Nazerman subverts such a trope: his suffering at the hands of the Nazis has made him a hard, closed-off person, dismissive of his second wife (herself also a survivor of the Holocaust), cold to his friendly assistant, and bitter towards himself. The movie follows Nazerman’s postwar life, vividly presenting his inner pain in a way that is almost too much to bear. Gotta say, Steiger gives one of the best performances I have ever seen in a movie here: he’s so three-dimensional and complex. The emotions on his face are registered with Falconetti-level brilliance.

The Apartment (dir. Billy Wilder, 1960)

While not the most depressing Christmas movie ever, The Apartment certainly puts a good injection of cynicism into the season. I have rarely seen a movie so adept at blending comedy, romance, and satire without feeling tone-deaf. There are a lot of things to praise about The Apartment, but I want to give a special shoutout to the dialogue. “Witty” dialogue that sounds natural is hard to come by-- so often, it just feels smart-assy and strained. Not here.

Anatomy of a Murder (dir. Otto Preminger, 1959)

I’m not big into courtroom dramas, but Anatomy of a Murder is a big exception. Its morally ambiguous characters elevate it from being a mere “whodunit” (or I guess in the case of this movie, “whydunit”), because if there’s something you’re not going to get with this movie, it’s a clear answer as to what happened on the night of the crime. Jimmy Stewart gives one of his least characteristic performances as the cynical lawyer, and is absolutely brilliant.

Oldboy (dir. Park Chan-Wook, 2003)

Oldboy reminded me a great deal of John Webster’s 17th century tragedy The Duchess of Malfi. Both are gruesome, frightening, and heartbreaking works of art, straddling the line between sensationalism and intelligence, proving the two are not mutually exclusive. It’s both entertaining and difficult to watch. The thought of revisiting it terrifies me but I feel there is so much more to appreciate about the sheer craft on display.

Family Plot (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1976)

Family Plot is an enjoyable comedy; you guys are just mean. I know in an ideal world, Hitchcock’s swan song would be a great thriller masterpiece in the vein of Vertigo or Psycho. Family Plot is instead a silly send-up of Hitchcock’s favorite tropes, lampooning everything from the dangerous blonde archetype (with not one but two characters) to complicated MacGuffin plots. You’ll probably demand my film buff card be revoked for my opinion, but to hell with it-- this is my favorite of Hitchcock’s post-Psycho movies.

My Best Girl (dir. Sam Taylor, 1927)

Mary Pickford’s farewell to silent film also happens to be among her best movies. It’s a simple, charming romantic comedy starring her future husband, Charles “Buddy” Rogers. Pickford also gets to play an adult character here, rather than the little girl parts her public demanded she essay even well into her thirties. She and Rogers are sweet together without being diabetes-inducing, and the comedy is often laugh out loud funny. It even mocks a few tropes that anyone who watches enough old movies will recognize and probably dislike-- such as “break his heart to save him!!” (my personal most loathed 1920s/1930s trope).

Parasite (dir. Bong Joon-ho, 2019)

This feels like such a zeitgeist movie. It’s about the gap between the rich and the poor, it’s ironic, it’s depressing, it’s unpredictable as hell. I don’t like terms like “modern classic,” because by its very definition, a classic can only be deemed as such after a long passage of time, but I have a good feeling Parasite will be considered one of the definitive films of the 2010s in the years to come.

Indiscreet (dir. Stanley Donen, 1958)

Indiscreet often gets criticized for not being Notorious more or less, which is a shame. It’s not SUPPOSED to be-- it’s cinematic souffle and both Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant elevate that light material with their perfect chemistry and comedic timing. It’s also refreshing to see a rom-com with characters over 40 as the leads-- and the movie does not try to make them seem younger or less mature, making the zany moments all the more hilarious. It’s worth seeing for Cary Grant’s jig (picture above) alone.

The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (dir. Joseph Sargent, 1974)

This movie embodies so much of what I love about 70s cinema: it’s gritty, irreverent, and hard-hitting. It’s both hilarious and suspenseful-- I was tense all throughout the run time. I heard there was a remake and it just seems... so, so pointless when you already have this gem perfect as it is.

They All Laughed (dir. Peter Bogdonavich, 1981)

Bogdonavich’s lesser known homage to 1930s screwball comedy is also a weirdly autumnal movie. Among the last gasps of the New Hollywood movement, it is also marks the final time Audrey Hepburn would star in a theatrical release. The gentle comedy, excellent ensemble cast (John Ritter is the standout), and the mature but short-lived romance between Hepburn and Ben Gazarra’s characters make this a memorably bittersweet gem.

The Palm Beach Story (dir. Preston Sturges, 1942)

Absolutely hilarious. I was watching this with my parents in the room. My mom tends to like old movies while my dad doesn’t, but both of them were laughing aloud at this one. Not much else to say about it, other than I love Joel McCrea the more movies I see him in-- though it’s weird seeing him in comedies since I’m so used to him as a back-breaking man on the edge in The Most Dangerous Game!

Nothing Sacred (dir. William Wellman, 1937)

I tend to associate William Wellman with the pre-code era, so I’ve tried delving more into his post-code work. Nothing Sacred is easily my favorite of those films thus far, mainly for Carole Lombard but also because the story still feels pretty fresh due to the jabs it takes at celebrity worship and moral hypocrisy. For a satire, it’s still very warm towards its characters, even when they’re misbehaving or deluding themselves, so it’s oddly a feel-good film too.

Applause (dir. Rouben Mamoulian, 1929)

I love watching early sound movies, but my inner history nerd tends to enjoy them more than the part of me that, well, craves good, well-made movies. Most early sound films are pure awkward, but there’s always an exception and Applause is one of them. While the plot’s backstage melodrama is nothing special, the way the story is told is super sophisticated and expressive for this period of cinema history, and Helen Morgan makes the figure of the discarded burlesque queen seem truly human and tragic rather than merely sentimental.

Topaz (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1969)

Another late Hitchcock everyone but me seems to hate. After suffering through Torn Curtain, I expected Hitchcock’s other cold war thriller was going to be dull as dishwater, but instead I found an understated espionage movie standing in stark contrast to the more popular spy movies of the period. It’ll never be top Hitchcock, of course-- still it was stylish and enjoyable, with some truly haunting moments. I think it deserves more appreciation than it’s been given.

What were your favorite cinematic discoveries in 2020?

155 notes · View notes

franeridart · 3 years

Text

Anon said: Ahh I really love your art, especially the way you present your story telling in the comics!! I smile every time I see them on my timeline haha thanks for making my (and likely many others) day! Wishing you all the best!!

Thank you so much!!!!! Especially glad to hear you think my comics’ storytelling works ;O; it means a lot!

Anon said: your satosugu arts give me life omg it's so beautiful and i love how smitten gojou is in all of them😭❤️ thank you for giving us pleasant escape from the disaster that is canon

AH GOSH thank you!!! Gojo lives all his feelings to the fullest doesn’t he! He’s a lot of fun to think about as happy and in love, he gives of the feeling of a warm hug to me ;; back in high school Geto was more reserved with his feelings, but I think he’d show it in his own very soft ways.....ahhhhh man, I love them ;;

Anon said: Your Satosugu is giving me life and also the fluff i need because HOLY SHIT THOSE CHAPTERS ;-;

I KNOW gege really looked at the old gen and went “enough with these dudes” huh lmao but I’m excited to see how everything is gonna turn out from now on! Esp since having been abandoned by the elders the protags are gonna have at the same time more options and less wiggle room.......... interesting!! Can’t wait!

Anon said: hey hey hey i just found your acc and i'm so invested in it already GDJSKALA I LOVE YOUR ART as a beginner like can't draw a circle beginner i truly admire your work also do you have any tips on what i should do to improve my art? because i'm on the brink of giving up istg cause my progress is just none there's no progress idk what to do like pls help me HAHAHHAHA idk what to watch how to practice what to do nothing absolutely nothing but i'm trying my best to hang on cause whenever i keep seeing artists like you it just makes me hang on and be like just keep going but even though i say that i'm going nowhere still so pls help... - 🍄

Ah man, I’m glad I can make you feel like keeping trying!! I answered an ask like this a while back here and I can’t say I have anything new to say on the matter? I hope it’ll help you! In the end the biggest suggestion I can give you is to try to figure out what it is that you want to draw and just draw it! Even if you don’t know how to, just draw it the way you can! As long as the act of drawing itself makes you happy more than the final result you’ll keep up with it and the improvement will come for sure!

Anon said: your art always brightens my day. thank you for sharing it!

Thank you for liking it!!! ;;O;;

Anon said: Idk anything about jujutsu kaisen (I hope I write it well), but seeing your fanarts tempts me to start watching it 😍😍😍

I hope you’ll like it if you do try it!!!!! It’s not a story for everyone, but it is a great story for its own genre! And the studio animating it is doing a wonderful job of making it a work of art too TT0TT

Anon said: Hi! Don’t mean to bother but I wanted to let you know that the user yslkeii on tik tok has reposted some of your art. It’s the “some of my favorite dilfs” video, I think the thumbnail is a photo of Levi Ackerman. She knows that none of the artists in the vid allow reposts but won’t take it down so I figured I’d let them know

Thanks for letting me know! Sadly, I have literally no clue how to act on this for tik tok orz if they could at least credit................ I’m not even too opposted to having my stuff used in videos if there’s credit...................................sigh

Anon said: Hello, I was wondering if I could use some of your old mha art as a reference? I won’t post it anywhere, or trace your work I promise!

Sure you can!! If you don’t mean to post it you don’t even need to ask for permission! Just, you know, my stuff is full of mistakes everywhere so don’t take it too much as a good source for proper anatomy reference and stuff like that!

Anon said: a thought i've been sitting on, having not seen it, that is sending me. gojo/geto color pallet swap

You know, I did see that a while back! White-haired Geto and black-haired Gojo, it was stunning! Didn’t look much like themselves though, Gojo especially hahaha the white hair is really distinctive of him, isn’t it? With it black he kinda looks like first-year!Yuuta with sunglasses hahaha

Anon said: Hey! How you doing? So, i wanted to ask you if I could use one of your Kamijirou's fanarts in my Twitter edit, with credits of course! I hope you get mad with this shitty ask, i totally understand if you don't let me use, is your right ♡

I’d prefer it if you didn’t, sorry!!

Anon said: huhghhuhfjfjd i was scrolling thru your art and i hit a todokiribaku thing you made for a friend an d honestly that's all ive ever needed in life. your friend's taste is impeccable *sobs*

She does doesn’t she!! That’s still one golden ot3, I doubt that’s gonna change any time soon

Anon said: sfdghffgdgd gojo has the right idea. they should just make out

They should!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I wish they had!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Anon said: i've been looking at your art for months and i //just// realized you've started drawing noses from different angles *facepalm*

I’m trying my best!! It’s one of the things that limited my style the most AND one of the most difficult things for me to tackle, so I’m giving it a shot but still, you know, expect them to stay inconsistent for a while haha

Anon said: so five ish years ago i followed you for haikyuu, then got into bnha through your art and now im very tempted to watch jujutsu kaisen because of you as well

ANON!!!!!! I’m so glad and happy you kept me company this long and through this many fandoms!!!! TTATT if you do try jjk I hope you’ll like it! And if you don’t and decide to leave that’s okay too, I’m just really grateful you stuck around this long already!!! ;;A;; <3<3

#fran answers #long post #have you guys listened to the new hayley williams album btw #i've been listening to it on repeat #getting my stsg feelings all over the place hahaha #sorry miss williams #break-up/i still love you though songs are a one track train for me lately #ah also #jjk spoilers #since we talk about stsg and all #:D

105 notes · View notes

opbackgrounds · 4 years

Note

Oooh can you do a post on the tenryubito?

So I feel like this is going to be an unpopular opinion, but I pity the Celestial Dragons.

That isn’t to say that they aren’t all (mostly) abhorrently evil megalomaniacs with an institutionally enforced god complex who treat the torture of human(oids) with the same blasé disregard as a kid pulling the wings off of a fly, but there’s a part of me that just finds them pathetic. The Celesital Dragons are a group of people who have the world as their silver platter, yet are so small-minded and infantile they literally trap themselves in a tiny bubbles because they’re too scared to breathe the same air as the so-called lesser races.

There was a time when I didn’t think much of the Celestial Dragons because I thought that Oda’s exaggerated storytelling had gone one step too far. They were too cartoonishly evil to be believable—nothing but a bunch of mustache-twirling villains too ridiculous to be taken seriously—and though I found Luffy punching one in the face very cathartic I wasn’t terribly invested in the World Nobility as a worldbuilding element.

But if there’s something I’ve realized as I’ve gotten older, it’s that there is a depressingly-large number of cartoonishly evil people who through no merit of their own find themselves wielding enormous amounts of power, and the Celestial Dragons are more realistic than I ever thought possible.

The Dragons are One Piece’s exploration of the idea that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Eight hundred years is a ridiculously long time to be in control of a single territory, let alone an organization as massive as the World Government. To put it in perspective a little, eight hundred years ago was when the Magna Carta was signed. Even real-world dynasties tend to have major fluctuations in power over the course of generations, but It seems that the World Government—and by extension the Celestial Dragons—have for eight centuries kept an iron hold over what they consider theirs.

Which just happens to be everything.

The actual origins of the CD tie into series lore and will probably play a big part in Robin learning about the True History, but I fall in the camp that believes that they originated on the moon because 1) they’re the Celestial Dragons 2) there’s gotta be some significance to Enel’s cover story, and 3) Oda clearly modeled their hairstyles and clothing off of the King and Queen of the Moon from the movie The Adventures of Baron Muchausen

Which, if true, makes them a foreign imperialistic force that used military might and a totalitarian regime that specializes in censorship and terror in order to turn the One Piece world into a giant colony while presenting itself as an egalitarian, unifying coalition where no single ruler is fit to sit on the Empty Throne.

And to think, there are some people who don’t think One Piece is political.

What’s really fascinating is that most of the rank and file Celestial Dragons don’t seem to realize their own history. Their traditional enemy has become a bedtime story used to scare children, and they’re too preoccupied in their petty games and pleasures to even notice that they’re not really the most powerful people in the world. It’s like their freedom to commit atrocities is the world’s worst example of bread and circuses, because as long as their attention is held by the shiny new slave or fixated on bringing in another tribute then they can’t use their immense power to actually do anything, and for the most part they’re too stupid to realize they’re being used.

Granted, I’m doing a lot of guesswork here, but we don’t really know where Im and his giant pointy crown fits into all this, or how aware the average Celestial Dragon is of his existence. Is he a world noble? Are the Elder Stars? I personally don’t think the latter are, but is it possible that there’s an even more secret and exclusive group within one of the most secretive and exclusive groups on the planet? And what in the world does the straw hat locked in a freezer have to do with any of it? Was that the treasure Doflamingo used to blackmail the Celestial Dragons into submission, and if so, who did he parlay with during his negotiations? Because I can’t see idiots like Saint Charlos or Mysogard before his character development giving two shits about any of it. Was it CP0, and if so, how much do they understand about the man who sits on the Empty Throne?

What I’m trying to say here, is that there’s a whole lot we don’t know.

What isn’t guesswork is how little the Celestial Dragons understand about the real world, and this is where I go back to feeling sorry for them. Even the best-intentioned noble we’ve seen so far (Homing) has no idea of what it is to be “human”.

This mansion is just...comfortable. It’s a downgrade. It’s how Homing thinks normal people live, and he thinks he can just plop his family out in the real world and live a quiet, normal life without blowback from a population that has suffered terribly at the Celestial Dragons hands. His ignorance and naivety, while well-intentioned, is staggering.

Because remember, slavery is technically illegal within the World Government. Only criminals and people from nations not affiliated can be taken to auction. What initially seems like a kindness turns out to be sending pigs to the slaughter, because what nation wouldn’t react the way this one did once they found out the truth?

Because what the WG (and by extension the CD) have done is punish nations who don’t kowtow to their power in order to fulfill the demand for slaves. Even the bit about criminals is terrifying when this is a world where for some it’s a crime to even be born, to say nothing about the Celestial Dragon’s refusal to obey their own laws if it means they can get what they want, when they want it.

The whole Homing situation puts a different spin on Doflamingo’s speech during the Marineford War. People who have only known peace can’t understand those who have only known war, and that lack of understanding is what ultimately led to his undoing.

That’s not to say that the Celestial Dragons are incapable of change on an individual level. One Piece is, ultimately, a very optimistic series, so while I was initially surprised that Saint Mysogard returned during the Reverie chapters as a good guy, upon later reflection it made sense with the points Oda was trying to make during the Fishman Island arc—that if different groups can try to understand one another, they can get along.

But it took an extraordinary event in almost being killed by his own former slaves and an extraordinary diplomat in Queen Otohime to change the mind of one (1) Celestial Dragon, and it doesn’t look like Saint Mysogard has been able to bring anyone else around to his point of view in the 10 years since he realized he was, in fact, human. And when feel like you’re due everything because you’re a god, why would you want to lower yourself to the position of a lessor being?

The Celestial Dragons are trained from birth to think of other human(oid) beings as less than animals, where sadism and torture aren’t only encouraged, but celebrated. The system has corrupted to the point where there’s no incentive to change and no oversight to prevent the abuse of power, and with the ability to call the admirals on anyone who pisses them off the average person has no hope of fighting back. It’s difficult to guess how noble the progenitors of the current Celestial Dragons were, but judging by what we know of the Void Century we can guess not very. At the same time, it’s hard to imagine them starting out as the mustache-twirling villains as we see in the current day. The only difference between the Nefertitis and the other kings was one man’s choice to stay with his people. In an alternate universe Vivi could have been a Celestial Dragon.

Now there’s an AU idea.

At the end of the day, the Celestial Dragons play an important role within the One Piece universe, but they are not, by themselves, important to Luffy. He hates their guts and enjoys punching them in the face, but he’s a pirate, not a Revolutionary. The future for One Piece is delightfully opaque, and it’s hard for me to see how the Natural Enemy of God ends up tearing the system to the ground. Will the Straw Hats end up going to space? I don’t know, but there are a lot of people who think it’s at least a possibility.

I personally find them at their most interesting when they’re playing the part of the outside influencer. The Celestial Dragons have only been the direct opponents to the Straw Hats a handful of times, but they’ve played a direct role in the lives of so many other characters—both heroic and villainous—that without them the series could not exist as it currently does.

And that’s the power of good worldbuilding. I don’t need Luffy to face off against Im to be satisfied with the series. In fact, he was brought in so late that I’ll be a little disappointed if he ends up as the final boss fight. I’m okay with the Revolutionary Army storming Mariejois off-screen, because while those are important players and major chess pieces, that’s never been where Luffy’s focus has been. He’s the man who’s going to become the Pirate King, and until the Celestial Dragons somehow get in the way of that dream he’s not going to bother with them. This lack of focus allows the inherent darkness of the Celestial Dragons not to overshadow the more lighthearted, whimsical aspects of the series. They explore certain themes that are important to One Piece, but the story doesn’t dwell in the mire, and I think it’s all the stronger for it. .

#long post #celetial dragons #world building #sarc talks

312 notes · View notes

ordinaryschmuck · 3 years

Text

What I Thought About The Mitchells vs. the Machines

The Falcon and the Winter Soldier is up there as one of the best installments of the MCU. Sure, the action and CGI sucks, and the season finale could use a bit more polish, but there is so much more of what it does right. It brings up an engaging discussion through Karli; the bromance between Bucky and Sam is incredible; Zemo's surprisingly a riot, and U.S. Agent is a character whose inner psychology is something I would like to study. Plus, the series really dives deep into the themes of race and the realistic hesitance that comes with making a black man Captain America. It's easily an 8/10 series that is worth an in-depth discussion.

But f**k that s**t, because I'm talking about The Mitchells vs. the Machines instead!

I know it might be questionable that reviewing a movie starring a predominantly white family of idiots saving the world instead of the TV series about the powerful journey of a black man taking the mantle of an American icon...but this movie is fun, alright? And yes, I'm going to spoil it to explain how. So if you still have a Netflix account, I highly suggest you check it out when you have time.

Because, random people on the internet who most likely won't read this, this Ordinary Schmuck who writes stories and reviews and draws comics and cartoons is going to explain why The Mitchells vs. the Machines might just be my favorite film of the year (steep contest, I know).

WHAT I LIKE

The Animation: Let's get this out of the way right here and right now: If a single person ever tells you that this movie has awful animation, or the worst animation they have ever seen, just go ahead and assume that person is an idiot. Because holy hot cheese sticks, does this movie look amazing!

Say what you want about most of Sony Pictures Animation's movies, but you have to admit that they nail making a CGI movie looking like it could be in 2D. And The Mitchells vs. The Machines is the peak of that style. Every character in nearly every frame looks like they could work well if the movie was hand-drawn, and I love it. I am addicted to seeing films that look 2D with a 3D makeover because there has to be ten times the amount of effort to get that look just right, what with modeling each character in unique ways to nail that style wherein a hand-drawn film, you could just, well, draw it. Not to mention that the cell-shading and certain hand-drawn elements also add to the aesthetic.

Plus, there is so much attention to details, such as most of Katie's character model being covered in sharpie, or how you can see a hint of Eric and Deborabot 3000's drawn on faces even though their black screens are showing something else. Seriously, you can listen to any criticism this movie gets, but don't you dare let someone get away with telling you that it looks awful. It doesn't. It's incredible, and I SO wish that I could have seen it all on the big screen.

The Comedy: On top of being incredibly well-animated, this movie is also incredibly funny. Like, really funny. I shouldn't be surprised since it's made by the same people responsible for Clone High and The Lego Movie, but yeah, I found myself laughing, chuckling, and snorting with nearly every joke in the film. Not every joke works, to be fair. But because of the fast-paced humor, the bad jokes are almost immediately followed up with better ones soon after. What's even better is that the writers know when to take a break with the humor and let some surprisingly compelling drama take over. And even then, when there are jokes during the dramatic moments, they add sincerity to the scene rather than take anything away. Looking at you, The Amazing World of Gumball...I mean, I love you, but sheesh, you need to learn to let a solemn moment play out.

Anyways, the comedy is hilarious. And while I won't spoil every joke, I will go over some bits that might have gotten to me the most.

Katie Mitchell: Let's just go ahead and add Katie Mitchell to the list of characters I highly relate to on a personal level (which is getting longer by the minute, hot damn). But jokes aside, I really like Katie. Her love and desire to make movies is something I identify with, and her goal to just go to a place where she feels like she belongs is easy to understand. Trust me, if I found out there was a group of weirdos who like the same things I do and enjoy the things I make, I’d be willing to pack everything I have and go to them as fast as possible too. Plus, I feel like a lot of us can relate to a character who lives in a household where people question if our career goal is something we can make a living with. I remember two years ago when I told my aunt that I wanted to make my own animated series, and her reaction is a little too similar to Rick's when Katie showed him her movie. They mean well, but sometimes it's for the best to have a cheerleader rather than a critic, especially if that person is family.

Now, Katie isn't perfect as her enthusiasm can get a little annoying at times, and her desire to leave can be conceived as a little too harsh as well. Still, she's pretty cool and serves her role as a protagonist pretty well...also, if the movie gets a sequel, let's hope she and Jude become cannon by then. GIVE KATIE A GIRLFRIEND, DAMN IT!

Aaron Mitchell: But as great as Katie is, it's this goober that earns the reward for my favorite character. At times it looks like Aaron is nothing more than a source of comedy, but he handles some dramatic moments really well. Partial credit goes to Michael Rianda for that one. Yeah, having a child actor would have made Aaron sound more like a kid, but no other voice could have fit him better than what Michael offers as he comes across as weird but never obnoxious.

Also, let's give the writer points for making a character who is clearly neurodivergent. Yet also refraining from having him be annoying or useless to the rest of the cast. No one ever really disrespects or belittles Aaron and instead chooses to work with him rather than against him. Especially Katie, who forms a solid sibling bond with Aaron as a fellow weirdo. It's genuinely sweet to see, and I loved every minute that the writers showed that just because someone acts on a different wavelength doesn't mean they shouldn't be treated any less because of it. You get that with Katie, a little bit, but I see it much more with Aaron, for some reason. And I love him every minute, so that’s a win.

(Plus, I may or may not have had a dinosaur phase when I was younger, so go ahead and add him to the list of relatable characters too.)

Rick Mitchell: This is probably a character you will either love or hate, and I can see both sides of that argument. Because on the one hand, I really like Rick Mitchell. His motivation is clear and understandable from the first set of home videos with him and Katie, both near the beginning and the end. Sure, he messes up a lot, but he is still a man who cares deeply about his daughter, as well as his entire family. He gets to the point where he would make great sacrifices for all of them, especially Katie. Plus, it's just pleasant seeing a cartoon dad who isn't a complete idiot or overprotective regarding his daughter's love life.

However, there are times when Rick comes across as an irresponsible d**k. When he does things like smash the family's phones without telling them or giving them screwdrivers for "presents," you're either gonna find that funny or you won't. Personally, I enjoy Rick and his antics, and I have no problem with irresponsible cartoon dads. As long as they don't cross the line toward Modern-Peter Griffin territory, I've got no problem with dads like Rick, who I believe has never even got that bad. Still, some people might think differently, and I can't blame them. Because after getting great cartoon dads like Greg Universe, I can understand if some people won't be interested in characters like Rick Mitchell.

Rick’s and Katie’s relationship: Alongside the top-notch animation and gut-busting comedy, Rick and Katie's relationship is what I consider the movie's most essential asset. These two are the main characters of the film, and as such, they develop through each other. And what's crazy is that they have very conflicting goals. Katie wants to escape and be with her people, where Rich just wants one last chance to have a good memory with Katie before she leaves. To do so, they first have to understand each other. Katie has to learn why Rick is so desperate to spend time with her, and Rick has to realize why Katie is, well, Katie. What I love most about it is that they try. These two don't spend the entire movie arguing and being at each other's throats until a sudden "Oh" moment in the end. No, there are actual moments when they genuinely try to understand one another and fix their relationship. It's nice to watch, and I especially love when it cuts to Linda and Aaron celebrating each time Katie and Rick get closer to each other. When recommending this movie, I'd say come for the animation and comedy, stay for the phenomenal relationship building.

Monchi: There are probably people already comparing Monchi to Mater or the Minions due to being a comic relief with nothing else to add...but gosh dangit, do I love this little gentleman. Maybe it's because I'm a dog person, but I find Monchie to be incredibly adorable, and I will fight anybody who disrespects this king of kings. Probably not physically, 'cause I'm a wuss, but I will verbally. So WATCH IT!

“HeLlO. i Am DoG.”: Have I mentioned that this movie is funny?

Rick’s videotapes of him and Katie: And right there. Rick's motivation for everything is set in stone through a solid case of visual storytelling.

PAL: The writers do almost everything they should have with this character. PAL might not have the most creative evil plan in the world, but to me, a villain can have a generic scheme as long as they're funny. Thankfully, PAL is funny. Not only is the idea of a smartphone ruling the planet hilarious in all the right ways, but Olivia Colman delivers such a great cynical energy that the character needs. The way PAL reacts to people explaining why humans are worth living is just the best, and her flopping around in a fit of rage successfully gets to me.

If I had to nitpick, I'd say that I wish PAL had more of a meaningful resolution to her character. The movie builds up that she makes a big deal about Mark dropping her, so it feels weird that neither of them really get any actual closure with each other. I'll get more into that in the dislikes, but I wish PAL had more of a fitting end than just dying after accidentally getting dropped in a glass of water. Other than that, she's a great comedic villain for a comedic movie.

PAL MAX Robots: These guys are the funniest characters in the movie. Half of it is the bits of visual humor, while the other half comes from the solid line delivery from Beck Bennett. Especially with Bennett's and Fred Armisen's Eric and Deborahbot 3000. These two are definitely the comedic highlights, as nearly every line they say is both hilarious and kind of adorable at times. And just like with Monchi, if you dare disrespect these characters, I will fight you. Because they are funny, and I will not hear otherwise.

PAL demonstrating what it’s like to be a phone: Have I mentioned that this movie is funny?

(Don't disrespect your phones, kids. Otherwise, they'll try to take over the world.)

PAL turning off the Wi-Fi: Again, have I mentioned this movie is funny?

“I love the dog. You love the dog. We all love the dog. But at some point, you’re gonna have to eat the dog.”: It's the sick jokes that get to me the most. Everyone booing Rick afterward is just the cherry on top.

Attack of the Furbies: Have I. Mentioned. That this movie. Is funny?

Seriously, if you haven't lost your s**t during every second of this scene, then you never had to deal with the demonic entity that is a Furby. In a way, I commend you. But you also don't get to appreciate the comedic genius of all of this. So I also weirdly feel bad for you.

The Mitchells deciding how to celebrate: You don't have a real family if you spend more time arguing about how to celebrate after saving the world than you do about how to save the world. I don't make the rules. I just abide by them.

The PAL MAX Primes: There's not much to say about them. The PAL MAX primes look and act pretty cool, are brilliantly animated, and raise the stakes while still being funny at times. I love 'em, but I don't have much to analyze with them either.

The origin of the moose: ...I'd make the "I didn't need my heart anyway" joke, but to be honest, it's still shattered after WandaVision.

(For real, though, this is a really effective scene that establishes why Rick makes a big deal with the moose and why he might feel hurt that Katie is willing to disregard it completely)

The Theme of Technology and Social Media: There's a theme about how family is important, and working hard on making things work is worth the effort. But that's a bit too generic for my tastes, so instead, I'm gonna talk about the equally important message this movie has about technology. Because as twisted as she is, PAL makes a great point. The technology we have today helps us in a variety of ways. It's especially useful with sites like YouTube, allowing content creators like Katie to reach out and share their voices. The only issue with technology is how people use it. Take note that the main reason why the Mitchells stand a chance against PAL is by using her own tech against her. Yes, over-relying on all the advancements around us can be dangerous, but if we're smart with how we use them, we can get by just fine. This movie isn't about purging all technology like most robot apocalypse stories are. Instead, it's about using it correctly and not being helpless sheep the second the Wi-Fi gets turned off. Which might just be the most unique thing this movie has going for it story-wise (more on that later).

The Climax: The Mitchells vs. The Machines has everything that I think I climax should have. First off, it utilizes callbacks and jokes that I wouldn't have thought twice on actually coming in handy for how the Mitchells win the day. But showing that Monchi causes the robots to malfunction turns a pretty "eh" joke into a solid case of foreshadowing.

Second, everyone does something. Some characters do more than others, sure, but the fact that every Mitchell, even Monchi, has a hand in beating PAL and her robots is a great sense of writing to me. It shows that you really can't cut anyone from the main cast, as they each add value to how they are essential to the plot. Even Aaron, who arguably does the least in the climax, still manages to be the catalyst to what is easily the best scene in the movie. Speaking of which...

Linda Kicks Ass: By the way, that's the actual name on the soundtrack. I'm not even kidding. Check it.

Anyways, for the most part, Linda seemed like a decent cartoon mom. She's insanely supportive but still has the common sense to keep her foot down, like agreeing with Rick to stay safe in the dino stop the second the apocalypse starts. A pretty fun character, for sure, but nothing too noteworthy...but the second she loses her s**t, Linda Mitchell frickin' SKYROCKETS to the best-cartoon-mom territory! Believe me when I tell you that seeing her slice and dice robots like a middle-aged female Samurai Jack is as awesome as it is hilarious. Does it make sense how she can suddenly do this? No, but at the same time, who gives a s**t about common sense?! Because this moment was epic, and I don't think I'll ever get tired of watching it over and over again.

Rick Learning How to Internet...Again: I consider this the funniest moment in the movie. Trust me, the Furby scene is a close, close, CLOSE, second...but I think this scene was funnier.

The final goodbye: This is what I'm talking about when I say humor adds to the dramatic moments. The Mitchells saying "I love you" in moose is pretty funny, but it's also a sweet moment given that this is absolutely how this family of weirdos would say goodbye to each other. And, yeah, I got a little misty-eyed during this scene. Especially when Rick saw Katie pocketing the moose. That s**t just cuts deep, man.

Alex Hirsch Voices a Character: ...That's it. I look up to Alex Hirsh as everything I want to be as a creator, and the fact that his name is on this movie fills me with joy. He's also a story consultant, so that can also explain why the movie turned out as great as it did...although there are some imperfections.

WHAT I DISLIKE

Katie-vision: What's Katie-vision? Well, throughout the movie, we get to see how Katie views the world as there are these hand-drawn elements that look like effects Katie would add if she was the one who made the movie. At times it can be subtle and cute, like when this little beating heart appears when Katie is talking with Jude and her other friends. It's when the movie is in your face with Katie-vision does it get annoying. Like showing how Katie is lying about being certain she can drive up a vertical ramp or signifying what is the Rick Mitchell Special. Even if you justify that this would be how Katie would edit the movie, it still doesn't change how obnoxious these moments can be. For instance, Monchi is justified to be essential for the plot, but that doesn't mean people won't hate him...I'll still fight them if they do, but that's beside the point.

I can totally accept this being a personal issue, as I'm sure some people enjoy it. As for me, I think Katie-vision works best when used subtly instead of crudely.

The Meme humor: It's something similar here. Because some people like meme humor...but I don't. To me, it just dates your story if you reference memes even once. Now, a show, movie, or book being partially dated is nothing new. We Bare Bears, a series that I love, reference memes, apps, and social media constantly. Yet, the show still has a timeless feel to it as it doesn't rely on those references too much. The Mitchells vs. the Machines doesn't rely on memes as much either. But even then, that doesn't make a difference about how annoying that gibbon monkey joke was. Seriously, what the f**k was that? And how is THAT the joke that gets used twice!?

Underutilizing Mark Bowman: It really bothers me how this guy barely does much. I mean, Mark Bowman is the main reason that anything happens in the movie. Because he mistreated PAL, Mark acts as the catalyst for events to come. So the fact that he could have been written out the second PAL takes control doesn't make sense to me. It's worse since I could see more potential with his character through his relationship with PAL. These two could be anti-Rick and Katie, as Mark and PAL show what happens when people disrespect their family. So separating them halfway through the story, and keeping them as such, is a huge mistake as it results in neither having a proper resolution to their arcs. Like I said, Rick and Katie develop through each other, and the same could have happened with Mark and PAL. It doesn't, making it something that I can't help but feel disappointed about.

The Poseys: These are characters I feel like work better with multiple appearances. Sure, they only have the one joke about being a perfect family, but at the same time, you can make a joke like that work. Look at Yvonne from Shaun of the Dead (Which might just be my favorite movie). That's a bit-character whose only purpose is showing how better she is than Shaun despite being in an eerily similar situation. But she works well as we constantly see how great she's doing in every instance we see her. The same could be done with the Poseys, as using a similar joke for one scene is underutilizing great potential to make an already good movie into a better one.

Plus, if you're gonna shoehorn in a romance between Aaron and Abby Posey, the least you could do is have more than one scene developing that...just saying.

Katie’s and Rick’s “Oh” Moments: I want to make it clear that I actually like these scenes. They're well written and effectively emotional. My problem is that they also happen two seconds apart. There's nothing wrong with having a character realize the error of their ways through a tear-jerking moment. It's a popular tactic for a reason. And given how both Rick and Katie are the protagonists, they both need their own "oh" moment. But you gotta space them out, as it makes things easier to see the emotional manipulation that you're clearly trying to pull on the audience. They work, but putting them back to back is an issue easily solved with at least two minutes of padding, not two seconds.

Katie’s Death Fakeout: This is one of the few instances that a joke doesn't work in the movie, made even more annoying with the fact that I could see the punchline a mile away and kept thinking, "Just get to it already." I'm pretty sure no one bought this, especially when Katie didn't look like she could have gotten killed in any way after throwing PAL. It's poorly handled and proof that even the funniest comedies have a stale joke every now and again.

Nothing New is really being done here: Keep in mind that in terms of style, this movie is incredibly innovative. And here's hoping future animated projects can take notes. But narratively speaking? Yeah, there's nothing really new that this movie is offering.

A story about how technology will be the death of us? Been there.

A story about a group of idiots miraculously saving the world? Done that.

A story about a father forcing their teenager on a road trip so they can spend quality time with each other, thus ruining the teen's chance of hanging out with their girlfriend? Believe it or not, I have seen A Goofy Movie...multiple times...both as a kid and as an adult.

Now, I have no issue with a movie's plot being a bit by-the-books, and in some cases, cliche. If done effectively, and if I still have a good time, I don't think there’s much to complain about. And there isn't with The Mitchells vs. The Machines. The problem lies with that I'll forget this movie along with the dozens of others like it in a couple years. Which might just be the biggest issue any film can have.

---------------------

Overall, I'd give The Mitchells vs. the Machines a well-earned A-. It has nitpicks, sure, but it's still a blast to watch. It might not be innovative or groundbreaking as movies like the last Sony Pictures Animation movie, Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse. However, it is fun. And when the world is burning down around us, it's nice to have a fun movie that can distract us from all of it. So feel free to log in to Netflix the next time you're in the mood for a film that is great for the whole family. You won’t be disapointed

(And I will talk about The Falcon and the Winter Soldier pretty soon. I just needed to get this out of my system first.)

#the mitchells vs the machines #what i thought about

18 notes · View notes

hopeymchope · 3 years

Text

World’s End Club demo thoughts

As a follow-up to the ask I recently responded to, I downloaded and played through the demo for World’s End Club last night. It’s just a single level/chapter, and it didn’t take much more than an hour to complete it.

Overall, I really enjoyed it - primarily for how the “Game of Fate” unfurled across the first chapter. Said “Game of Fate” is the much-publicized Fake Death Game, and it centers around a setup that’s reminiscent of Danganronpa 3′s Future Arc. I’ll get into more detail much later after a Spoiler Cut, but suffice to say that everybody starts getting suspicious of one another immediately, and many betrayals occur in short order. The exact nature of how people would get knocked out of the game and why was what kept me most intrigued by the numerous cut scenes. Many people’s wristbands have rules that are tied in with other people’s rules, so there’s a domino effect of causality whenever someone is “eliminated” that quickly became my favorite part of the first chapter’s storytelling setup. Learning the reasons why someone suddenly teams up with a character they don’t get along with or why someone is eliminated for seemingly no reason? That’s a lot of fun.

Pielope the weird floating jester-like thing will be your Monokuma for the demo.

The characters are pretty thin as they are presented in this demo, but obviously it’s WAY too early to really know much about them. There’s even an end-of-demo twist that makes the characters’ behavior in this first level retroactively be even less revealing of their natures. The good news here is that everyone is well-voiced, and that helps them to be likable. Naturally, it’s particularly easy to grow fond of the characters who serve as a lifeline of kindness and sanity while the majority are betraying you.

Unfortunately, although most of the characters are voiced, there is one who isn’t: The protagonist that the player controls, Reycho. He’s one of those “silent protagonists” who isn’t silent at all; he talks, but the player simply never hears what he says. I’ve always disliked silent protagonists in games where everybody else is talking, so this just annoyed me, but it’s hardly a deal-breaker.

Perhaps he has laryngitis, and he’s communicating with surprising effectiveness by flapping his mouth and gesturing emphatically?

The first level consists more of cut scenes than actual side-scrolling gameplay, which is fine with me. Danganronpa games are similarly structured; you spend more time on the Visual Novel elements than on the interactive gameplay side, so this kind of balance is very much in my wheelhouse. Platforming is basically a non-issue in this chapter, and there were only three puzzles to solve in the entirety of the chapter, but hey, I liked them. One was painfully obvious, but the other two took me a little bit of thought. They’re far from hard IMO, but they took enough brain usage to make me feel good for figuring them out. The latest trailer reveals that future chapters will actually include boss fights (!), so that means we’re going to see some combat elements to the gameplay that aren’t even introduced in this demo. Sounds cool.

There are also a couple of “choices” you can make in the first level that can result in early Game Overs (with unique dialogue/scenes) if you do the wrong thing. If you’re a fan of games with multiple endings, I imagine that seeing all of the unique Game Overs could prove pretty entertaining, so this was another aspect I dug.

By the time the demo ends, there is still a ton of mystery around what’s happening in the game. That’s going to be the driving factor in keeping me invested, I suspect. Well, that and the voice acting. Both of those elements are what made me immediately wish I could go on to the next area.

If you want some kind of report on the technical aspects of the game, I can say that it’s got a cool soundtrack and the art style is appealing to me, but that stuff is subjective anyway. Character animations are frequently stiff and awkward, but who cares? If you’ve ever played Zero Escape’s latter two games, you should really expect that by now. :P And hell, the Danganronpa games aren’t animated at all most of the time, so let’s not act like we’re demanding some high-quality mocap in this sort of story. We’re here for the writing and characters more than anything, correct?

Now I’ll actually explain the setup of the “Game of Fate” so that I can complain a little about it. Spoilers for the demo/first level.

Here’s how the Game of Fate works in brief: The cast is trapped in an underwater building-type construct. Each member of the cast is wearing a digital wristband that tells them the “goal” of someone else in the cast. The only way to learn your own goal is to find the person wearing the wristband that states your goal. However, as soon as any one person accomplishes their goal, that person wins and "there can only be one winner,” so it’s probably in your best interest to keep your wristband hidden... if you assume that not winning means you’re automatically a loser. (Note that this is never outright stated by Pielope, although “there can only be one winner” could be argued as implying that the rest become losers.)

The winner gets a “magic key” that can unlock any lock, but it can only be used on a single lock before it “disappears.” Given that they are all trapped in this underwater prison, the obvious place to use the key is the exit door that leads to the surface. As for the losers who get eliminated by failing their goals or rendering them impossible, the cast is told that anyone who “loses” will die. But of course, the creators of the game have already spoiled us on the fact that this is a fake-out. In terms of in-universe logic, however, it makes for a frightening motivator for the kids.

The kids might have been too scared to spot them, but of course I, the player, immediately saw the loopholes here. 1) No one ever says or even implies that only one person can pass through the exit or anything. 2) People who simply don’t reach their goals first (but don’t render them impossible to complete) aren’t automatically called “losers.” Ergo, there is little reason why everybody wouldn’t immediately help one person to complete their goal so that they can all survive and unlock the exit, right? Just walk out the door together! Nobody manages to think of this, though. Alas.

In fairness... near the end of the level/demo, we are given some information hat could be seen as a retroactive explanation for why this didn’t just happen, and I was grateful for it.

#world's end club #world's end club demo #demos #tookyo games #video games #Kotaro Uchikoshi #kazutaka kodaka

15 notes · View notes

justforbooks · 3 years

Photo

Fifty Great Classic Novels Under 200 Pages

We are now end of February, which is technically the shortest month, but is also the one that—for me, anyway—feels the longest. Especially this year, for all of the reasons that you already know. At this point, if you keep monthly reading goals, even vague ones, you may be looking for few a good, short novels to knock out in an afternoon or two. So now I must turn my attention to my favorite short classics—which represent the quickest and cheapest way, I can tell you in my salesman voice, to become “well-read.”

A few notes: This list will define “classic” as being originally published before 1970. Yes, these distinctions are somewhat arbitrary, but one has to draw the line somewhere (though I let myself fudge on translation dates). I did not differentiate between novels and novellas (as Steven Millhauser would tell you, the novella is not a form at all, but merely a length), but let’s be honest with ourselves: “The Dead” is a short story, and so is “The Metamorphosis.” Sorry! I limited myself to one book by each author, valiantly, I should say, because I was tempted to cheat (looking at you Jean Rhys).

Most importantly for our purposes here: lengths vary with editions, sometimes wildly. I did not include a book below unless I could find that it had been published at least once in fewer than 200 pages—which means that some excellent novels, despite coming tantalizingly close to the magic number, had to be left off for want of proof (see Mrs. Dalloway, Black No More, Slaughterhouse-Five, etc. etc. etc.). However, your personal edition might not exactly match the number I have listed here. Don’t worry: it’ll still be short.

Finally, as always: “best” lists are subjective, no ranking is definitive, and I’ve certainly forgotten, or never read, or run out of space for plenty of books and writers here. And admittedly, the annoying constraints of this list make it more heavily populated by white and male writers than I would have liked. Therefore, please add on at will in the comments. After all, these days, I’m always looking for something old to read.

Adolfo Bioy Casares, tr. Ruth L.C. Simms, The Invention of Morel (1940) : 103 pages

Both Jorge Luis Borges and Octavio Paz described this novel as perfect, and I admit I can’t find much fault with it either. It is technically about a fugitive whose stay on a mysterious island is disturbed by a gang of tourists, but actually it’s about the nature of reality and our relationship to it, told in the most hypnotizing, surrealist style. A good anti-beach read, if you plan that far ahead.

John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men (1937) : 107 pages

Everybody’s gateway Steinbeck is surprisingly moving, even when you revisit it as an adult. Plus, if nothing else, it has given my household the extremely useful verb “to Lenny.”

George Orwell, Animal Farm (1945) : 112 pages

If we didn’t keep putting it on lists, how would future little children of America learn what an allegory is? This is a public service, you see.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) : 112 pages

A people-pleaser, in more ways than one: Sherlock Holmes, after all, had been dead for years when his creator finally bent to public demand (and more importantly, the demand of his wallet) and brought him back, in this satisfying and much-beloved tale of curses and hell-beasts and, of course, deductions.

James M. Cain, The Postman Always Rings Twice (1933) : 112 pages

A 20th century classic, and still one of the best, most important, and most interesting crime novels in the canon. Fun fact: Cain had originally wanted to call it Bar-B-Q.

Nella Larsen, Passing (1929) : 122 pages

One of the landmarks of the Harlem Renaissance, about not only race but also gender and class—not to mention self-invention, perception, capitalism, motherhood and friendship—made indelible by what Darryl Pinckney called “a deep fatalism at the core.”

Albert Camus, tr. Matthew Ward, The Stranger (1942) : 123 pages

I had a small obsession with this book as a moody teen, and I still think of it with extreme fondness. Is it the thinking person’s Catcher in the Rye? Who can say. But Camus himself put it this way, writing in 1955: “I summarized The Stranger a long time ago, with a remark I admit was highly paradoxical: “In our society any man who does not weep at his mother’s funeral runs the risk of being sentenced to death.” I only meant that the hero of my book is condemned because he does not play the game.”

Juan Rulfo, tr. Margaret Sayers Peden, Pedro Páramo (1955) : 128 pages

The strange, fragmented ghost story that famously paved the way for One Hundred Years of Solitude (according to Gabriel García Márquez himself), but is an enigmatic masterpiece in its own right.

Italo Calvino, tr. Archibald Colquhoun, The Cloven Viscount (1959) : 128 pages

This isn’t my favorite Calvino, but you know what they say: all Calvino is good Calvino (also, I forgot him on the contemporary list, so I’m making up for it slightly here). The companion volume to The Nonexistent Knight and The Baron in the Trees concerns a Viscount who is clocked by a cannonball and split into two halves: his good side and his bad side. They end up in a duel over their wife, of course—just like in that episode of Buffy. But turns out that double the Viscounts doesn’t translate to double the pages.

Kate Chopin, The Awakening (1899) : 128 pages

I know, I know, but honestly, this book, which is frequently taught in American schools as an example of early feminist literature, is still kind of edgy—more than 120 years later, and it’s still taboo for a woman to put herself and her own desires above her children. Whom among us has not wanted to smash a symbolic glass vase into the hearth?

Leo Tolstoy, tr. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) : 128 pages

Another classic—Tolstoy can do it all, long and short—particularly beloved by the famously difficult-to-impress Nabokov, who described it as “Tolstoy’s most artistic, most perfect, and most sophisticated achievement,” and explained the thrust of it this way: “The Tolstoyan formula is: Ivan lived a bad life and since the bad life is nothing but the death of the soul, then Ivan lived a living death; and since beyond death is God’s living light, then Ivan died into a new life—Life with a capital L.”

Richard Brautigan, In Watermelon Sugar (1968) : 138 pages

Brautigan’s wacky post-apocalyptic novel concerns a bunch of people living in a commune called iDEATH. (Which, um, relatable.) The landscape is groovy and the tigers do math, and the titular watermelon sugar seems to be the raw material for everything from homes to clothes. “Wherever you are, we must do the best we can. It is so far to travel, and we have nothing here to travel, except watermelon sugar. I hope this works out.” It’s all nonsense, of course, but it feels so good.

James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) : 140 pages

Another early novel on the subject of passing—originally published in 1912, then again under Johnson’s name in 1927—this one presented as an “autobiography” written by a Black man living as white, but uneasily, considering himself a failure, feeling until the end the grief of giving up his heritage and all the pain and joy that came with it.

Thomas Mann, tr. Michael Henry Heim, Death in Venice (1912) : 142 pages

What it says on the tin—a story as doomed as Venice itself, but also a queer and philosophical mini-masterpiece. The year before the book’s publication, Mann wrote to a friend: “I am in the midst of work: a really strange thing I brought with me from Venice, a novella, serious and pure in tone, concerning a case of pederasty in an aging artist. You say, ‘Hum, hum!’ but it is quite respectable.” Indeed.

Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962) : 146 pages

If you’re reading this space, you probably already know how much we love this book at Literary Hub. After that excellent opening paragraph, it only gets better.

Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man (1964) : 152 pages

Isherwood’s miniature, jewel-like masterpiece takes place over a single day in the life of a middle-aged English expat (who shares a few qualities with Isherwood himself), a professor living uneasily in California after the unexpected death of his partner. An utterly absorbing and deeply pleasurable novel.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, tr. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Notes from Underground (1864) : 154 pages

Probably the best rant ever passed off as literature. Dostoevsky's first masterpiece has been wildly influential in the development of existential and dystopian storytelling of all kinds, not to mention in the development of my own high school misanthropy. Maybe yours, too? “It was all from ENNUI, gentlemen, all from ENNUI; inertia overcame me . . .” Actually, now I’m thinking that it might be a good book to re-read in pandemic isolation.

Anna Kavan, Ice (1967) : 158 pages

The narrator of this strange and terrifying novel obsessively pursues a young woman through an icy apocalypse. You might call it a fever dream if it didn’t feel so . . . cold. Reading it, wrote Jon Michaud on its 50th anniversary, is “a disorienting and at times emotionally draining experience, not least because, these days, one might become convinced that Kavan had seen the future.” Help.

Jean Toomer, Cane (1923) : 158 pages

Toomer’s experimental, multi-disciplinary novel, now a modernist classic, is presented as a series of vignettes, poems, and swaths of dialogue—but to be honest, all of it reads like poetry. Though its initial reception was uncertain, it has become one of the most iconic and influential works of 1920s American literature.

J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World (1962) : 158 pages

Only in a Ballard novel can climate change make you actually become insane—and only a Ballard novel could still feel so sticky and hot in my brain, years after I read it in a single afternoon.

Knut Hamsun, tr. Sverre Lyngstad, Hunger (1890) : 158 pages

The Nobel Prize winner’s first novel is, as Hamsun himself put it, “an attempt to describe the strange, peculiar life of the mind, the mysteries of the nerves in a starving body.” An modernist psychological horror novel that is notoriously difficult, despite its length, but also notoriously worth it.

James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room (1956) : 159 pages

Still my favorite Baldwin, and one of the most convincing love stories of any kind ever written, about which there is too much to say: it is a must-read among must-reads.

Willa Cather, O Pioneers! (1913) : 159 pages

A mythic, proto-feminist frontier novel about a young Swedish immigrant making a home for herself in Nebraska, with an unbearably cool and modern title (in my opinion).

Françoise Sagan, tr. Irene Ash, Bonjour Tristesse (1955) : 160 pages

Sagan’s famously scandalous novel of youthful hedonism, published (also famously) when Sagan was just 19 herself, is much more psychologically nuanced than widely credited. As Rachel Cusk wrote, it is not just a sexy French novel, but also “a masterly portrait that can be read as a critique of family life, the treatment of children and the psychic consequences of different forms of upbringing.” It is a novel concerned not only with morals or their lack, but with the very nature of morality itself.

Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor (1924) : 160 pages

Bartleby may be more iconic (and more fun), but Billy Budd is operating on a grander scale, unfinished as it may be.

Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) : 160 pages

Everyone’s gateway to Pynchon, and also everyone’s gateway to slapstick postmodernism. Either you love it or you hate it!

Franz Kafka, tr. Willa and Edwin Muir, The Trial (1925) : 160 pages

Required reading for anyone who uses the term “Kafkaesque”—but don’t forget that Kafka himself would burst out laughing when he read bits of the novel out loud to his friends. Do with that what you will.

Kenzaburo Oe, tr. John Nathan, A Personal Matter (1968) : 165 pages

Whew. This book is a lot: absolutely gorgeous and supremely painful, and probably the Nobel Prize winner’s most important.

Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (1936) : 170 pages

In his preface to the first edition, T.S. Eliot praised “the great achievement of a style, the beauty of phrasing, the brilliance of wit and characterisation, and a quality of horror and doom very nearly related to that of Elizabethan tragedy.” It is also a glittering modernist masterpiece, and one of the first novels of the 20th century to explicitly portray a lesbian relationship.

Yasunari Kawabata, tr. Edward G. Seidensticker, Snow Country (1937) : 175 pages

A story of doomed love spun out in a series of indelible, frozen images—both beautiful and essentially suspicious of beauty—by a Nobel Prize winner.

Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) : 176 pages

This novel, Rhys’s famous riposte to one of the worst love interests in literary history, tells the story of Mr. Rochester from the point of view of the “madwoman in the attic.” See also: Good Morning, Midnight (1939), which is claustrophobic, miserable, pointless, and damn fine reading.

George Eliot, Silas Marner (1861) : 176 pages

Like Middlemarch, Silas Marner is exquisitely written and ecstatically boring. Unlike Middlemarch, it is quite short.

Muriel Spark, The Girls of Slender Means (1963) : 176 pages

The girls of Spark’s novel live in the May of Teck Club, disturbed but not destroyed by WWII—both the Club, that is, and the girls. “Their slenderness lies not so much in their means,” Carol Shields wrote in an appreciation of the book, “as in their half-perceived notions about what their lives will become and their overestimation of their power in the world. They are fearless and frightened at the same time, as only the very young can be, and they are as heartless in spirit as they are merry in mode.” Can’t go wrong with Muriel Spark.

Robert Walser, tr. Christopher Middleton, Jakob von Gunten (1969) : 176 pages

Walser is a writer’s writer, a painfully underrated genius; this novel, in which a privileged youth runs off to enroll at a surrealist school for servants, may be his best.

Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958) : 179 pages

Read for proof that Holly Golightly was meant to be a Marilyn.

Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (1958) : 181 pages

A powerful, clear-eyed, and haunting novel, which at the time of its publication was transgressive in its centering of African characters in all their humanity and complexity, and which paved the way for thousands of writers all over the world in the years to follow.

Leonard Gardner, Fat City (1969) : 183 pages

Universally acknowledged as the best boxing novel ever written, but so much more than that: at its core, it’s a masterpiece about that secret likelihood of life, if not of literature: never achieving your dreams.

N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn (1968) : 185 pages

House Made of Dawn, Momaday’s first novel, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and is often credited with ushering in the Native American Renaissance. Intricate, romantic, and lush, it is at its core about the creaking dissonance of two incompatible worlds existing in the same place (both literally and metaphysically) at the same time.

Chester Himes, If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945) : 186 pages

Himes’ first novel spans four days in the life of a Californian named Bob Jones, whose every step is dogged by racism. Walter Mosely called Himes, who is also renowned for his detective fiction, a “quirky American genius,” and also “one of the most important American writers of the 20th century.” If He Hollers Let Him Go, while not technically a detective story, is “firmly located in the same Los Angeles noir tradition as The Big Sleep and Devil in a Blue Dress,” Nathan Jefferson has written. “Himes takes the familiar mechanics of these novels—drinking, driving from one end of Los Angeles to another in search of answers, a life under constant threats of danger—and filters them through the lens of a black man lacking any agency and control over his own life, producing something darker and more oppressive than the traditional pulp detective’s story.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925) : 189 pages

All my life I have wanted to scoff at The Great Gatsby. Usually, things that are universally adored are bad, or at least mediocre. But every time I reread it, I remember: impossibly, annoyingly, it is as good as they say.

Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin (1957) : 190 pages

Still one of my favorite campus novels, and short enough to read in between classes.

Charles Portis, Norwood (1966) : 190 pages

Portis has gotten a lot of (well-deserved) attention in recent years for True Grit, but his first novel, Norwood, is almost as good, a comic masterpiece about a young man traipsing across a surreal America to lay his hands on $70.

Philip K. Dick, Ubik (1969) : 191 pages

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and A Scanner Darkly have more mainstream name recognition (thank you Hollywood) but Ubik is Dick’s masterpiece, filled to the brim with psychics and anti-psis, dead wives half-saved in cold-pac, and disruptions to time and reality that can be countered by an aerosol you get at the drugstore. Sometimes, anyway.

Clarice Lispector, tr. Alison Entrekin, Near to the Wild Heart (1943) : 192 pages

Lispector’s debut novel, first published in Brazil when she was only 19, is still my favorite of hers: fearless, sharp-edged, and brilliant, a window into one of the most interesting narrators in literature.

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (1962) : 192 pages

This novel is probably more famous these days for the Kubrick film, but despite the often gruesome content, the original text is worth a read for the language alone.

Barbara Comyns, Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead (1954) : 193 pages

Comyns is a criminally under-read genius, though she’s been getting at least a small taste of the attention she deserves in recent years due to reissues by NYRB and Dorothy. This one is my favorite, permeated, as Brian Evenson puts it in the introduction of my copy, with marvelousness, “a kind of hybrid of the pastoral and the naturalistic, an idyllic text about what it’s like to grow up next to a river, a text that also just happens to contain some pretty shocking and sad disasters.” Which is putting it rather mildly indeed.

Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) : 194 pages

In 194 pages, Janie goes through more husbands than most literary heroines can manage in twice as many (and finds herself in equally short order).

Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome (1911) : 195 pages

To be honest with you, though it has been variously hailed as a masterpiece, I find Ethan Frome to be lesser Wharton—but even lesser Wharton is better than a lot of people’s best.

Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967) : 198 pages

The mood this novel—of disappeared teens and Australian landscape and uncertainty—lingers much longer than the actual reading time.

Angela Carter, The Magic Toyshop (1967) : 200 pages

“The summer she was fifteen,” Carter’s second novel begins, “Melanie discovered she was made of flesh and blood.” It is that year that she is uprooted from her home in London to the wilds of America, and it is that year she comes to term with herself. “It is often the magical, fabular aspects of Carter’s stories that people focus on, but in The Magic Toyshop I responded to the way she blended this with a clear-eyed realism about what it was to live in a female body,” Evie Wyld wrote in her ode to this novel. “In a novel so brilliantly conjured from splayed toothbrush heads, mustard-and-cress sandwiches and prawn shells, bread loaves and cutlery, brickwork and yellow household soap, the female body is both one more familiar object and at the same time something strange and troubling.”

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at http://justforbooks.tumblr.com

#JUST FOR BOOKS

30 notes · View notes