jthrash 2024-11-25 01:15:31

Like I said, the casting choices for this particular movie were unusually good. Normally there's at least one major character where I think "the actor is too young/too old to play this character," but not here.

jthrash 2024-11-25 01:17:53

He's not THAT scary...

jthrash 2024-11-26 18:04:22

Funny thing is that I used to hate musicals until my Dad showed me The Greatest Showman, then I realized musicals can be FINE as long as I focus on the music and not the (oftentimes) threadbare story, usually involving impossibly beautiful people being sad despite being so beautiful and perfect. But yeah, all you have to do is look at Disney's filmography or all the Looney Tunes cartoons lampooning classical music to realize we Americans are easily amused by a well-choreographed musical number. Especially as distractions during times of national stress--Hamilton is SUCH a delusional, unrealistic look at American idealism (especially after the results of the recent Presidential Election and considering the real-life Alexander Hamilton is most responsible for our national "gun culture"), but the music is catchy, so who cares?

To be fair, there are tons of popular musicals I never understood the appeal of, such as Dear Evan Hansen, the infamous Spider-Man Musical, and especially Disney's most recent obnoxious Princess movies. Plus it should be telling that it was my sister and my Mom that convinced me to watch this movie, and it's probably only fair after subjecting them to (arguably) sexist anime like Kill la Kill and basically everything else from Studio Trigger that they get back at me by making me sit through what is admittedly a bit of a chick-flick. My next Hollywood slop-fest will be Gladiator II this next weekend, don't worry.

Finally, I think Sonic 3 will at least be a "boy-ish movie," considering the advertising is heavily focused on Shadow the Hedgehog wielding guns while riding motorcycles and him being voiced by the same guy that did the Matrix and John Wick movies in the English dub. Plus, outside of "Pretzel Lady" and her fat, unfunny sister that got WAY too much screen time in the second Sonic movie, the movies seem to be absolute "sausage fests," not even acknowledging the existence of Amy Rose or other female Sonic characters in an age where SEGA and Hollywood seem to be trying way too hard to get more girls and women to buy their stuff.

All in all though, as disillusioning as it sounds, every once in a while I have "normie" tastes in entertainment, and if I had to choose between watching a basic Hollywood musical with friends and family, and watching angry incel content alone and depressed in my room, I would choose the Hollywood musical route. I'll give you all time to process this knowledge of my character flaws...

jthrash 2024-11-26 19:51:38

Personally, I think it's good to get ideas from other sources than just other people's cartoons. It gives you a much wider variety of potential ideas to choose from, exposes your audiences to other potential hobbies and "fandoms" than just more cartoons, and most importantly you're less likely to make something that is just an inferior rip-off of what's already out there. That said, I've always liked stuff like Conker's Bad Fur Day, where like 50% of the game was just re-creating popular movies at the time as N64 platformer levels, so shameless derivative stuff can be fun sometimes, too, when done right.

I haven't really been able to enjoy cartoons since The Regular Show ended (and I outgrew Cartoon Network), and I haven't really enjoyed any more recent Japanese anime besides the now decade-old Kill la Kill, yet I'm never running out of new ideas to turn into dumb cartoons because I have a massive variety of other interests to turn into stories (Although I think it also helps it takes me at least half a year to implement my ideas into full animations, meanwhile I'm coming up with like 10 ideas an hour I'll never have the time to turn into full animations). I could probably get more ideas for "stupid" characters these days from U.S. politicians than I could from Patrick Star from SpongeBob. Of course, no one can accuse me of ripping off Demon Slayer, or Bluey, or whatever the heck the "young sprouts" watch nowadays, either. If you know what cartoon I got the term "young sprouts" from, then congratulations, you are an old Millennial soul.

And yes, you are correct in saying The Godfather is the best movie ever. Part II is pretty good, too. Pretend that Godfather Part III never happened, however.

jthrash 2024-11-26 20:55:57

Conker is a fun, gloriously-bloodthirsty parody of Rare and Nintendo's cutesy games at the time, but it was a rushed game and the controls and camera are very unwieldy and frustrating by today's standards. You'd probably be better off just watching a playthrough of the game like I did (twice), rather than playing it yourself.

Frankly, Kill la Kill is only all that sexist on the surface level. A lot of episodes are basically metaphors for female body positivity, fighting against the patriarchy telling women what they can and can't wear, most of the male characters in the show are kind of pathetic or even "damsels in distress," stuff like that. You know how prudish Americans can be, though (this country as we know it now was founded by literal Puritans), and the simple fact that the female characters with larger-than-average boobs get naked a lot and the show was mostly made by men makes it "sexist" in our culture, sorry.

I don't want to get too much into the Election stuff since I frankly don't like talking about politics anymore, but I'm over it now and moved on with my life, don't worry. All around the world, we apparently experienced an "anti-incumbent" election year (basically, if you were in charge during all the economic inflation and chip shortages up until about 2023, then you're outta here), and predictably, we Americans got it quite easy compared to, say, Germany, in that Donald Trump barely won the majority of the vote 51-48% (meaning he may have to assure almost half the country he's not going to harm them and increase his poll numbers to get anything truly done), and he's already proving that he's more interested in "triggering the libs" than actually passing laws, and the best way for me to deal with that for 4+ years is to just ignore the news and live my life regardless of what's happening outside my immediate neighborhood.

To be fair, Democrats give me ideas for "dumb" characters too, even if I see them as the lesser of the two evils. Even if incumbents like Biden (and later Vice President Kamala Harris) were probably doomed to lose no matter what this year, I have never seen a party panic like chickens with their head cut off the moment Trump started catching up in the polls, doing everything they could to make things worse for themselves and turn this minor setback into a massive problem for the Democratic party as a whole. Though of course I would be subtle and non-political about it in my future cartoons since 1) I'm sick of talking about this stuff and 2) Jokes directly about US politicians simply make no sense to most people out of the US, similar to how, if you were to make fun of a specific Brazilian politician, I would have no idea what you're talking about.