I guess it’s just a quality of good (cartoony) animation in general, Genndy T. is able to pull this off in the Hotel Transylvania movies. But if you are phoning it in you can’t manage it

Another thing I noticed about Don Bluth ‘80s style (and maybe also Disney animation of the time) is… everyone’s personality is *so* embedded in their every movement & drawing. Nicodemus is SO spooky, Jenner is SO evil, Jeremy is SUCH a goof. Is it my 2D bias or is this less common in CG animation?

“Detective Pikachu”: The kids liked it but it sucks. Plot is too-many-cooks hash, nonsensical villain motivation. Mostly tho it’s just ugly. Why do a Pokémon movie with blue-gray desaturated colors & ‘realistic’ designs. As bad a fit as the 1990s Super Mario live action but less quirky. Just garbage

Winner 👏

I know right? Such honesty! Love him!

Let’s not kid ourselves. You can write some great villains by externalizing your own worst qualities, letting them run wild for awhile, then the hero punches them

The other quote by a mangaka which inspires me the most is when Yoshihiro Togashi was asked what YYH character he put the most of himself into and he said “all the villains”

“And this is how our lives are changed, and this is how we are redeemed.” - James Baldwin, “Nothing Personal”

“Hong Kong will immediately cease to be a name and become the center of your life. And you may never know how many people live in Hong Kong. But you will know that one man or one woman lives there without whom you cannot live….”

“Pretend, for example, that you were born in Chicago and have never had the remotest desire to visit Hong Kong, which is only a name on a map for you; pretend that some convulsion… throws you into connection with a man or woman who lives in Hong Kong; and that you fall in love…”

It’s a well known novel (“Beloved”) so I guess the assumption is that readers would know the plot basics 😅

Annoyed when the introduction to an audiobook gives away the entire plot. It's my fault for listening on audiobook I guess; if it was a prose book I'd just skip the intro, but I typically listen to audiobooks from beginning to end and I got caught with "Guess what, character X kills character Y"

Wow! I didn’t know they did it in the anime! I bet Araki himself loved it.

This was so true & thoughtful, it is hard to get away from a child level color theory where specific things encode specific colors. tldr blood isn’t necessarily red or water blue. I still do operate on child level color for many drawings 🤪 but it is helpful to remember that the composition is king

One of the most inspiring things I’ve ever hear artistically is when Hirohiko Araki (in an interview) said he had trouble coming up with an ‘official’ color palette for the Jojo characters because he always colored them conditionally in relation to other objects in the drawing 🤯

Ultimately actions are more important than words or labels

Often people will hold strongly to some particular thing as part of their identity and disavowing this completely is a hard ask for them. They would much rather say “I’m a *good* X” or “My version of X is different” than say “I’m not an X.” I’m in favor of flexible definitions. This can be hard tho.

I loved that movie!

Like if you just look at a random wall and think “Mmmm. That perspective. Those shadows” 🤤