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animatedminds · 17 days
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Star Wars Covers by Alex Ross
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animatedminds · 1 month
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I [Want To] Do Animation To!
In a move I can only hope is clever, I'm going to start pivoting this channel a little from just being my random goofball thoughts and pretentious reviews about animated media into showcasing more of my own work. Over time, I'll start using this blog not just to comment on animation and art, but also host more work I've made, old specs and scripts, etc, I can't really do anything with any more, etc. With that in mind, I'll start with reintroducing you to the animated/visual novel-style short I wrote and directed, with the help of a pair of very talented artists a couple years ago: The Seminars for Better Heroing!
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I'm especially proud of this one, particularly because I'm currently in the process of retooling it as a 22 minute animated series and (fingers crossed) pitching it to prospective studios!
Enjoy the sarcastic reminiscence of a retired hero / villain pair, and look out for more Seminars content coming up as well!
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animatedminds · 2 months
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On Moana 2:
I'm torn. On the one hand, the various areas of Polynesian folklore and history are collectively an extremely interesting subject for an animated period film to cover and it bugged me that a lot of it got left on the cutting room floor the first time so Disney could tell it's vaguely self-digging "anti-princess, but actually a princess" story.
So a sequel to explore that more would be amazing. Plus Moana was a fun character who felt like she only somewhat got to stretch out and shine in her own movie, so more of her without the story holding her back sounds great in the same way Frozen 2 really improved the amount of space Elsa had as a character (in my opinion).
On the other hand, because of the way they did it the first time around, I would really just prefer if they made a new film set in that region that's actually based on an actual folktale.
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animatedminds · 2 months
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Too bad it's impossible to get a picture of the narrator from Love Is War. Also, Ian Sinclair is Rashid? Losing some fighting gamer and voice over enthusiast points for not knowing that...
Ian Sinclair | Thursday, 03.02.2023
Got a favorite character voiced by Ian Sinclair across any anime or video games right now? Here are my personal favorites down below.
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animatedminds · 2 months
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animatedminds · 2 months
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Watching Moon Girl: Season 2
Can't decide whether this show or Spy X Family has the best character faces for reaction images. Both shows are just top notch for extra facial expressions. Also the second season is even better than the first one go watch it right now.
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animatedminds · 8 months
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Catching up on "My Adventures With Superman"
I've been watching this one but doing it in the stints thing where I take a break for a couple weeks and then binge a few episodes at once. Just did one of those to catch up to the present and thought I'd share my reactions to the latest episode... seeing as it features my favorite of all of Superman's villains: the illustrious Mr. Mxyzptlk.
I know I'm Super late on this (ha), given that this is six episodes in, but I think I'll just give my thoughts on the two-parters coming up as they come/conclude and then my final thoughts on the show as a whole when its over. You can already get a bit of that towards the end of this, though. Episode 6: "Kiss, Kiss, Fall in Portal." So, this one reminded me of Spider-Verse. Not the movie. The original comic. And not in a good way. It has that same "we'll introduce the multiverse to give every bit of continuity ever made an established place so that we can homage everything... but actually devalue everything by forcing it to fit into a very rigid and contrived paradigm" feel.
For a while I've been starting to think the people who make this show don't actually see Superman's world and characters as especially interesting, which is why they've mostly been turning them into imitations of other things. The Legion of Lois'es, especially, really brought that feeling out: so the ultimate evolution of every prominent Lois Lane in every previous Superman property we've ever seen is... to cease to be Lois Lane and become Flash Gordon instead? It's such a jarring contrast for the primary Lois in this series to be someone whose main motivation is to become a reporter and help people by getting answers, only for the show to say "once you become the best you can be you won't even need to be a reporter anymore - then you'll be a cool sci-fi hero and do cool sci-fi hero stuff!" - and it then feels like Lois feeling insecure falls flat because none of these characters even do the things she or any other Lois we've ever seen cares about. I think it mostly hit me this way because this doesn't really get a resolution. The characters give the Multiverse Police the slip (which I do love, see below), but there isn't really a "I'm going to be the best I am because that's who I am, not what you think I'm worth" moment from Lois. She (and thus, the show) just kind of internalizes it.
I might be being harsh on it, I think. But it's comes off an idea that was intended as a homage on paper but ceased to work as one in execution - and instead maybe felt a bit like the opposite. On top of that "we love these characters and put them on a pedestal through nostalgia, so what if characters in-universe actually had the same reactions to those same characters and treated them the same way" is pretty much an idea I've never seen work out - it always just ends up turning characters into reflections of fan reactions, instead of allowing them to be... well... characters.
I'm explicitly not getting into the Clark implications, firstly because everyone overreacts the hell out any time an evil Clark or Clark-like character shows up in anything these days, second because the issues with the concept are evident even before Clark comes into it, and third because - due to the first - I think people are focusing too much on Clark specifically and not enough on how the concept as a whole wasn't great to characters involved (except Jimmy / Jalana because this show's versions of any Olsen continue to be a treasure).
And fourth because the "the characters discover some versions of their friend went bad" does actually line perfectly well up with the season's overall plot about Lois' dad being a paranoid nutter, but the Kryptonians maybe being evil and Clark being an unclear cog in the gears of this strange mystery. It's a plot decision I really liked in this show: I'm suspecting we might end up with something Iron Giant-esque, where all evidence points to the hero being a monster, but the hero refuses to fall into expectation as their friends refuse to fall victim to the fearmongering.
But... overall, all that is why I really liked how the main characters' ultimate response to the judgmental multiversal police squad was a "screw you guys, we're going home" without even a goodbye. Screw that noise. Presumably the Lois'es from other continuities who pointedly aren't among the Lois'es actually in the judgmental multiverse police squad did something similar. Live your life as yourself. Good message, though I think show could've been more overt about delivering it.
On the flipside, Mxy was fun. He was a tread to Lois & Clark's "more malevolent Mxy who wants to be a god" idea, which is... hate to repeat myself... fun. But being fun it what's most important where Mxy is concerned. It's a little less interesting to have a Mxy who needs power because he wants to be a god vs a Mxy who already has power and finds concepts like godhood boring, but I don't think traditional Mxy is in line with how this show envisions threats, and regardless he was delightfully tricky and - let's face it - is one of the two big things absolutely carrying the episode (the other being Clark and Lois' relationship, as usual).
All in all, the show continues to hit me two ways at once: I really love the way it's interpreting the characters and their relationships - again, Jimmy is fantastic and Lois and Clark's relationship is nuanced, adorable and continually keeps me invested - but the plot decisions that surround those great characterizations keep missing, often feeling like they're wasting good concepts.
I hope I'm wrong about the feeling I'm getting that the writers maybe have some overall apathy for Superman's world and characters, but bit by bit the show keeps making me wonder - I just wish the show would start feeling excited to reinterpret these characters rather than flippant.
Either way, though, fun episode. More Mxy is always a treasure.
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animatedminds · 8 months
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I love the way women depict women.
A lot of action and fantasy media is male-focused. Made by men, for men. Sometimes made by women for men or by men for women but in both of those cases, male-centric understanding of the world often dominates nonetheless.
Created by Stan Lee and John Buscema to be a sexy female Hulk, original comic book Jen falls well into that category. And the comics love putting her body and sexuality on display, right down to the infamous "BECAUSE YOU DEMANDED IT" naked jump-rope issue. You know the one. No, that wasn't a meme. That was a real thing that they did with this character.
But the MCU's Jen is produced and directed by women, for women. And the difference is palpable.
In male-centric media, female characters are frequently confrontational for no reason. Take something like Stranger Things, which introduces a second girl to one of its three cast herds in its second season, and they instantly despise each other from the second they meet. It isn't until the third season that the showrunners stop doing that. Women presented by men are often catty and mean to each other by default. Because that's how men view women.
But then you sit down to something like She-Hulk, something made by women for women, and you get things like the bathroom scene. A group of women come into the bathroom to find Jen bloody and disoriented. And they lightswitch into Mission Mode.
Because they know.
They aren't entirely correct in their assumptions, because Jen's dealing with supernatural fantasy bullshit. But they know. And they drop what they're doing to help out a strange woman they've never met who seems to be going through a familiar crisis. Whatever they were doing before, it doesn't matter anymore. Nothing matters more than forming a wall, talking this woman through what she's going through, and getting her to safety.
Because that's how women view women.
And we don't get to see enough of it in media. In an ocean of bromances, there are too few scenes of women even just stepping forward to have another woman's back.
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animatedminds · 8 months
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An Animated Mind, High On Gear 5
As a fanatic for both Western animation and anime, more than one person in my every life. I've more than once heard the comparison to Tom & Jerry, as it's the one the creator gave, which is interesting. Tom & Jerry animation didn't often look like that, but that's what Oda states as his primary reference so he would know (I really need to start reading the manga). At least when it comes to how Toei chose to animate it, what this really did remind me of was Fleischer, especially that "fluid noodle people" reference, and it's a shame that's not an name on people's lips more regarding this. This is pretty much exactly how I would imagine an anime Popeye adaptation would look when it really got going. With a little bit extra: Gear 5 is like a glorious mix of Fleischer and Tex Avery with classic shounen (One Piece being one of the last examples, design wise, of a very strong traditional artistic style), and it's wonderful. Which actually leads me to single animator and era this kept reminding me the most of. Crazy as it is to say, the whole time I was thinking of John K, and late 80's animation in general. That drive to merge classic animation designs and styles with modern animation techniques was pretty much the font of up and coming animators during that time, and when there was a serious budget behind it? And also Richard Williams, because I'm like 80% sure there was a bit in that sequence (the part where Kaido gets burnt up) that was directly inspired by the Thief and the Cobbler. Actually, I'm changing my answer of "being reminded the most of." The more I remember of Richard Williams' work, the more this feels at least in part like a love letter to one the masters, Williams included. I'm hearing about people giving the animation choices crap just because of what it chose to reference, which imo is silly. As if watching, loving, being amazed and learning from all the animation you can and being driven to build new and astounding things on top of it hasn't been the origin story of nearly every animator all over the world. Are anime fans really still out here seriously believing that there's only one region in the world anyone who's anybody actually pays attention to?
Because the people who actually make anime and manga have never, ever believed that. Art is universal.
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animatedminds · 9 months
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And speaking of this scene being a mess, we come to... I want to call it the worst thing in No Way Home but there's actually something just as bad coming down the pipe much later, and it's hard to decide which is the bigger black mark on the film.
Yeah, that's right. It's time to talk about Aunt May's fridging. May dies to prove how much of a Very Serious Bad Guy the Green Goblin is. So much manlier and bad guyier than those other villains in those other movies!
But she doesn't die just for that. Her death is more insidious than that. See. There's this Fix Fic quality to her death that drives me up the wall.
See. People had, at this point, been complaining for years about Uncle Ben. The MCU movies decided not to rehash Ben's death. They didn't think we needed to see him bleed out from a gunshot and say The Words for a third time, so they skipped over it.
The reasonable takeaway from here is that Uncle Ben was a person who existed, and he did die, and he did say The Words, and the movie just didn't think we needed to see Ben die over and over and over again in every single piece of Spider-Man media. But that's not what happened.
Civil War had Peter sit with Tony and talk about his motive, and he didn't say The Words. They had him say a different thing. And the fandom has never forgiven the MCU for the audacity of using different words. It's the BIGGEST CONTROVERSY IN SPIDER-HISTORY.
I mean. Not really. The biggest controversy in Spider-history is the comic that this film's an adaptation of, ironically enough. But the point is, people have been mad for so long. Because we didn't see Ben die, and didn't hear him say The Words.
So here we are. Moments before passing away from her injuries, Aunt May fills Ben's spot. We get to watch her die, and she says The Words. It's fixed! Spider-Man is no longer ruined forever! Because someone died and they said The Words, and that's all Spider-Man is!
And this? This infuriates me. It infuriates me that they took a torch to an entire character because they were mad about how a sentence was phrased. Tore down a significant supporting character and guiding influence in Spider-Man's life, because a line of dialogue in a Captain America movie was written differently than they wanted.
May is dead now because someone decided that nine words of spoken dialogue are more valuable to the Spider-Man mythos than Aunt May's entire existence. And because they couldn't think of any better way to make the Green Goblin look scary.
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animatedminds · 11 months
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Star Wars Visions: Reviews Incoming!
For those few who follow my channel, you might remember that whent he last season of Visions came out I did an extra special, episode by episode reaction where I broke down what I felt worked and didn’t work about each episode, which ones really hit me and why, and all in all did the review thing. I also did a thing where - knowing that Visions is entirely non-canon - I hypothetically broke them down for compatibility to the canon setting of Star Wars: that is, which of the stories would canonize well should someone decide to give them the Harley Quinn treatment someday. This wasn’t a quality thing or review thing, exactly, and more of a thought experiment - and one I really quite enjoyed. Welp, I’m doing it again for this season as well, but this time I’m going to try to do something special... AnimatedMinds’ first video reviews! Should I actually find the time to do them, I’ll record the reviews and post them both on the Animatedminds Youtube channel - which does exist and hosts one or two reviews or attempts at directing of mine - and here. Here’s to seeing you, and until then may the force be with you and happy Star Wars day!
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animatedminds · 1 year
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The Mandalorian: The Spies - On Pax Vizsla
To loop the discourse around the episode back to an animated show - y’all know how I do - I like how opposite thematically Pre Viszla's death feels to Pax Viszla's death - despite the two technically believing in the same things, and I believe this may well have been intentional.
Pre Viszla died for his ideals in a way that was entirely selfish, and happened at the expense of everyone around him. The strongest must prevail, so Pre's is willing to die and give away the keys to everyone he's responsible for to a madman just because the madman took those keys in a way that satisfied Pre's own beliefs and obsessions. “The Strong Shall Lead” - who cares how it affect anyone else. He actively dooms everyone around him in a moment of ideological satisfaction.
But we get from his speech a couple episodes ago, and see here, that Pax Viszla interprets "The Strong Shall Lead" differently. To him, it's not about "if you're strong enough, The Way is to do as you command," it's "if the cause is just, then the strong must lead the charge towards fighting it." He lays down his life to protect others because This Is The Way, because this is what he believes defines Mandalorian strength.
It's a really great contrast.
Especially since we all know Ragnar Viszla's probably going go out getting eaten by something.
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animatedminds · 1 year
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The Mandalorian: Guns for Hire Thought
Is it crazy that I want to see more of the dramatic adventures of that star crossed Quarren & Mon Cala couple? Daring rescue from forbidden parents, adventures as fugitives from Mon Cala out in the wide expanse of space? Seriously, where's their orchestral romance theme by John Williams?
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animatedminds · 1 year
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Just Caught Up With Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur, And...
The Beyonder song is stuck in my head. Like, seriously stuck. I can’t stop listening to it over and over again. Send help.
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animatedminds · 1 year
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I always call Treasure Planet Disney’s most forgotten gem. For how good it is, it’s staggering how commonly people don’t even know it exists. One of the best things about it is the art design and direction - behind the scenes images like this are very appreciated! Love the look of Montressor Spaceport, especially!
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Visual development from Treasure Planet: A Voyage of Discovery by Ian Gooding, Hye Coh, Dan Read, Christophe Vacher, Steven Olds, Dave Tidgwell, and Guy Deel.
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animatedminds · 1 year
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New Year’s Tradition! Let’s put a foot to the behind of another year. It may be hard sometimes, but we have to.
And hey, here’s to another year hoping for a Boondocks reboot!
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This is one of my favorite moments from a series I really love: The Boondocks. And I post it ever year somewhere or another, without fail. So I wanted to share it here, to get that message out there - because it’s ever been more true.
Some of you out there have suffered, and suffered badly this year. We’ve had troubles like most of us have never seen in our lifetimes. Some of you out there have had to go up directly against the wicked, and against things in the world designed to keep you down and separate from everyone else in a time where everyone should have been working together. Be it by race, by class or sickness, it’s been a literal hell of a year.
But for everyone who suffers out there, never forget that you’re not alone. There’s people out there just the same, trying to get through, doing their best to make the world better despite it all. We’re all in on this crazy ball together, and the only way we’re going to get through it is together… even if together is six feet apart right now.
Don’t let 2020 keep you down any more, don’t let it stain the rest of your life. Take your foot, and put it very firmly up it and all its problems’ behind. And then take that foot, and get ready to keep putting it up the behind of next year. And hey, watch a few cartoons along the way. Last year might have been the year of squandered hindsight (2020, eh?), but let this year be the year of hope and joy. Peace and much love to everyone out there, and I’ll see you in the New Year!
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animatedminds · 1 year
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For the company’s birthday, a character who’s been in retirement for over eighty years hops back onto the screen - if the computer screen - for a little bit of fun. Hand drawn fun, no less! It’s really trippy to see stuff with Oswald in it, even if it’s just a minute long short. I’ve spent ages wondering why they never - say - put him in an episode of the Rudish Mickey shorts (beyond the one brief cameo he had) or anything like that. He seems like an interesting character, and they’ve had him back for ages. Why not? So here’s hoping this turns into something. But it probably won’t. In any case, Happy Birthday, Disney.
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