"Tigger Needs a Tune-Up"

This is how my brain just works sometimes, especially when I'm otherwise making a tame and "marketable" drawing like Disney' Tigger. Fun Fact: Not Disney's version of Tigger, obviously, but A. A. Milne's version of Tigger from the 1920's went into the public domain last year along with "Steamboat Willie" Mickey, Minnie, and Pete. Pooh and all the other characters were introduced earlier in the original books, which is why they entered the public domain even earlier in 2022. Anyway, if you think what I did to Disney's Tigger here is bad, imagine what I could do with the public domain version of him (once I do the bare minimum of research and look up what A. A. Milne Tigger even looks like, too lazy and unmotivated at the moment)!

Also, for those that might be concerned, yes I'm still working on my Punk n' Gunk animation I've been talking about, and I only make these dumb doodles on days where I have no access to my computer and Blender at all, but must release some pent-up "artistic depravity" anyway. In fact, I am probably one or two weekends away from being done with the animation (I finally wrapped up all animation for Punk, the angry pink guy, and just have to wrap up lip sync animation for Gunk and Gregorio) and its just a simple matter of hitting Render, then video editing adding additional sound effects, music, and a Nickelodeon cartoon-style title card, like what I did for my Keister Bunny animation. The render will take longer because I unsurprisingly decided Cycles produced a superior image quality than even Eevee with ray tracing on (while also figuring out a way to optimize it so that it will render about 1,500 frames of animation within our lifetimes), but I believe it will be worth it and either way, I'll FINALLY have this wrapped up long before my original pessimistic deadline of late June or July.

Stay tuned! Also, stay tuned up, don't want to end up like Tigger, here...

I don't blame you if you're not aware there's a new Looney Tunes movie currently out in theaters, especially given Warner Bros-Discovery's current leadership, but there's a new Looney Tunes movie currently out in theaters. It's technically published by Ketchup Entertainment in North America, not Warner Bros-Discovery, and it seems to have basically no marketing budget, so the only reason I know it exists is because of animation enthusiast websites like Cartoon Brew and Animation World Network (similar to how I found about Flow and Memoir of a Snail). It also doesn't help that, outside of Space Jam: A New Legacy and that soon-to-be-shuttered Multiversus video game, I'm not sure if younger generations even really recognize the likes of Porky Pig or Daffy Duck anymore.

It certainly doesn't help that the media tends to portray any and all cartoons as problematic and avoided at all costs, as if some World War II-era cartoon's poorly-aged jokes is that much more racist than what kids today are exposed to on right-wing social media and the current President + the elongated muskrat. I think the only reason we're not allowed to watch Pepe Le Pew cartoons anymore is because some old dude at the New York Times said so--not a feminist group or women in general, just some guy at some old corporate news conglomerate that now owns the rights to Wordle.

Anyway, my Dad (who of course grew up adoring these slapstick classics on TV) and I (who technically grew up with classic Looney Tunes too, via re-runs on Cartoon Network in the '90's) saw The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie, and it was pretty good. Now, as a movie that presumably started out as a made-for-streaming movie for Max that was unceremoniously cancelled as a tax write-off, then picked up by a virtually-unknown distributor with apparently ZERO marketing and advertising money (Ketchup Entertainment), and based on a classic cartoon franchise where the flimsy "story" was just an excuse for hilariously-violent cartoon shenanigans, you shouldn't go in expecting some life-changing theatrical masterpiece in the same league as Oscar-winning movies like Flow or Del Toro's Pinocchio.

However, as a "Looney Tunes" comedy, The Day the Earth Blew Up is a glorious return to form. For one thing, could you imagine an almost-purely 2D-animated film coming out in major theaters in 2025?? Seriously, outside of a couple of vehicles in the movie (which obviously are not supposed to squash and stretch like the characters do) the entire movie seems hand-drawn in a similar fashion to Bob Clampett and Tex Avery's shorts of old! Seeing all these people in 1940's-like suits and dresses wandering around with smartphones while licensed music from R.E.M. is playing in the background is weirdly charming.

It's also a great little parody of cheesy B-movies of the 1950s and '60s like Manos: Hands of Fate or Warner Bros' own Catalina Capers (if you've ever watched Mystery Science Theater 3000, you'd know what I'm talking about). The evil villain plot is silly, the twists are contrived, and the acting is melodramatic, and I'm not just talking about the obvious cartoon characters of Daffy Duck, Porky Pig and Petunia Pig. Again, it's essentially just an excuse for cartoon characters to engage in some silly slapstick comedy and make ridiculous faces for 90 minutes straight, so as long as you're not expecting to hear about this movie at next year's Oscars Awards ceremony, you should enjoy it just fine.

That doesn't mean the writers didn't try at all to give Porky, Daffy and Petunia more interesting character arcs, though. There's a basic-but-moving message about brotherly love as the timid, stuttering Porky tries to get along with "looney" conspiracy theorist Daffy (this Daffy is based on the more popular "crazy" Daffy of the oldest cartoons, not the "greedy miser" Daffy in later cartoons), while Daffy tries to be a good wingman in Porky's attempts to woo Petunia. Petunia is one of the better-written female protagonists, in that she's a strong character that just so happens to be of the feminine persuasion, not some checkmark on a "diversity" checklist that no longer exists in Hollywood because of the Annoying Orange, and the fact that Hollywood never REALLY cared about social issues, they just cared about the money of people who do care about social issues. I think it helps that she is not depicted as a perfect "Mary Sue"--best emphasized when Porky first sees her--he certainly sees her as a beautiful, perfect, competent supermodel because he's in love, but then it snaps back to reality and Petunia is actually a messy dork who does weird things like taste-test dishwasher sponges in public (there's a method to her madness).

Overall, it's the 90-minute (mostly) 2D-animated slapstick Looney Tunes movie we've all been secretly hoping since we first saw one of the "good" Looney Tunes shorts growing up. It's always been a bit frustrating that these classic cartoon-to-movie adaptations have felt the need to give these inherently-basic characters contrived Pixar-like character arcs, as if a movie can't be carried by comedy and escapist entertainment alone. This is especially felt in the 1992 and 2021 Tom and Jerry movies. The 1992 one ("We've Got to Have...MONEY") is at least a bit of a guilty pleasure nowadays, though I remember hating it even as a wee babby and particularly finding the voice they gave Tom really grating, but the 2021 version is just "How Do You Do, Fellow Kids": the Motion Picture. I never want to see Tom FLOSS again. But this movie here is just unpretentious classic cartoon slapstick inspired particularly by Bob Clampett's wacky style, nothing more, nothing less. Probably helped it was originally just supposed to be some made-for-streaming movie (WB's straight-to-video/TV/streaming movies are sometimes better than they sound--ever watched Tom and Jerry Meet Johnny Quest?).

And hopefully now that we live in a world where Latvia's Flow proved a feature-length movie devoid of dialogue can work, Tom and Jerry will finally get the movie they deserve, too, Zaslav willing.

BONUS: Because this was technically published by the small Ketchup Entertainment, not Warner Bros, the previews before the movie were mostly for other extremely niche movies with almost no marketing budget. Unfortunately, none of them looked worth watching, and had me worried for a second that The Day the Earth Blew Up would be equally as bad and hokey-looking (it wasn't).

There was some surprisingly-unoriginal movie trailer from A24 (the boutique studio known for Marcell the Shell with Shoes On plus Hazbin Hotel) where some girl is tasked with hunting a mythical monster, but it turns out the mythical monster is really cute or something, so she protects it from those that want to kill it. So far, so E.T. I think they're trying to go for a Jim Henson puppet-like look with the monster, but the wannabe-Baby-Yoda freak of nature just looks like badly-composited CGi from the early 1990s. That must be why the movie also looks like it will only be 4:3 aspect ratio and somewhat blurry, like an old childhood VHS tape, either that or the simple fact that nearly every movie A24 publishes seems to have to make a pretentious, misguided stylistic choice that Disney and Dreamworks would never do (for good reason).

Probably the only other really notable animated movie coming out this month is Sneaks, about some designer shoes a kid wins, but then they get separated out in the city and one gets abducted by an evil shoe collector. So far, so Secret Life of Pets-meets-Toy Story 2. My Dad commented on one scene he felt was racial stereotyping, specifically where the protagonist shoe (a white shoe) is being a sissy out in the "Bronx" and a street-wise pair of shoes (black shoes) helps him out. Frankly the entire movie comes across as some weird modern-day equivalent to "Blaxxpoitation" movies, with both the kid that wins the shoes and the evil shoe collector being black, implying that only black boys and men care for designer shoes, and as a (half) white boy who still searches in vain to this day for the "SOAP" shoes Sonic wore in Sonic Adventure 2 (apparently they were a real brand that helped Sonic Team raise enough money to get the Dreamcast version of that game out, even when the Dreamcast itself was discontinued), I kind of take issue with that. The most offensive thing, though, is the janky 3D animation, made worse by Sneaks seemingly trying to imitate the "low framerate" look popularized by the Spider-verse movies, but ultimately ending up with what looks like a poorly-optimized Nintendo Switch port. Expect the likes of Saperspark to milk this mediocre-looking movie for YouTube content once it inevitably flops.

Sadly, these previews of lower-budget movies made the trailers for upcoming safe-but-polished Hollywood movies look more bearable in comparison. I'd be lying if the live-action Lilo and Stitch trailer didn't make me chuckle at least once, although I'm pretty sure that one joke already exists in the original that I could just re-watch now. Nani (or Nami, or whatever Lilo's adult sister's name was, though I'm fairly certain she's not Nami from One Piece), as usual, looks to be played by some skinny little actress with no GYATT like in the animated original, which I'm sure is going to piss off the "body positivity" crowd and those awakened by the original animated design (like me), but otherwise it's just yet another Disney remake nobody asked for but everybody is going to watch anyway.

Minecraft still looks like pure nightmare fuel that will scare small children (for comparison, when I was little, early PS1/N64 graphics and particularly Wallace and Gromit was all it took for my parents to get me a nightlight to deal with the nightmares). However, it looks like it will at least please its target audience of young Minecraft addicts, have the usual cheesy-but-somewhat-charming humor that, let's be honest, has been in kiddie movies since at least the 1980's, and even have a good (if basic) message about the virtues of creativity (the good guys encourage it, the bad guys denounce it). Maybe it will even become some sort of nostalgic guilty pleasure for today's children the same way I'm nostalgic for Pokemon the Movie: Mewtwo Strikes Back, while fully acknowledge it was a crap, glorified toy commercial for Pokemon merchandise. But seriously, what were they THINKING giving the villagers these weird, fleshy, overly-realistic skin textures, while also making the Creepers unintentionally adorable?

If you somehow read ALL of this...I love you. ^3^<3

I am about 2/3rds of the way done with the entire animation, but like I said before, I am slowing down to ensure the animation is more polished than if I rushed through it every weekend, so it will still be a few months before I even finish the animation, let alone call it "done" and upload it to the Movie Portal and my YouTube. Being able to render this close to real-time, with ray tracing on and all, has certainly helped me be able to self-critique myself and hopefully figure out ways to work out obvious animation errors BEFORE I upload the video and get critiques on the Movie Portal (so that I get more helpful feedback on storytelling and camera composition, rather than point out obvious mistakes I should have fixed sooner).

In all seriousness, the past week was an awful, no good, very bad week for the Western indie and gaming industries (Technicolor shutting down and taking down once-great VFX studios like The Mill with it; Zaslav continuing his reign of terror on WB-Discovery by shutting down Monolith, hoarding the patent to their innovative "Nemesis" system, plus other gaming studios in favor of doubling down on Suicide-Squad-like live service flops; Companies like Disney and Nickelodeon stroking the Annoying Orange's ego by removing their diverse hiring initiatives, even as Trump loses court cases left and right and proves once again he is nowhere near competent enough to be an actual dictator; and of course, countless layoffs on any day ending in "y," even on otherwise-wildly-teams like the Marvel Rivals team in the US). Flow winning the Oscar for Best Animated Feature over far more well-funded and mainstream movies like Inside Out 2, WIld Robot and Wallace and Gromit: A Vengeance Most Fowl (not to say any of them are bad, you should watch all those + Memoir of a Snail in addition to Flow) was some much needed motivation after all the other, more negative events last week made me question whether I could ever still have a future in animation beyond spending way too long making too-short animations for the Movie Portal that only get 3.4 stars out of 5 at best.

The director, Gints Zilbalodis, is the same age as me, 30 years old on the dot, and, with the help of his friends, Blender, Blender's Eevee render engine, and later on French studios who clearly believed in his movie idea, proved once and for all you don't need to be part of a massive, greedy corporation or even rent overpriced "industry-standard" software like Maya, ZBrush, Adobe Creative Cloud and/or VRay in order to make a multi-award-winning CG masterpiece--you and your relatively-small team just needs to become damn good at fundamentals like emotional storytelling and effective use of animation principles. No AI required, either! No more lame excuses for me, just gotta work on my fundamentals, improve in Blender, and most importantly, improve in my cinematography and storytelling.

Special mention should go to another underdog win, Iran's "In the Shadow of the Cypress," managing to win in the Animated Shorts category, despite nobody even really knowing of this short's existence until yesterday, due to immigration troubles between war-torn Iran and anti-immigrant US meaning they could only get their visas and make it to the big show at the literal last minute, meaning they could not spend time and money throughout the Awards Season advertising their work. Yet apparently the once-seemingly-clueless Academy (at least in regards to animation as an art form) is so tired of automatically giving such awards to Disney, Pixar and Dreamwork's uncontroversial kiddie fare, they simply decided this troubled Iranian production told a short-form story more effectively than the rest of the competition. So between Latvia's first Oscar win with Flow and Iran's first win with In the Shadow of the Cypress--if you feel you may not amount to much as an animator due to living in a country without much of an animation industry, don't worry about it and push through the anxiety. This proves people (at least Americans) crave actual diverse storytelling from countries they may not have even heard of, and are not bound by or overly-familiar with tired storytelling tropes and cliches that have long defined either Hollywood animation or Japanese anime.

As Charles Dicken's A Tale of Two Cities famously once said, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." Clearly the future of successful animation, the way I see it, is not sacrificing your social life and well-being for crotchety old corporations like Disney or Warner Bros only to fire you like the worthless cog in the machine they see you as when their latest remake only makes billions of dollars instead of bajillions of dollars--it's forming your own teams, using affordable software like Blender or Krita, and making stuff that audiences and, more importantly, YOU want to see in entertainment! Don't let this opportunity pass you by!

Like most people who watched the live-action Netflix adaptation of One Piece's East Blue arc and thought "You know, this was not as bad as I thought it was going to be," and watched the infamous 4Kids dub of One Piece back in childhood, I decided to check up on the anime version for the first time in a while. Naturally, I prefer the ADHD, almost "Looney Tunes"-esque insanity of the animated version better, particularly in the latest arc (Egghead Arc), and I've rediscovered my love of this understandably-popular anime as of late:

Speaking of 4Kid's attempt at sabotaging One Piece's North American success back when I was a kid, I recognize Tony Tony Chopper the quickest out of all the Straw Hat Pirates simply because, for reasons I may never fully understand, Cartoon Network's anime bloc, Toonami, kept showing the same episode of One Piece every Saturday night at 10:30 pm for like 3 or 4 years straight.

Specifically, it was the episode where Nami falls ill while the Straw Hats go to this snowy island or something (somewhere within the Alabasta arc, basically), and Luffy is looking for a doctor and finds one in the form of Chopper and I guess some elderly woman dressed like a 13-year-old at Hot Topic, or something. It was a good introduction to Chopper's character, don't get me wrong, but it was immensely disappointing tuning into Cartoon Network/Toonami every Saturday during the mid-2000's in hopes of at least seeing a re-run of a different 4Kids One Piece episode, only to see that same exact episode AGAIN up until I finished middle school and outgrew children's networks like Cartoon Network in general. No wonder I fell off of One Piece until the Netflix live-action adaptation my mom made me watch re-introduced me to the series.

By the way, my mom actually prefers the live action version, possibly because she finds the constant screaming and shouting in the anime version (and in Japanese animation in general) annoying and the live action version of Nami is probably less likely to give young girls body dysmorphia, compared to how her literal hourglass curves are drawn even in the otherwise-P.C. (politically-correct) 4Kids dub. Different strokes for different folks, I guess. Hopefully the Alabasta arc in the live action version will do sweet little Chopper justice and not turn him into some CG affront to God and Creation--not TOO stylized like Toothless in the upcoming How to Train Your Dragon remake, but also not whatever Sonic was going to look like in the first Paramount Sonic movie, before they wisely changed his look.

Work in Progress (emphasis on WIP) of the upcoming animation I told you about, called Punk n' Gunk: Gregorio the Has-Been:

Essentially, this is to assure those of you who are understandably concerned I might be yet another random Internet artist who makes bold claims about my upcoming projects, only for the projects to be quietly cancelled anyway. I am indeed chipping away at this project, I am indeed working on this alone without even one other person to make this easier (because I'm crazy, I guess), and perhaps the only fly in the ointment is that the final release of this project might be delayed a bit, because I found it would be better for the final animation quality (and my work-life balance on weekends) if I only animated one character per shot to a more polished standard per weekend, rather than rush to do get an entire shot's animation done in a single day.

Most shots have two to three complex character rigs to animate (plus 2D FX like sparkles and blood splatter, though those take far less time), so this means it will likely take two-three weekends just to fully complete one shot in the future. Forget about my guesstimates of having this done by May best-case scenario, for now, though on the other hand I just realized I completed 23 whole seconds of CG animation in only a month...

The nice thing of having this preview out there for me is that it allows me to detach from my work a bit and figure out already what could be improved--for example, the color correction (this is technically a "preview-quality" Workbench render, but it's remarkably close to what the final Eevee render will look like, real-time rendering in Blender has come a long way...) and maybe adding some ambient bird and nature noises at the very beginning, because it seems eerily quiet compared to what comes after. Unfortunately, I'm not able to change and accept any feedback on pre-production stuff I finished months ago (the modeling, texturing, the story itself), but these are little things I can do to improve the final product before I hit "Render Animation."

Maybe in the future, I could upload WIP shots to the Work-in-Progress section of my favorite 3D-specific forum, BlenderArtists, to finally get the feedback I need to improve my animations BEFORE I upload them to the Movie Portal here, not afterward. I've griped a lot about how I can't seem to get any good critiques from my irl/offline family and friends, due to them being impressed I can even draw a stick figure at all, and obviously quietly chipping away at my projects alone isn't helping, so this might be a good way to get the feedback I need while still keeping the project somewhat of a secret until it's fully done, to those of you that merely want to wait for the final, polished animation on Newgrounds and YouTube.

Been reading an interesting book about 1-Panel "Gag" comics from The New Yorker magazine, thought I'd try some of my own (especially since, for obvious reasons, it takes FAR less time and effort than making a fully-rendered illustration or especially an animation).

Would it have killed them to smile during that one part where the NFL was required to show Dear Leader and his illegal immigrant wife right before the Super Bowl started? Sheesh. Someone get the Smiling Friends in here.

For those not familiar with the reference, this caricature of Donald and Melania Trump is alluding to the classic Grant Wood paining, American Gothic. I know it's supposed to be high art, but the "old married couple" vibes of this image never ceased to make me giggle:

If you don't hear from me for awhile, I am most likely being waterboarded in Guantanamo Bay Prison, Cuba, for making the mistake of assuming I still have the 1st Amendment right to make fun of politicians I don't like. But you will hear from me soon (hopefully), because I have an update this weekend on how my current animation project is going. Farewell for now, Comrade!

I know I haven't been super active on NG lately, sorry, but it's for the best possible reason--I am currently working on the pilot episode of my Punk n' Gunk series I have been talking about, called "Gregorio the Has-Been." I am putting more effort into making this animation as polished as possible, so while it may seem like I've been sitting on my butt doing nothing since I uploaded "Penguobbo Causes Climate Catastrophe," I have actually been diligently working weekends (and even some evenings after work) on this animation. Here is a picture of the Ren and Stimpy/SpongeBob-esque "gross-up" shot that will assault your eyes for a couple seconds when the animation comes out:

As a reminder that animation, especially solo animation, is hard, even though I've been working on this one or two shots per weekend immediately after finishing my last short animation, it looks like I'm in this for the long haul. At my current rate, I should be done around late May, and the worst-case scenario is that I won't finish until mid-July, and either way that only means I have the ANIMATION part of the pipeline done, meaning I still have to render the whole thing and maybe do some post-processing afterwards, so expect the final animation to finally be released in mid-June in the best-case scenario and August or September in the worst-case scenario. Finally, I WILL force myself to go on hiatus after it finally releases, because in retrospect, immediately moving on to a huge animation project right after finishing up one that was still kind of big (by solo animation standards) and had its own frustrations was one of my dumber ideas, self-care-wise...

So, uhh, you might have to be patient with me this year, but this is a much more ambitious project I've been wanting to get around to doing for a very long time and hopefully my influences of classic SpongeBob and '90's Nickelodeon show through loud and clear in the final project (and I'm not just referring to that one gross-up shot), and ultimately enhance your viewing experience. I'll still be able to show up from time to time to enjoy and comment on your stuff, as well, but clearly I need to be more diligent in chipping away at this one and I may not even be super active online overall as a result. Stay "tooned" for more potential updates on this!

So I've had the surreal experience today of being exposed to recent European entertainment at both its absolute best and absolute worst.

First, the bad so that we end on a high note later. OneyPlays is back (as sad as it sounds, I was genuinely hurting not having their dumb entertainment amuse me since their Sonic 3D Blast video last Christmas Eve), and they couldn't have picked a more controversial, toxic game to return with, 2024's EU-funded Dustborn. The Spider-verse inspired visuals look decent, but that's where the compliments end. Supposedly, it was made by European devs who were frustrated by Donald Trump winning the US Election back in 2016 (I'm sure they're furiously working on a Dustborn 2 right now, then), but the characters are SO insufferable and unlikeable, bullying each other and Nazis (or at least that's what they call people that disagree with them, this is no Wolfenstein), it almost feels like a right-wing psy-op to make us liberals look as stupid as possible before all the major world elections last year. Basically, it sounds like the polar opposite of fun, and it sold poorly. In fact, I'm still not 100% sure the game actually exists.

Thank goodness I watched Flow later in the day with my family. It was probably the first avant-garde European animated movie I've watched since I inexplicably watched The Triplets of Belleville at the age of 7 or 8, and it was fantastic--surprisingly easy to follow, too! It blows my mind that the entire movie was made in Blender (as opposed to prohibitively-expensive "industry-standard" software like Maya and Houdini), rendered in Eevee, and the water was accomplished using a $50 Blender Market plug-in, plus it practically moved me to tears at times without a single line of dialogue. Much better use of European tax money.

So right after I made that last blog post, TikTok has apparently been revived in the US already:

https://www.pcmag.com/news/tiktok-ban-trump-executive-order-jan-19-what-you-need-to-know

See, this is why I tend to avoid referencing current events in my animations and Movie Portal submissions. Animation takes forever, but the world just moves too dang fast--the ban did not even last 12 hours! This does not change the fact that I personally think short-form video content is shrinking our brains (at least our attention spans) and I will not magically decide to get a TikTok account or any of the alternatives (RedNote, Instagram Reels) either way, though this does kind of discourage me from putting more effort into my YouTube Shorts--it is a bit of extra work making a separate "YouTube Shorts" version of my horizontal animations that would be better spent just moving on to the next animation project, and it's not like my animations are (currently) long enough to necessitate making a clip for YT Shorts or TikTok, anyway.