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floatingcatacombs · 9 months

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It’s the Tar Taking Over That Came Unexpected

12 Days of Aniblogging 2023, Day 2

Back when it was a frustratingly rare Wii exclusive, I braved a storm to hunt down a used copy of Xenoblade Chronicles, and it still surpassed my every expectation. So finally sinking my teeth into Xenoblade Chronicles X earlier this year felt right.

This was a Wii U game and it’s still nuts that this was a Wii U game. The only change I made when emulating it was bumping up the internal rendering resolution, and it’s crazy how good it still looks. The highest-fidelity games I play are FromSoft so my frame of reference is busted, but even still, it’s frequently breathtaking. Monolith Soft has always had a reputation for building impressive open worlds on underpowered hardware, and their first foray into HD might be their greatest feat. Or maybe I’m just easily impressed by pretty skies. Emulated at 1080p 60FPS, the experience really clicks, with snappy menus, fast loading times, and the ability to alt-tab to the map on the gamepad. For once I didn't feel like I was missing out at all by not playing on original hardware.

After starting a new game you're immediately dumped into a character creation screen, which means I already have to navigate an old stupid censorship debate. See, there was a whole internet shitstorm back in 2015 when this game released stateside because the English version removed the bust slider from the character creator. This was the era of GamerGate and “localization versus translation” and Fire Emblem Fates taking out a waifu-touching minigame and everything surrounding Tokyo Mirage Sessions – things got really heated for a second! In hindsight, it was weird mixture of niche game publishers misreading their target audiences and hypervigilant right-wing provocateurs gearing up for larger culture wars, using titty games as a nexus for radicalizing nerds.

Things have cooled down a lot since then, as Japanese games generally release unaltered these days, rendering it a non-issue. When controversies do happen, it’s not in Nintendo's court anymore, it’s usually Valve removing Japanese visual novels from their store page in an act of laughable double standards. Anyways, thanks to the wonders of PC emulation and memory editors, I was able to restore the boob slider to Xenoblade Chronicles X, and valiantly used it to make my character flat.

XCX’s design sensibilities are a pretty sharp contrast from the direction the series went afterwards, instead dealing in guns, gritty sci-fi, and a more realistic color palette. The storms and forlorn mecha on the box art tell you all you need to know. It’s all very western, with the designers definitely taking cues from Halo and Mass Effect in a lot of places. The hub city is also based on Los Angeles, further cementing the American influence in everything but the mechas.

Ultimately, I think this all worked out well. The original Wii release of Xenoblade Chronicles isn’t particularly “anime”, after all. Its aesthetic sensibilities are closer to Final Fantasy X than, say, any given Tales. Xenoblade Chronicles 2 and 3, as well as the Switch remake of the first game, hew much closer to games like Genshin in terms of colors and character proportions, but Xenoblade X takes the original’s artstyle and places it in a more serious context. I’m glad the series didn’t commit to this direction (it would have gotten bland fast), but it’s cool that we got it exactly once. Despite the more western stylings though, this is still fundamentally a niche anime game, much more so than the first Xenoblade. There’s titty armor and fanservice outfits as quest rewards, a young moe girl in the main cast, and the occasional pervy sidequest. A lot of the localization conflict may have been Nintendo attempting to clean up Xenoblade X in order to pitch it as a mainstream release at a time when the Wii U really needed a hit. While it’s a solid game, it was never going to be able to appeal to a very large audience.

Also, the story’s a bit of a mess. The tone is all over the place, with both comic relief and serious moments frequently failing to land. What starts off as a surprisingly grimdark sci-fi about the last remaining humans trying to survive on an alien planet as their crashed generation ship-city runs out of power quickly morphs into Star Wars levels of goofy aliens. Plot twist after plot twist ensues, defusing a lot of the tension because you know that they’re just going to pull something even crazier out next. Though the main story struggles, the emergent narrative of New Los Angeles is actually pretty good. A lot of the player’s side questing is dedicated to resolving interpersonal conflicts and helping make the city feel like a real home for everyone. Gradually, NLA begins taking on alien immigrants and the mutual fish-out-of-water situation between human and alien refugees leads to some funny moments and the occasional surprisingly thoughtful quest about cultural tolerance.

But for the most part, the story takes a backseat to exploring planet Mira. Through the gameplay loop I’ve come to understand Xenoblade X as something of a single-player MMO. The combat system is based around positioning, auto-attacks, skills that go on cooldown, and extremely customizable character classes. There’s a nightmarish amount of skill trees to keep track off, to the point where I’d forget about them alone until I was having trouble with a fight, and then remember an entire system I’d forgotten to take advantage of. There are item collections to fill out and side quests of all flavors and secret areas and difficult raid bosses yada yada yada…

Okay I can’t hold off from discussing the music any longer. The combat theme for Xenoblade X is the stuff of legends. Terrible, terrible legends.

Putting vocals in your RPG’s regular battle music is a bold move. You really have to make sure you knocked it out of the park, because singing is going to grate on the player far more quickly than any instrumental. Because of this, the battle themes of Persona 5, The World Ends With You, and Get In The Car, Loser! are all something of a flex. Black Tar is not that. I’m just going to link the song, because it really has to heard to be understood.

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Xenoblade X’s battle theme starts off strong, the grim sci-fi tone clearly communicated through the moody synths. Soon enough the guitars come crashing in, giving way to a distinctly nu metal sound. That stylistic choice alone pissed people off in 2015, to which I say grow up, it’s great. But if you let the battle run on for 50 seconds, someone starts rapping.

Black Tar has some of the most nonsensical lyrics ever put to pen, delivered in the jankiest way possible, with words just kind of crammed in without any regard to flow. It’s not even a case of “non-proficient English speaker comes up with shoddy lyrics” as occasionally happens with Japanese songs. Every single word of this is an act of malicious fluency, and if I singled out all the lines I had questions about, I’d be here all day. Opening the first verse with “We’re stuck on a whole different planet” tricks the listener into thinking that the lyrics will to tie into the game’s events and setting, but this is a fool’s errand. The titular tar has no in-game corollary, so to make any sense of it you have to go metaphorical and claim that maybe it stands for losing your squadmates and giving up hope. That's still pretty flimsy! Maybe it really is just be about heroin.

Eventually though, we reach the chorus, and it’s actually a great hook! Except for the fact that it’s sung by a Japanese singer in English. The lyrics were clearly written with no regard for which syllables he’d have difficulty with, and making this guy utter the phrase “Black tar’lll” was an open act of cruelty.

In a 2015 interview, Black Tar rapper and lyricist David Whittaker brings up that the he wrote the words for his first video game song in about two hours, going for “just foolishness”. I imagine his work here was a similar situation.

It’s so, so easy to harp on Black Tar. Everyone did at release, and everyone who hasn’t played the game still does. The thing is, it’s impossible to keep that antagonism up when you’ve got an 80-hour game ahead of you where this is the standard battle theme the whole way through. For the sake of your own sanity, you have to learn to love Black Tar, and pretty much everyone who finishes the game comes around to it. Much to the chagrin of my girlfriend, I quote Black Tar constantly, with less of a sense of irony each time. Eventually, you too will find yourself shouting along with David Whittaker as he raps about being on a sea of dark matter. And of course, the instrumental was always a banger if you weren’t a coward. The theme for New LA also gets a lot of flak for its gibberish vocal samples and St. Anger snares, but I’ve always been a fan and think it holds up great as an endless-looping hub area theme. It’s so…. Sawano zeitgeisty.

The entire soundtrack is actually a Hiroyuki Sawano joint, and he does a pretty good job. It very much all sounds like the kind of music he’s known for, with the exception of the overworld themes, which instead try to mimic the compositions of the first Xenoblade Chronicles. Primordia’s theme is an excellent response to the first game’s Gaur Plain, with a more techy and ominous tone that nevertheless still evokes the sense of grand exploration ahead.

The edgy atmosphere, the washed out palette, the Sawano tunes….Xenoblade Chronicles X is extremely of its time, in a way that comes across as deeply charming 8 years later. It’s kind of terrifying that something can already be an early 2010s period piece! The Sawano music alone will shoot you back to the days of Kill La Kill and Aldnoah Zero, when Gen Urobuchi was absolutely everywhere and the default crap anime genre was magic school instead of isekai. The mere idea of early 2010s nostalgia sets off alarms in my head, but it’s definitely real, and will only become more of a thing in the next few years. Brace yourselves for the flow of time.

Last, but certainly not least, the mechas! They’re one of the main reasons I tried the game out in the first place. Giant robots are often part of Xenoblade worldbuilding, but they don’t really factor into the gameplay. X is the exception. From the first preview trailers to the title screen to their first step into New LA, the player is made to want a Skell. They’re so cute! The Skells were designed by Takayuki Yanase, one of the people who worked on Gundam 00, and I can see the similarities in the combination of curves and blocky elements. There’s quite a few mecha otaku who work at the NLA hangar out of love for the Skells. Most of them are women, a detail that made me really happy!

Adding even more to the player’s desire is the fact that Xenoblade X withholds Skells for a very long time. You have to make it more than halfway through the story and substantially explore the first three continents on foot before receiving your piloting license. And it’s Xenoblade, so these places are massive. Even with an extremely generous jump, you’ll run into countless clifftops out of reach. They really make you work for it, but at least the core gameplay loop of exploring to setting up waypoints and mining devices is a lot of fun on its own (I was curious if the plot would ever get around to problematizing the resource-extraction gameplay loop, but no dice).

party members next to the Skell for scale purposes

When you finally get a Skell about forty hours into the game, everything changes. One of the major challenges facing mecha games is getting the scale right –it’s pretty easy for the giant robot to feel human-sized if all the player is ever doing is piloting. Xenoblade X avoids this by making your human pace painfully clear before giving you a ten-meter robot to traverse those same landscapes. It’s night and day how much more quickly you can navigate. Skells are also wildly stronger than characters on the ground, and being able to take on behemoth creatures as well as pulverize the human-scale enemies you’ve been fighting all this time keeps the scale relevant. It provides a real power fantasy and makes them feel believable in-setting. Being able to get in and out of your Skell at will goes a long way towards making it truly feel like yours, and this mechanic also acts as something of an on-the-fly difficulty modifier for the remainder of the game. A few chapters later you get a flight pack for your Skell, and the world opens up all over again.

not pictured: the j-pop earworm that plays every time you start flying

After spending so much time hanging out with the mecha pervert mechanic girlies in the NLA hangar, the back half of Xenoblade Chronicles X finally lets you be one of the mecha pervert girlies. Customization is on the lighter side, as you can’t mix and match body parts like in Armored Core, but there’s still plenty of color customization and weapons fine-tuning to do. I totally fell in love with my robots, and that alone makes it a victory of a mecha game.

A new song plays during Skell combat, and it’s…. more verses of Black Tar!! There truly is no escape. The backing has more of an EDM sound to it, and the lyrics are even more laughable than before. “Shoot them with your guns” still gets me every time. And yet, I would be lying if I said I’ve never headbanged to the part about being stuck on a different planet. You learn to love these things.

So that’s Xenoblade X. It’s a weird-ass game, a real triumph but also absolutely the wrong thing for Nintendo to have to put out in 2015. It’s easily the most impressive Wii U exclusive and I’m glad Monolith Soft took this detour. You’d be disappointed in it if you went in with purely the expectation of a mecha game, but as a Xenoblade fan who’s been gradually falling deeper into mecha, it was a great genre blend. Xenoblade X’s servers will shut down next year, and while I didn’t partake in any of that (the multiplayer elements seem fairly minor anyways), it will be the end of an era for sure. Just in time to start fondly reminiscing.

#12 days of anime #xenoblade x #xenoblade chronicles x

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butcher--bird · 1 year

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hi, i just wanted to make a post reflecting on my artistic journey through the past year or so, I'm going to put it under a cut because idk this may be boring/uninteresting. if you decide to read, thank you for listening. anyway, here's art from October 2022, and art from May 2023

very funny to see.

however here's a bit of insight into my very drastic style change below the cut

so like, haha funny aside right.

i used to use alot of pastels, draw cutesy stuff, and very 'safe' content. i didn't want to do this stuff, not in that amount anyway, so i'd purposely water down and sanitize my work just for the wider approval of an audience. which is crazy, if you look back at my old work it looks nothing like something id draw. especially if you know me personally or talk to me even a little bit lmfao. my art has always been very grungy especially from when i was 13-15, then i decided that wasn't going to get me the attention i wanted (i really liked attention back then, not so much anymore LOL)

every once in a while id draw something 'shocking' or creepy but id, once again, hold myself back in fear i'd "alienate my audience" so id never be able to match what i wanted to do or let my full potential run free.

it's very unfortunate how much a struggled with my mental and physical health at the time because art and fandom spaces upset me so much. 'you don't draw this right!' or 'if you draw x like this you're stupid and wrong' to put it in a slightly more goofy and less antagonistic way. it made me fucking hate drawing so much, that id draw something and be immediately scrutinized. thank god now i purposely avoid fandom space/discussion and consume fandom content through very *filtered* ways, it has done wonders for my mental well-being.

but its really a shame how all that stress and anguish with my art almost tarnished one of my fav pieces of animated media of all time. slowly but sure i want to draw it more and do more of what i want to do.

to end this off, thank you to everyone who supports me and my weird art no matter what i do. i do notice people who stick around and im very grateful for everyone, if you're a new or old follower, thank you for being here.

#teethtext

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katatonicimpression · 4 months

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Avengers (2023) Retrospective

ok technically the series isn't over but they've changed the lineup so it counts

I hadn't been following news on this so when I clicked on this week's I was genuinely surprised to see Steve... and then I was annoyed. So, I guess I'll sort this rant into sections so it looks like I am capable of logic and reason even though this is entirely vibes:

i. Jed's Style

So, McKay has this really noticeable tic in his writing where he structures an action sequence with a bunch of shit simultaneously, and then the panels flit between each tableau with a narration saying Something Meaningful about each moment which then builds to a climax.

This genuinely works really well to build to dramatic moments and to have the entire team feel present in the story. It does, perhaps, just a bit, get a little repetative and maybe didn't need to happen as many times as it did in 13 issues. 13 issues is long enough to devote longer to individual characters, and provide a more personalised story moment for everyone outside of the ensemble. So, yeah, effective at showcasing the team as a whole but not the most efficient use of time for more in depth storytelling.

That said, while I wasn't massively moved emotionally by what happened in this series, I did like it a lot. He's a good writer, his characterisation was mostly very good, and I had a good time.

ii. The SamChalla of it All

My absolute favourite thread in this series has been the relationship between Sam and T'Challa.

The pre-amble to this is that T'Challa made Sam's wings way back when, and he made his shield. He's just staggeringly down to help him and give him vibranium for nothing, just the sheer love of the game I guess. But then, in Symbol of Truth (SoT), Sam sneaks into Wakanda for superhero reasons and T'Challa is like "you're not supposed to be here" and Sam is like "can you not see the nazi I was chasing he is literally right there" and then they fight. They fight and Sam wins.

Sam wins, in jeans and a t-shirt. No wings, no shield. And to Sam, it's like whatever he just wanted to get out of that situation, but to T'Challa, that seems like a big deal. It shows that Sam doesn't need him, never did. It rocks his sense of superiority which, love the guy but he definitely has one.

It's important to remember that T'Challa is currently Going Through It when it comes to feeling rejected by his country (they want democracy) and having a bit of an identity crisis. This informs how he acts in Avengers (2023). How does he act? Pettily.

He nags Sam, condescends towards him, insists on calling him by his first name and not his code name. It's petty, it's mean spirited, but also oddly intimate. You can tell Sam bothers him, gets to him in some way.

For Sam's part, he doesn't sit back and take it, but he doesn't rise to the bait either. He pushes back a little, but avoids a real conflict. This is in character, and indicates that Sam does still respect T'Challa, despite his pettiness. I doubt Sam would have a huge amount of empathy for T'Challa's current angst (because lol) but he does want to be friends, he wants this weird phase to pass.

And then in Blood Hunt (which is ongoing and yes that means I should probably be saving this retrospective until after it ends but whatever) we see T'Challa sacrifice himself to save Sam. The other avengers too, but Sam first. Sam is his priority.

Now, isn't that just a fabulous moment. Everybody, please, write me some fanfics.

iii. Art (Comic Book go Brr)

It's fucking stunning let's be real.

The art is CF Villa, who knocks it out of the park. Everyone looks great, especially Wanda, and it's just fabulous to look at. Like, I don't have anything to say here because it's not like it's super stylised or there's anything unique about the art. It's just really solid in a really pleasing way.

I also like the way he drew Sam. I like it when Sam gets to be pretty and youthful, and not always so "big massive hulking monster of a dude" - Admittedly this is weird because obviously he is a big masculine guy, but adjusting for inflation (i.e. adjusting for the fact that all marvel dudes are massive), he's not supposed to be a mountain. He's a gymnast ffs. And yes, he's not technically that young in canon, he is approximately the same age as the o5 x-men, and younger than, like, Emma Frost, and yet he gets drawn like he's middle aged half the time and they all get to be fresh faced 20-somethings. So, yeah maybe my preferences are silly but they're not formed in a vaccuum - I like it when Sam gets the physical appearance that has been denied him in the past. And I don't think it's a coincidence that artists over the years have decided to make the black guy visually the biggest, most masc and oldest of the group time and time again even when it makes no sense.

That was a long way of saying that I preferred Sam's look in Avengers (2023) compared to SoT. And his writing tbh.

iv. Why am I so Mad?

I didn't love his writing though.

There were a few moments scattered here and there that felt really weird. I think McKay's choice to associate Sam with this abstract idea of being The Symbol could have worked, but he never really filled in the blanks there. A symbol of what? A symbol to whom? I think there are potentially really interesting and relevant answers to these questions with Sam, but I can't help but think they're what he had in mind when writing it.

No, rather I think he just had a vision of Sam as a Steve stand-in... but if #14 is anything to go by, a stand-in who he is considerably less interested in than he is in Steve.

Steve is a symbol of America, of patriotism and courage and valour, hope in desperate circumstances and punching nazis. He also symbolises american ideals of white masculinity, and functions as a kind of ubermensch much to his own annoyance. That's the irony of Steve - he represents things in many people's eyes that he doesn't stand for, and his grappling with that is a big theme for the character. In general, Steve is hyper aware of his own symbolic import - it comes up over and over again. Moreover, he deliberate evokes that power - his assumed status as a figurehead - in order to get people to do things.

Sam's status as a public symbol is very, very different. He is not seen as the embodiment of America - in fact many people seethe and cope at the very idea of him being associated with it - he's not a universal symbol of anything really, given how controversial he is. And, again, that's the twist with Sam - he's politicised no matter what he does and his dilemmas and decisions are all in the context of having radically different expectations on him than Steve does. That said, Sam does care about his symbolism; he specifically cares about how young Black people understand him, how they respond to him. He wants to inspire. His priority is not symbolic - he's all about actually helping people on the ground - but it is still an important thing to him that could've been explored.

But it isn't.

The worst part of this is that moment when T'Challa sacrifices himself. The villains want to take Sam and vampire-ise him because they think it'll be symbolic. T'Challa saves Sam, but literally says it's for symbolism reasons (very "the people need captain america because he gives them hope") but like...? No, T'Challa doesn't believe that. No, Sam is not seen like that by the public tbh. No, the villain is not right actually. The scene would have been so much stronger if T'Challa's reasoning was because he likes Sam, because he cares about him. That way the villain's cold, strategic perspective is contrasted with something human and loving, and it's a more apt final beat to their relationship arc.

And, anyway, I don't think the rest of blood hunt is going to heavily feature Sam as a beloved symbol of hope the world over. Maybe I'll stand corrected, but I doubt it. Especially because #14 continues the event but with Steve and oh what's that? He's the world symbol of hope and courage and whatnot?

Yeah. The man wanted to write Steve the entire time you can tell.

The other way Sam felt less than present in this series is obviously his powers. I know I go on about this every time, but seriously. He uses his powers once in #2, never again. There are missed opportunities with this, especially when they're dealing with Nightmare/existing in a dream state. Worse, the very first episode shows Sam being recruited with Carol's argument being "I would take Steve because obviously he's better but Sam is a powerless everyman so he's more humbly relatable." I'm paraphrasing but it's literally that patronising.

No, Sam is literally superhuman. No, he would not find this convincing. No, your otherwise good writing doesn't make me any less mad at you, Jed.

McKay's obvious glee at finally having Steve in his lineup is incredibly off putting. It's clearly what he wanted all along. But there's this other thing. Namely, that while Sam is clearly playing a stand-in role for Steve in this series, he's not really getting the full Captain America treatment either.

vi. Did Carol Danvers ruin my life?

At some point in the mid 2010s, Marvel made Carol Captain Marvel (she'd been Ms Marvel for years) and decided to actually treat her with dignity and gravitas. To respect the character and make her important. To portray her as the heavy hitter and major player she should be. And to make her a team leader.

Now, this is great obviously. Lovely to see them give her the respect she'd been often denied over the years.

She's the team leader in this comic. And then there's Tony - the writer's pet to end all writer's pets - and the rest of the team. So, if Steve were on this team, he'd be the leader. Tony would still be there and in charge of a lot, but Steve would be the shot-caller in action scenes and the guy framed as the lead. If Carol was on the same team as Steve (in the modern era) maybe they'd split this role, but Steve would still be calling shots and, idk like, pointing at stuff.. telling the avengers to assemble, you know the drill.

Sam's not doing that, though, is he?

Sam's just another part of the team here. He's not in a leadership position, not even when they're out in the field. He's kinda just in the background half the time. He gets to be the horse whisperer to the impossible city - which I genuinely love as a character beat it suits him - but aside from that he's just kind of there. To be clear, this is way better than that godawful infinity comic that insults him at every opportunity (and physically beats the shit out of him) but it still feels odd, right? He's call "captain" sometimes in Avengers (2023), but he doesn't get even a whif of authority in the series.

I'm left wondering if there really is room for a Captain America, a Captain Marvel and Iron Man in an avengers series. Like, that's too many bosses, too many team leaders. And that sucks.

But of course, if Steve were here, they'd find a way to put him in charge wouldn't they? This also sucks.

Anyway, it's not like I massively, desperately need Sam to be giving orders all the time. Honestly, I think as a guy he's in his comfort zone when he's not in charge. But that's why it's important to push him into a leadership role sometimes - because it challenges him. That's the entire point of him being Cap ffs.

v. Conclusion

I don't want to sound like I hate this series. I'd recommend #1-#13 and I do genuinely think it's really solid.

I'm also aware that a lot of what it failed me on are things that really belong in a Sam solo. But we don't have a Sam solo right now. We did have one, and it was kinda meh. It had many of the same problems and some entirely different ones. Although, it had a bit more fun with his powers, I'll give SoT that at least.

I guess maybe my hopes were a little too high? I was so caught up in the high of Sam being in a good comic that I forgot that company wide failures to do Sam justice existed.

But overall I think it is genuinely very good. I'm not a big avengers series person at all, and I still read this every month and anticipated each new issue. I had fun. I'm just also full of bitterness and resentment.

#2200 words ish #kinda salt #kinda not #avengers (2023)#this is mostly about Sam because you know me this is what I end up doing #rants

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allseeinganalyst · 1 year

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Frozen II Novels - Review

It's been a while since I reviewed or analyzed anything here. This blog was made for that exact purpose, but I've posted one half-hearted review-ish thing about Mob Psycho and the Nanoha look-back is taking a while.

Part of that is due to being that I find myself in weird mental spaces more often than I'd like. The internet is a hell-hole, but it's also one that's borderline impossible (and certainly very impractical) to actually just sever ties to. I've ditched Twitter and I don't use TikTok (except to look at videos my partner sends me), but I still get, somehow, hit with a lot of LOUD, SHOUTY voices that seem to make it impossible to enjoy anything.

After about three-to-four midlife crises about things (i'm 30 this November), and a chat to my partner, I've managed to get the mental TARDIS that is my mind up and running again, ready to tour the fictional universe and enjoy what is has to offer, getting back into the things I love, without getting bogged down in the screeching of fandoms and social media.

Gods, that was a very long way of trying to say "I read a cool Frozen book."

Frozen 2 - Forest of Shadows and Frozen: Polar Nights - Cast into Darkness are two original novels set in the world of Frozen (Duh.) Forest of Shadows was released in 2019 and I actually read it back then, while Polar Nights was released in 2022, and I picked it up from Target and read it in march of 2023.

To get this out of the way, while it does sometimes throw people off, I am actually a big fan of Frozen. I've loved it since the first movie. It's not my favourite Disney film (that would be Tangled, and whoo-BOY, will we get to Tangled related media at some point on this blog!), it's probably a close second. I love the animation, I love the songs, I love the characters and I love the world. I was even sad when the hype for Frozen died down, and no, I don't think Enchanto is better - That's another LOUD SCREECHY OPINION that I'm not sad to hear less of.

These are obviously not the only Frozen novels out there. I do own "A Frozen Heart", which I've really got to get around to, because apparently it contains some Hans backstory, and Hans is a character I'm really interested in learning more about, and obviously there is a slew of additional Frozen media. Frozen-Mania gripped the world in a chokehold not seen since the god-damn Shrek movies, and it had an effect on our media and culture so great that no doubt, someday there will be an essay on youtube by Super Eyepatch Wolf explaining and analyzing the overwhelming impact of a Disney movie from 2013 and the INSANE fandom that sprung out of it - which I was a part of from very early on, and quite honestly you can use it as a self-contained example of how fandom has changed since then... BUT I'M DIGRESSING.

The point I was trying to make here is that, most of the media released post the original Frozen movie is fairly generic. Baring one or two things, and of course, the animated shorts, a lot of it is standard kids stuff - Storybooks, Quick Reads, Junior novels, picture books, etc. Some of it is really fun, and the art was almost always either a wonderful, bright cartoonish 2D style, or a painterly, soft style that's really pretty to look out - But not a lot of is espeically unique. It's got a "Frozen Flavour" to it, but it's all very standard. If you changed one or two things, you could swap out Elsa and Anna for Rapunzel, or Ariel, or any other number of Disney Princess characters and the stories would be more-or-less the same. Stuff that mum and dad can give to their kids to let them have their Frozen fix without having to endure "Let it Go" one more time. (Side note: If you do happen to be one of those people who're bitching about how over saturated that song is - Fuck you, I'm going to play it again on purpose.)

The point I'm getting around to is that these books, cheep target paperbacks they may be, are not that. There's a distinct world and continuity here, and it's even possible to place a timeline.

These books (I believe there may be a third between them for a reason I'll get too shortly) have recurring characters, direct continuity and callbacks. All of them expand on the world of Frozen, moving away from the generic Disney-Princess storytelling of kingdom mishaps and "oh-no! character X is lost/upset/lost a precious item/wants to do something special/has a special occasion/etc" and into a deliberately constructed world, with a soft but distinct influence from Nordic and Sandenavian folklore.

They are not perfect, but they are worth talking about. Spoilers abound below, for those of you who are interested!

I'm not going to summarize the plots. I want to talk what I find interesting, annoying, curious, fun or frustrating about these books. These reviews are intended as a form of looking after my own mental health anyway. If you're interested, I've given names and pictures of the covers. Go look them up. Or better yet, read the books yourselves and tell me what you think!

The coolest (pun 400% intended) part about these books is they are clearly on a timeline. They're designed to slot very nicely into Frozen canon, and do so very tightly I might add. The timeline that we can establish is:

Frozen > 3 YEARS > Forest of Shadows > Frozen 2 > Polar Nights.

Forest of Shadows leads directly into the events of Frozen 2, even referencing the scene where Elsa wakes up the spirits at the end, while Polar Nights is explicitly stated to be a matter of 2-3 months since Anna took the throne.

During that 3 YEARS period there, you can obviously slot in Frozen Fever, Olaf's christmas special and probably one or two of the storybook stuff released post Frozen. If the (hilarious) "Olaf Reenacts Disney Movies" shorts are in ANY way canon (and... They MIGHT be to some degree, I'll get to this later...) they almost definitely slot in between Frozen 2 and Polar Nights. Again, I'll get to why later.

I believe I am missing a novel or story somewhere that fits into the same timeline as Polar Nights references an event that's a bit too specific to not have been depicted in some form of media, but I can only work with what I find locally. Although I am in no uncertain terms a fan, I only have so many resources and time to put toward things, and Frozen isn't at the top of that list. If a novel appears on a store shelf, I'll buy it. If it doesn't, I go without.

While my thoughts are mostly focused on Polar Nights, because I read Forest of Shadows over 3 years ago. I'm talking about both novels for the most part.

They are decent in size. Small enough for kids to read with no trouble, but more than a short story. Both tell full length, original stories.

These books paint a slightly wider view of Arendelle and it's surroundings than what we see from the movies. Neighboring kingdoms are mentioned by name (including Corona - Rapunzel's kingdom from Tangled. - Again, I'm going to get back to this later), and there are several named, recurring characters like Tuva and Ada, lesbian blacksmith wives (explicitly mentioned as being married) or Sorensson, the Astronomer who lives far outside of Arendelle and is introduced in Forest of Shadows, then plays a small but significant role in Polar Nights. There's recurring references to Aren of Arendelle, the founder of Elsa and Anna's kingdom, and a secret room or passage discovered in one book is referenced and used again in the next. It's really consistent and it makes it feel rewarding to read these novels. I very much doubt that any future Frozen visual media will reference their events, but if the stories themselves can keep a continuity across writers, then that's good enough for me to feel like I'm really in a bona-fide expanded universe.

There's some stuff in these books that I have personally wanted to see since the first movie. Things like finding out how Anna never recovered the original memories the trolls took from her, or finding out what Elsa spends a lot of her time doing in Ahtohallan...

(conjuring ice memories, apparently. Yeah, seems like while she's not going to "drowning depth" again, she is using her magical ice powers to pull up home-movies of her parents... Gotta wonder if she didn't accidentally pull up one of their date nights and then shattered the whole thing into ice shards in a panic once her dad put on the Barry White music.)

The books ALSO give me something that I have held in my head since the very first movie - Anna cracking jokes about her past and her mistakes.

I've always loved the idea that Anna doesn't seem the type to get all "Shell-Shocked PTSD Veteran" over her traumatic memories. That's Elsa's job, so I've always imagined she makes a lot of jokes and lighthearted fun out of it. Like, she seems the type to go: "OH HEY! That's a great statue of me! And I'd know! I've been a statue! Made of ice! Wanna see me do the pose?"

And while we don't get that exactly, we do get her ribbing Elsa about having Marshmallow throw her out of her ice castle, grumbling about how "Hans isn't actually THAT good looking", and generally having a sense of "oh no, I remember what happened LAST TIME..." about her. It's not as explicit as I'd like, but it's there and it helps with that feeling of the world being alive and moving. These characters do remember what happened yesterday. They are actively learning their lessons and trying to avoid the mistakes of their past.

The stories are compelling enough. While not groundbreaking, edge-of-your seat page turners, they both offer an adventure that's very much on brand for Frozen, effectively utilizing the characters and the world. This isn't a story where you could change a few names and slap Aurora or Belle or Ariel in instead. These stories feel tailored to Elsa and Anna. Unfortunately, there's a bit of an issue that I assume arises from being an author hired to write your own original entry into a carefully curated, multi-million dollar franchise, owned by the real world's full on Mega-Corp.

See, while I love the connected, constructed world these novels build around the movies - They do in-fact, happen to be being built around the Frozen media franchise, and Disney have been notoriously strict with this before.

If you were a part of the early Frozen fandom (again, I was), you might remember the sheer excitement around when it was announced that Elsa and Anna, as well as Arendelle and a number of other movie characters would be coming to Once Upon a Time, flinging the universe of Frozen into unexpected live action.

I'm not going to get into my thoughts around OUAT, because... YEAH I'm trying to be focused and that is worth a WHOLE other blog post - which I don't have any REAL desire to write out unless someone BEGGED me to do it, but long story short, given that the show explicitly is alternate continuity for ALL Disney's franchises, it had a lot of leeway in what it could do with it's regular cast... But not the Frozen characters. Although the writers did get to play around creating new backstory and lore, and chopping and changing a bit, there was a strictness to what they could and couldn't do with the characters. They couldn't give Elsa a love interest. They couldn't dramatically change anything from the movie. Characters had firmly fixed personalities that were absolutely not allowed the usual "flex" of OUAT - No extra edginess snuck in, nothing out of character.

(They did have incredible costumes though. Way better than any other live action projects that I've seen).

My point in all of this is, that was explicitly in an alternate universe. OUAT had NEVER had any bearing on any of the franchises it pulled it's roster from, and was marketed to a whole different audience.

These books are NOT. They are marketed toward the same audience as the movies, and are intended to fit alongside it. And it is painfully obvious that Disney holds a tight leash when it comes to ways for writers to interpret their billion-dollar characters. Obviously this is pure speculation, but I would imagine the writers for these novels were given dedicated character bios of characters like Anna, Elsa, Kristoff, Olaf and not allowed to deviate or even go into much depth beyond what was listed in those bios.

I say this for a couple of reasons - The most notable of which is the dialogue, and to a lesser extent the character actions. Characters have an unfortunate tendency to sprout stiff, unnatural dialogue, based on certain things that were mentioned in the moves.

Nowhere is this more egregious than with Anna and chocolate. The movies mention her having it as her favorite treat, and she has like two memorable moments involving it in the first movie, but the books treat it like it is NEVER off her mind. If the books mention Anna wanting to do ANYTHING, most of the time, it involves chocolate in some way. She brings it with her on expeditions. She can't wait to get back to the castle and eat some. She has a "choco-versary" with Kristoff, the anniversary of the first time they ate chocolate together. It comes off as a weird obsession, instead of the favorite food it was in the movies. Similarly, she's mentioned as having "Sandwiches" as her favorite meal a few times. Not only is this FRUSTRATINGLY non-specific, it also seems PURELY based on her one line in "Love is an Open Door" and it's callback during her conversation with Kristoff in the first movie... Although to be fair, this did also get a call back in Frozen Fever where we see her be enthusiastic about one, so... whatever.

It gets stiff with dialogue between characters too. Almost every conversation with Elsa and Anna seems to drift towards "we were seperated, but now we are together again, and I love you and am so proud of you!". They'll discuss the plot, and they do have some genuinely great moments (like Elsa talking about the trolls and Anna pointing out, somewhat sadly, that "no, sis, I can't remember, they took my memories as a child...") but a lot of it is re-hashing their end-of-movie "sisterly bond" stuff. It's a real shame especially in Polar Nights, because that is set AFTER Frozen 2. We could have had scenes of Anna asking Elsa for help ruling as Queen, or Elsa observing how Anna does things differently from her, but we learn nothing more about how these two interact than what we already knew.

The other problem that I assume crops up from Disney's strict oversight is that it's obvious the writers are not allowed to affect the world too much. They can play with the figures in it, but can't change the landscape dramatically. This is understandable, as it's unlikely the Mega-Mouse wants some kids novel throwing out a detail that might force them to change how they write the next movie. They're not going to kill off Kristoff, or suddenly give us a Hans redemption arc - As interesting as that would be, the writers need the all clear from Disney, and Disney won't want some hired novelist to make a major change to their giant money making machine which is no doubt shaped like Elsa's head.

This means that, although the stakes do feel real for the books themselves, there's a sense that nothing that happens within really affects the world that much. Characters don't learn a vital lesson or change in any significant way, and those that do are new characters, constructed for the book, who can easily be ignored by the wider narrative - Polar Nights has a whole segment with a pair of sisters, obviously designed to parallel Elsa and Anna, who's past and backstory, and the mysteries and mistruths thereof, form more-or-less the basis for the entire plot, but our ACTUAL sisters can't have a chat more complex that "boy I'm glad we're not separated anymore, also we're proud of each other!"

The result is - and this is kind of what I've been driving toward this entire time - these books give me a VERY distinct feeling, and it took me a while to identify what it was. I didn't catch it when I read "Forest of Shadows", but it WAS there, and Polar Nights has it there in full force.

These novels feel like FILLER.

Traditional, ACTUAL, filler.

SIGH - Quick sidetrack.

The term "Filler" is thrown around a lot these days, often by people that I don't think realized the term originally had a more specific meaning - At least from what my experience is.

"Filler" was primarily a term used by the anime community, referring to episodes of a show that were not adapted from the original manga. This practice was done as most anime, especially Shounen anime like those pictured above, ran almost continuously, and when your airing an episode a week which is sometimes able to adapt multiple chapters from the manga, you're going to close the gap pretty quickly.

This meant that things would be done in the episodes to stretch them out. Anything from lengthening fight scenes, to additional dialogue, all the way up to - perhaps most famously - whole new arcs created purely for the anime. These arcs had to tell their own stories that were entertaining, but obviously couldn't massively shake up the status quo, as they had no idea what would be coming next for these characters and this story. They relied on events distanced, often entirely unrelated to the plot at large (in-fact, rather infamously, Bleach once went to a year long filler arc in MID-SWORD-FIGHT BETWEEN CHARACTERS). Often they would invent new characters, new powers, and often draw on events of the past, or spotlight background characters to create an unobtrusive narrative.

These arcs can, and have, been good. There's nothing inherently wrong with filler, but as TV Tropes says: "These arcs can, and have, been good. There's nothing inherently wrong with filler, but as TV Tropes says: "At their most extreme, absolutely nothing that happens in a filler episode will affect things going forward, even if it seems like a character developed or grew in some manner."

Filler's definition has expanded a lot, and was never really as fixed as I tended to take it, though I still see it used incorrectly. If an episode of a show had the characters sitting around talking, with the plot not advancing at all, but we still learn things about the characters that matter, and have an impact or call back later, or their relationships change in SOME way, then it's NOT filler. In the words of my Media Teacher: "Just because it didn't feature a car chase and a shoot out, doesn't mean it doesn't matter." - Filler doesn't matter. Slow paced slice of life episodes can matter a LOT.

As a side note, to this side note, Filler in it's most traditional sense is dying out, and has been largely, though not entirely, gone from anime by the mid 2010's. Anime have switched over to the "cour" style of episode production, with a season consisting of usually around 12-or-24 episodes (a little leeway in either direction is common, like having 26 or 10 episodes), which focus on tightly adapting one arc or novel or portion of the story. They then take a break, and return with the next season whenever, picking up where they left off. This is why you don't really see stuff running for 200+ episodes in a row anymore, and why something like, say, Attack on Titan has five seasons. This has allowed for MUCH reduction of filler, and virtually eliminated the need for the filler arc. They do still pop up, but notice how today's "big shots" like My Hero Academia and Demon Slayer have multiple seasons instead of just running for a billion episodes like shows such as One Piece, or Naruto.

Though speaking of that, apparently some new shows are determined to carry on the traditions laid by their parents... *side-eyes Boruto*

AHEM. I really need to drop this topic and get back on track. QUICK, what's an appropriate Frozen-related GIF to use to move on?

I fuckin' told you I was gonna play it again.

ANYWAY, so my point is that - despite feeling like we've really entered a living, breathing world, with its own history and people, it feels like we're never allowed to see that world DO anything.

This wasn't too bad in Forest of Shadows, because even though it couldn't do anything massive, it could create the illusion of movement, by transitioning characters from their Frozen selves to their Frozen 2 selves, laying down hints of what would be fully realized in that move, but it is REALLY on display in Polar Nights - The set up involves exploring Anna's first major kingdom event as Queen, and yet, we really don't get any meaningful detail about that. We don't get a sense of how it feels for her to suddenly wield all this power and responsibility when, not just a few months ago, she was more or less the spare princess that could spend her days having picnics with snowmen. I mean sure, there's mention that she's nervous, but it really doesn't go into much detail. She's just "Queen Anna", the same way we saw her at the end of Frozen 2.

(Elsa's also still referred to as Queen - sometimes she gets directly called "The Snow Queen" - but this is a detail I like. It's not like the people forgot or disavowed her as their monarch. The two are called "The Queens of Arendelle" at one point. It's an interesting touch.)

The events of Polar Nights involve a lot of things happening (including major characters losing their memories of each other), but it all amounts to a problem that's easily resolved with Sisterly Love, and by the end of the book, everything's normal. I know these books are not going to affect the movies, but one of the cool things, as I mentioned, was that they did have continuity between each other. Sorensson was introduced as a man of science in Forest of Shadows, and then in Polar Nights, Anna and Elsa go to him for help with something they want a scientific explanation for. While some of these characters might pop up again to be mentioned in the next novel, it's hard to believe it'll focus on Anna dealing with the fact that... Say Dragurs are real, and exist out there, and that things like grudges and nasty legends and rumors can bring unwelcome power.

Some of the dialogue and phrasing is just plain awkward too. A lot of the time, when Anna spoke to Kristoff, it felt very bland, and forced-romantic, rather than their natural, more banter and warm interactions in the movies. We don't even get a call-back to "I prefer you in leather ;)" - Although that may have been pushing the biscuit. If they went any further with how Anna feels about that, the LOUD SCREACHERS might lose the ability to pretend she was being 100% wholesome and child-friendly with that line...

There's another line where Elsa's narration indicates she wants Anna and Kristoff to have kids so she can be "the cool aunt, literally" - A line that exists purely for that one lazy joke, since no other mention of them having children exists that I can remember.

(Though I am borderline certain that Frozen 3 will focus on their child, but again, that's getting distracted)

Polar Nights also avoids any direct appearances of Northuldra. No Honeymaron or Rider or anything - The only other significant characters that appear from Frozen 2 are Mattias (who fills a bit of a generic "general/captain of the guard" role, but that's his job so it's fine), as well as Gale and Burnie and the Water Nokk, who do have roles to play, but relatively minor ones. They are mentioned, but even when we see the Enchanted Forest, it's purely featuring the cast from Frozen, plus the wind and the new plush mascot lizard. Again, it's a shame because beyond: "Elsa loves the fact that she is living free" and "Elsa spends time pulling up home movies made of snow", we get nothing about how the former Queen is living as a spirit. Okay, I don't expect the book to explain about how Elsa hates needing to pee in a bush now or something absurd like that, but when you go from living in a castle to living in tents and caves, you've got to feel more than just "free" right? We don't even see how she interacts with the Northuldra. How do these people, who revered the spirits, interact with one who can speak to them in their language? Who can sit and chill out with them? Who can pop round for dinner? We get none of that, and it's sad, because it would have been nice.

Polar Nights features a mystery story between two sisters, one of whom is said to have outright murdered the other, several fights between Elsa and a Nordic zombie wraith that mimics her powers at one point, a Pirate Queen and her fleet sitting menacingly at Arendelle's borders, at one point escalating to firing on royal ships during a massive storm in an eternal night, Anna and Elsa traveling to a whole different neighboring kingdom, and Anna's fiance explicitly losing his memory of her, and anything they ever did together...

... and somehow it comes off as less compelling and impactful than Frozen 2, where - and I don't want to downplay or insult Frozen 2 because I think it's amazing and obviously it's themes run far deeper BUT - the main antagonist force boils down to "Dam that a bastard-man built one time".

(On that, Polar Nights is intent on reminding everyone that King Runeard was a Bad Man™ and every single character essentially goes "BOO! HISS!" whenever his name comes up. And yeah, the dude was an absolute bastard, and he only gets revealed to be worse in Polar Nights but you would think Anna and Elsa would have more complex feelings than "hate that guy" to their granddad who they believed was a bit of a legend up until the events of the second movie. Still, maybe they genuinely don't and at any rate, unpacking those feelings might be a bit more complicated than a novel intended mostly for kids is willing to get into.)

There's more that could be said, but I worry I've been sticking to the negative for too long. Yes, these novels do feel like anime filler. Lots of stuff happens, but it doesn't really impact anyone. There's new characters introduced and side characters discussed and all sorts of things that really don't mean that much to the world in the long run, and no doubt will be forgotten by the time Frozen 3 rolls around BUT...

BUT

The books are an enjoyable read. They let me return to the world of Frozen and explore a bit more of the land these characters live in. Yes, I wish the book featured a conversation between Anna and Elsa that didn't just feature them rehashing what they've learned in the movies, but it is STILL good to see them together again. It's heartwarming to know that Elsa still stays in the castle, that Anna let her keep their parents bedroom, that the people of her former kingdom still call her "Queen".

It's great to see side characters mentioned, and not just appear once. It's great that these books are allowed to look outside of the generic fairy-tale fare and bring up things like Dragurs and Huldrefólk and, while I do think the Sisterly Love being the solution to Polar Night's problem isn't the best ending, it does FIT with the themes for the franchise and it isn't a re-hash of Anna and Elsa, instead holding up a mirror to them and showing them what they could have been had their lives been but a tiny bit different.

They're good books, and I would rate them:

A solid B

Was originally a B-, but upon writing this out, I re-evaluated and I wanted to stress that I actually really do like them, and I hope they make more. I really want Frozen to be that thing that winds up having 20 different novel series, six comic books, two original TV series and a line of successful movies. It'd make me happy.

That is just about all I have to say on this topic except for:

OKAY SO YOU KNOW HOW I HAVE BROUGHT UP TANGLED A COUPLE OF TIMES AND I'VE BEEN SAYING I'LL GET BACK TO HOW I THINK IT INTERACTS:

Well - We all know Frozen featured Rapunzel and Eugene visting Arendelle and, ignoring some of the crazy and common fan theories (they're cousins I swear it still works if you squint), that suggests that there is a shared universe and I believe these books CONFIRM that when taken in conjunction with other evidence...

Consider that, Corona is directly mentioned in Forest of Shadows, and that would seem to confirm it, but I've still seen that, and the Tangled character's cameos waved off as cheeky Easter Eggs, BUT... REMEMBER THOSE FUCKIN' OLAF SHORTS? The ones where he re-enacts disney movies?

YEAH WELL, in the Tangled one, he has a bit of extra dialogue where he goes something like "this one is for one of my favorite people in the world, Rapunzel" or SOMETHING LIKE THAT THAT SUGGESTS HE'S MET RAPUNZEL PERSONALLY, and...

AAAAAND...

Polar Nights reveals that he and the others HAVE stayed in the Enchanted Forrest before, which gives him a timeframe where he could plausibly tell these stories in universe, AND AND AND AAAAANNNNND:

He also has a short where he re-enacts "The Little Mermaid" which IS CHEEKILY IMPLIED TO BE A BOOK THAT ANNA LOVES in Polar Nights, so Olaf has a REASON to know that story, AS A STORY--

AND BASICALLY THIS CONFIRMS THAT FROZEN AND TANGLED ARE SET IN THE SAME UNIVERSE AND THE FRANCHISE IS GOING TO CONCLUDE WITH AN ULTIMATE CROSSOVER THAT puts Avengers to shame and I SWEAR THAT IT'LL BE SO AWESOME AND--

The Analyst has been dragged off into the night by sensible people. Please ignore his ramblings.

#Frozen #Frozen 2 #Frozen Forest of Shadows #Frozen Polar Nights #Frozen Polar Nights Cast into Shadow #Anna #Elsa #Kristoff #Sven #Olaf #Review #Analyst #Ramblings #Tangled #Disney #disney princess

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notajinn · 9 months

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Top Games Played in 2023 - Number 1: Super Mario RPG Switch

1. Super Mario RPG Remake (Switch)

This one isn't fair. The SNES Super Mario RPG is one of my favourite games ever, so a faithful remake is almost guaranteed to be better than any other game already.

What I Like

Most of this is just what I like about the original Super Mario RPG because a lot of the game is unchanged.

I love the battle system incorporating timed hits. You still get to take your time on your turn deciding what to do, but the additional input being able to majorly affect the battle keeps you engaged. This is especially important in the late game and new post-game given you're pretty likely to die without good timed hits.

The writing in the game is the quality you'd expect of something that released in the same generation as Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger. It's lighthearted, fun, and includes a good sprinkle of cool moments. The game mostly revolves around new characters like Mallow and Geno, and they manage to be some of the best written characters in the Mario series despite being in only one game. Even some of the enemies like Croco and Belome return later in the game and get their own tiny character arcs.

They did a good job keeping the weirdness of the original SNES art style while updating the graphics to the current gen.

SMRPG has one of my all-time favourite video game soundtracks.

I mean, what else can I say? The gameplay is good, the writing is good, the music is good, the graphics are. Those are the four most important parts of any game.

As far as new stuff is concerned, I'm happy they added a post-game at all! The new content has writing that matches the rest of the game well, and there are some cool bosses. It's also legitimately hard content which is nice for an otherwise pretty easy game. I love that one of the post-game bosses is Booster since you otherwise skip his boss fight in the main game unless you fail a mini-game.

There's one major change made to the combat system in that you can switch party members during battle. This actually makes the game feel very fresh since otherwise I always kept Peach in my party for emergency heals, but now I just swap her in when I need healing. This let me play much more aggressively.

They also added a party-wide super meter. These are fun animations and useful moves, but mostly unneeded given how easy the game is.

Plus it's way easier to move around with a control stick now compared to having to use the D-Pad for 3D in the SNES game.

What I Don't Like

Across the board, the new remastered soundtrack is worse than the original soundtrack. This could just be nostalgia. Fortunately the game lets you toggle between Remastered and Original soundtrack at any time.

The game maintains the strange difficulty spike at the Sunken Ship. It's not hard, but it goes from easy to "I need to try now" very quickly.

A few of the post-game bosses are bullshit and require extremely precise timed blocks to not take crazy amounts of damage. It's also a little annoying to always have to travel to Frogfucious after each boss to find out who the next boss to fight is.

The Casino remains an annoying area to unlock, and one that doesn't really reward you with anything good. Not even a Flower Tab.

Final Thoughts

It's one of my favourite games touched up and with some new content. What's not to love?

#top games of 2023 #super mario rpg

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rustbeltjessie · 1 year

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Rust Belt Jessie’s NaPoWriMo 2023 Prompts: BONUS ACTIVITY!

make a poetry video

One thing I hate about the Now is the TikTok-ification of everything. It’s like every social media site has ‘reels’ or ‘stories’ or a ‘live’ feature now, and everyone is pressured to upload video content alongside whatever else they’re posting. And the videos have to be short and funny, or short and poignant—but poignant in a clickbait-y, easily digestible/likable/shareable way, not in a poetic way* **

But, paradoxically, one thing I dig about the Now is that most everyone has a camera/audio recorder in their pockets at all times, and those self-same devices can run apps that act as mini film studios.

I used to want to be a filmmaker. I’ve always written (poetry, and other stuff), but once upon, I thought I was gonna be the next Jim Jarmusch. I even studied film, briefly, at the start of my college career.*** But my life changed and my plans changed, and I didn’t continue with it.

Then, in late 2019, FIVE:2:ONE magazine accepted three of my poems—and asked me to make either an audio recording or a video to go along with them. I’d already done a lot of spoken word audio—and that’s something I still do—so I decided to make a video, for the hell of it. And then I decided that, rather than record a simple video of me reading said poems, I’d make a poetic short film.

Since then, I’ve made several others along the same vein. Some feature full poems, some feature excerpts from longer poems, and still others act as trailers for bigger poetry projects and thus feature excerpts from a number of poems.

So, if you’re up for it, this is what I want you to do with this bonus activity: pick a poem (maybe one you wrote from one of these exercises!); or, if it’s a super-long poem, choose an excerpt. Then, make a short film from/with/of it.

You might include an audio track of you (or someone else) reading the poem. You might not, and instead go silent film-style, and put the text of the poem in the film. You might include photographs or other visual art (by you, or by someone else), or video clips (ditto). You might include music (your music, someone else’s music).**** You get the idea. Have fun.***** Get weird.

Since we’re resisting the TikTok-ification of everything, you obviously don’t need to share your poetic short film on social media, or anywhere. But if you do decide to share it, I hope you contact me and let me know where I can watch it. Cuz I really, really wanna see it.

Recommended viewing:

Three Poems by Jessie Lynn McMains (yeah, most of these are gonna be my own, because I honestly don’t know of many other people doing this right now) Self-Portrait with Ghosts and Trains (Trailer) Dear One (Coney Island Baby) Left of the Dial (Trailer) Also, Carrie Olivia Adams’s Forty-One Jane Doe’s comes with a DVD that includes short films of some of the poems. If you can track that down, I highly recommend it.

Resources:

Flickr (a great place for finding Public Domain and Creative Commons images and videos) Unsplash (ditto!) Pixabay (ditto ditto!) Free Music Archive (great for finding Creative Commons music) Free Sound (great for finding Creative Commons sound effects)

—

*Don’t even get me started on “Instagram” poetry. I’m all for people sharing their work on whatever platforms they choose, and I’m all for short/“simple” poems if that’s the form the poem demands (or which the poet feels most drawn to). But the fact that people are purposefully trying to write a type of poem designed only to get the most ‘likes’ skeeves me out.

**Okay, look, I have friends who write poems to upload to Instagram or make videos to share on TikTok and the like, who are really great at it. I’ve also seen stuff made by complete strangers on those platforms that is really excellent. My opposition to that type of stuff is not that I don’t think there’s anything of value (meaning: artistic and intellectual and like, humanistic value; not monetary value) that can be done with it. My opposition is to the commodification of everything, how we’re all supposed to have our personal Brand, we’re supposed to be a brand, and we’re supposed to be generating constant “content.” I don’t want to create content, I want to make art. In the immortal words of Lloyd Dobbler, I don’t want to buy anything, sell anything, or process anything as a career—that includes myself—and oh yeah, capitalism is the enemy of poetry. The other half of the reason I won’t join TikTok is cuz I resist trends. Hell, I still use Tumblr as my primary “social media” account. (And every seven days, I toggle the switch and turn off Tumblr Live.)

***Jim Jarmusch went to school to study poetry, then became a filmmaker; I went to school to study film, then became a poet. This is a minor coincidence which means nothing, but I still think it’s kinda interesting. (Oh! And! While writing this chapter, I came across this line in Ann Lauterbach’s poem “The Blue Door:” I was once at the Stray Dog Cabaret, once in / unlit neighborhoods where sexy initiatives / were underway, awaiting Jim Jarmusch.)

****If you’re using photos, visual art, video clips, or music by someone else, obviously you can collaborate with someone you know—which would be awesome! But there’s also a wealth of Creative Commons/Public Domain stuff online. I’ll be providing links to some of it.

*****Oh Lord, there’s that damn word again.

(This exercise is from my ebook of NaPoWriMo prompts, which can be found here.)

#napowrimo #glopowrimo #poetry #short film #poetic short film #video art #prompts #ideas #napowrimo 2023 #jessie lynn mcmains

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rosieuv · 1 year

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The new Miraculous film is actually alright

I didn't have high standards for this film originally. I put the release date on my calendar, but forgot about it as I didn't care all that much. However, today I was too tired to do much so I decided to give it a watch.

First thing is the animation. It's better than the show's, but there was a missed opportunity to redesign the characters to look less like they were just concept art for a final character. Chloe's hair looks like it was dunked in olive oil and was never washed out. Another thing I noticed is that Marinette always seems to be wearing some sort of earrings, which confused me as her disguised miraculous looks exactly the same as the earrings she wears at the start of the film and when she takes them off halfway. I hope they did what Jimmy Neutron did and reuse the film assets for the next season of the show. The camouflaged state of the butterfly miraculous looks so tacky! The creepy basement has been redesigned to replace the lift with stairs and the capsule with generic flowers. The school's been redesigned to look less modern and for some reason, both Marinette and Adrien now have analogue watches. Also Adrien has a phone with 1 camera and uses wired earphones. I imagine it's trying to do what the show did, by keeping all the technology from 2015 as that's when season 1 came out (the only contradicting point being the English news reporter from the season 5 finale said "God save the King", which implies this takes place in 2023 or later). It would be weird if Adrien didn't have the latest tech considering he's supposed to be rich and all. However, Alya's phone looks more like a modern phone due to the fact there's no buttons on the screen side and no bevels. Is she a time traveller?

The voice acting's fine. Something I didn't realise at first, is that this film is a musical. The songs are so damn cheesy and whenever they would play, I would open up discord and look through my unread messages while tuning out the generic songs about not being worthy, love, being a villain, etc. Marinette's singing voice is different than her regular voice and it's really noticeable. Nooroo's voice changed and I really don't like it. I like the scared and high-pitched voice that they had in the show as it gave the impression that Nooroo was terrified of being used for evil (possibly because a similar thing happened to them before), but had no choice and just had to obey. Fortunately Nooroo's a minor character in the film so I don't have to hear that out of place mystical mature voice much.

The music is just generic Disney style cinematic piano stuff. Careless Whisper (or as I call it: the sexy saxophone song) plays twice in the film. Why. Why would you unironically put a meme song in a film?

Now the writing. Oh the writing.

Spoilers here (I go over the ending and important plot points):

First off: this takes place in this alternate world where Marinette is unpopular and weird and Adrien has been at this school for a while now. I like this take as it's similar to season 1, but does a better job at Marinette's character arc. How they meet in this universe is by the library. Also Marinette's not a creepy stalker in this universe, and can actually talk to Adrien enough to ask him to go to the prom thing. Again I like this take as instead of her following him around for 4 seasons before he eventually confesses his feelings, she gets to know him better and they become friends via the help of Alya and Nino. Also when Alya saves Marinette from being publicly humiliated by Chloe, that was a better transition into them becoming friends then how it was originally with them meeting by just sitting together in the same class.

It was annoying how we never got to see Adrien's reaction to finding the miraculous. He finds this cat, didn't question how it got through his window when his room's on the 1st floor, cat turns to ring, then it just cuts and the next time we see him he's cat noir. Meanwhile Marinette freaks out over realising she's the chosen one. She never calls herself Ladybug in her introduction, but people start calling her that as they're all really unoriginal when it comes to name. Cat noir fights the enemy like he (somewhat) knows what he's doing, but Ladybug has absolutely no idea and is acting very clumsy. Something that annoyed me about the original origin story, was that Master Fu just met them 2 and decided that because Marinette gave him a macaron, then she would be a good Ladybug. In this version, Marinette saves his life by pushing him out of traffic, and the kwamis decide who their holders are by destiny or something. There's a couple missing features from the show:

Her magic ladybirds don't activate by her throwing the lucky charm. She figures out how to activate them in the end of the film by moving her arms around.

They don't de-transform after 5 minutes after using their power.

There isn't a manual in the stick and yo-yo (that would be a bit overpowered though).

They don't seem to break the akumatised object, the akuma seems to fly out of it after.

The suits can be damaged by attacks but they can't in the show. Towards the end, Cat noir and Hawk moth have a battle and he rips half of Cat noir's mask off. They also don't seemed to be affected by the magic plot device introduced in United Heroes that makes humans not question why the superheroes look so similar to Marinette and Adrien; Hawk moth realises that Cat noir is Adrien and oh my god that scene was written like it was a fan-fiction I would upload here. Personally I would make the backstory scene a lot darker (although something to note is that in the show, Emilie's death was a lot more recent than in the film) and have Cat noir actually manage to cataclysm Hawk moth (like in season 5 episode 3) instead of the Eiffel Tower (even though that was really cool too) just because I'm so curious how that conversation would go if he knew he essentially killed his own father. I was laughing in that entire scene so loudly that my brother messaged me on discord from the room next door asking if I was having a stroke. I was laughing so hard that I could barely hear what they were saying, and I was more focused on why Gabriel's eyebrows are shaded so tackily.

There's no akuma alert on their phone, they detect danger by their miraculous glowing. Better concept imo.

Ladybug doesn't use her lucky charm in the entire film. Cat noir uses his cataclysm so why doesn't Ladybug use her power? This doesn't make sense to me.

Anyway, Marinette finds out that Adrien likes someone else when she asks him to go to the prom (that isn't described as a prom, but essentially that's what it is) and he rejects her saying that he likes someone else. Well, Hawk moth figured out much sooner in the film that he can akumatise himself and become really OP with a crap ton of butterflies. That version of him reminds me of Dr Robotnik when he gets the Master Emerald in the second Sonic film as he controls his power in a similar way. He drags the earrings out of Ladybug's ears and doesn't put them on? Instead the miraculous of the ladybird goes directly into the butterfly miraculous and it fuses that way. No different form though. So anyway, Marinette is on an island because from what I remember the place was flooded, but her island was separated from the one with Hawk moth and Cat noir. She finds out that Cat noir is Adrien, but the others are too busy having a mental breakdown that they don't notice her 4 metres away. At the end she tells Adrien that she's Ladybug in the cheesiest way. This was at the prom, Adrien's sad that he's never going to see Ladybug again because Hawk moth's been defeated and he knows that Ladybug isn't interested in becoming a couple; so he's next to a tree outside the venue. Marinette finds him and then this really cheesy scene plays that I can't really explain but it would have been better if she just asked why he was sad and then Adrien would be vague, but mention something about never being able to see his crush ever again. Marinette would mention that it's because he likes Ladybug, and because he's Cat noir, the only time they meet is when they're saving the day from akumatisations. He would act startled but that's when Marinette would mention that she's Ladybug, and that he doesn't need to worry. Marinette in the original scene is too vague.

Plagg deserved more screen time: he only appeared in 3 scenes, 2 of which involved him eating cheese. It's such a shame as Plagg's my favourite character from the show. The charm from his original character's been watered down and because he barely features, he never gets to make up for it.

Yeah essentially that's my thoughts. I prefer this universe over the universe of the show as this one makes more sense writing wise. It's not perfect, but it's not too bad. I quite enjoyed it but I feel like it could do with a bit of polishing to make it really shine. I'm not sure what direction the show's going with Lila being the new villain, but this film was definitely a better version of the Hawk moth arc due to it's smaller scale.

You can watch it on Netflix (I think) or some random piracy website that I used called miraculous.to. Use chrome though as the video buffers like mad on firefox.

I spent more than an hour typing this out.

#film #film review #movie #movie review #review #miraculous #miraculous spoilers #miraculous ladybug #miraculous film #miraculous movie #featured

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theharpermovieblog · 2 years

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#HARPERSMOVIECOLLECTION

2023

A CELEBRATION OF DAVID CRONENBERG

I watched Crimes Of The Future (2022)

Oh David Cronenberg, you're A Director who has amazed and disappointed me, but never left me without a sense of true talent and artistic vision. With a Cronenberg movie, you always walk away with his vision in your thoughts.

A man who grows new organs and surgically removed them as art must decide whether he must expose the idea that humans are evolving to eat and survive on synthetic materials.

Let's talk about David Cronenberg and his unique style.

David Cronenberg has always had a fascination with the human body, organic technology, and an interest in strange sexuality, which he tends to wrap in a plot that balks at the powers that be with a revolutionary or counter culture-esque middle finger.

Its not enough to show us the strange and unusual and disgustingly odd. It must be on display, front and center, because to Cronenberg, the disgusting is beautiful and deserves a place in the artistic spotlight.

This film is classic Cronenberg in this sense. In every sense really. It's almost as if he wanted to prove he'd mastered his own style.

Cronenberg is more than just disgust as beauty. Watch Existenz, Naked lunch and then This film back to back and you'll get a sense for his style. Slow, muted conversations, lingered reaction shots, even the sound of a crowd in the background, in a Cronenberg it's all his own way of doing things. Everything on screen from the things you like, to the things you don't like are, at the very least, a choice that he seems to have made.

Among Cronenberg's worst films is Scanners. It has a rushed, unfinished feel. But, even Scanners has, at it's core, very interesting ideas. There is thought and meaning behind it all. Cronenberg always brings originality and it's what makes him an artist over just some guy who makes movies.

Lucky for us, Crimes of the future is among Cronenberg's best films.

He's not only giving us a talented cast and a grotesquely interesting plot, but he's wrapped it all in the crisp cinematography he's come to be so fond of.

It's a film about the evolution of man, art, and sexuality. It's about voyeurism and the ownership of ones body. It's about the need to adapt to an increasingly synthetic world. It's not just weird for the sake of being weird. It's weirdness as a way of exploring these many things.

It is certainly a gross movie. New organs growing, surgery is the new sex, the weird ear guy......it's all pretty gross. So if you're watching for nothing else other than the body horror, you'll still get your fill.

For me the surgeries and body horror challenged me in a way I wasn't expecting. Not only was I uncomfortable with the thought of growing new organs or sexual surgery, I found myself not wanting the characters to choose to do these things, or change their bodies. I had to check my judgment a tad. If a movie can make me do that, it must have something to say.

You can pull a lot of meaning from this movie. It's a strange trip with many messages in it's artistic display. It's possible that this is Cronenberg's masterpiece. His perfect blend of style and substance.

Lastly here is a list of David Cronenberg Movies You Should See:

•The Fly

•RABID

•The Brood

•Naked Lunch

•A History Of Violence

•Eastern Promises

•Videodrome

•Dead Ringers

•Crimes Of The Future

#crimes of the future #david cronenberg

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rambles-of-mine · 2 months

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Today I got a moth tattoo.

It was a weird experience at first cause the tattoos I’m used to do are pretty small compared to this one, so my anxiety was on level explosive diarrhea if that makes sense.

Im not gonna lie I was also excited to do this tattoo since it was going to be a cover for an old tattoo that I wanted to get rib of, I didn’t connect with it anymore cause it reminded me of my past self and well like everybody, people tend to change throughout the time, their beliefs, their personalities, their likes, their behavior towards certain situations, their way of thinking, their way of communicating with others, their bad sense of style back when they were still in middle school and didn’t know how to match tops and bottoms and also never heard of color coordination.

Everybody changes and that’s good, and I know that talking about something that’s gonna be permanent on your skin is a lot of hypocrisy on my part but that is also part of the experience, knowing that something you did in the past doesn’t define you anymore is a very big step into knowing the new version of yourself, it’s like a clue to a new chapter of a book, in this case we can call this chapter: “don’t be sad go get a tattoo, again.” And move on to another part of your life!

People always tend to annoy me with that topic “oh no! You got a tattoo?! Do you realize that’s permanent?!”

“Yeah no shit Sherlock, no I was just messing with you I made this with a sharpie 5 min ago inside that public restroom, just to look cool. It’s a dragon btw, I know it’s looks more like a raccoon but it’s just because I didn’t pay attention during art classes.”

This is a great answer to that stupid question, like do you think I paid almost with my kidney just to come off 3days later?! I know I’m messed up but not that much, chill.

Anyways the point of this blabbering is that I really enjoyed the tattoo, it covered the other one perfectly and I’m in love with it, the point of doing a moth tattoo was because of a video on tik tok explaining the meaning of moths, if your not into spiritual things then stop reading but if you are welcome bestie, have a cup of tea let’s talk:

So apparently, moths have a deeper meaning that I have imagined and I only discover this in the beginning of this year, moths are a representation of finding the light in the darkness, since they are nocturnal creatures and they follow the light of the moon or the light inside your house, it’s a way to guide them and with out it they cannot fly properly, that is why when a moth is close to a light bulb they tend to go around in circles cause it’s their only light source, I don’t know if what I’m saying here it’s 100% accurate but I guess it’s something like this. So basically moths are very misjudged and not seen with good eyes but for me I think they’re very cute and beautiful.

“Moths are often symbolic of positive transformation because they fly in the dark of night towards light. In some traditions, moths are seen as a symbol of a holy union of light and dark needed for a soul's transformation.” The funny part of this is months before I did my tattoo a encounter three moths inside my house which is not very rare in my area, one them I found in my front door actually, and the most weird part it was during the day, it’s commonly known that they only appear at night so it was very strange.

It was the first time that something like this has ever happened to me before and I took has a sign to do this tattoo, not only because I wanted to cover the other one so bad but also it kinda matched my current state of life, I have been through some rough times during 2023 and also the beginning of this year, so seeing a moth so many times when my life is getting better day by day is something that warms my heart, it’s saying that not everything is lost and there’s a light in the darkness, just like that Scorpions song:

🎶“This is the time for yourself to be free

You gotta follow your heart

This is the time in your life and it's never too late

To see the light in the dark

You gotta follow your heart”🎶

Damn that shit hits hard.

But yeah this was just to share my happiness with my new moth tattoo and also to say that not everything is doomed, we all have a dark era but we also have a slay era, we are the light and the dark in one body and we need this union to grow and become a better version of ourselves.

Now go out there and slay your enemies with your smile periodtttt!!!!

(I’m watching to many Caseoh’s videos)

#life #quotes #moth post #moth tattoo #rambles #ramblings #you gotta slay those enemies #periodtttt #caseoh #transformation #im too philosophical for this app

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excusethequality · 5 months

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My 2024 in Film: January

Since doing the whole year all at once was way too much of a chore, I figure this year I'll just do it by month.

Plus that way anyone who is interested can periodically get some ideas on what to watch during the year.

* = rewatched

January

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem

(2023)

—Animated Coming-of-Age Action Comedy

When a family of mutated teenage turtles come across a band of mutant criminals, they are forced to choose a side: the humans they admire or the mutants they relate to.

I've always been a big fan of the ninja turtles so consider me biased, but I adore this movie. If you too are a turtles fan, you've probably already seen it. So for everyone else, here are some things that I love about this movie:

They are use actual teenagers for the turtles' voices and they do such a great job. Plus the production gave the kids a lot of creative control with the script and it really gives the characters a lot of life and realism.

There are so many interesting artistic choices going on in this! They use this really wild art/animation style that's purposefully made to be messy and have slightly broken proportions. Also the humans are designed to look a little more monstrous, while the mutants are made to look cuter. And more! They paid so much attention to the visual look of the film and it shows.

I'm always a sucker for themes of found family.

Jackie Chan is in it and he is SO good! Seriously, I know he isn't usually known in the US for his acting skills, but he brings some serious heat here. His Splinter might just be my favorite character in the movie.

Ayo Edebri is April O'Neil and she's probably my favorite version of April.

It is just such a fun movie. It's like a teenager personified in film. It's silly and heartfelt and quirky and passionate and full of emotion and personality.

If action-comedy kind of things just aren't your jam, this probably won't change your mind on the genre. But if you're on the fence about this one I thoroughly recommend you give it a go.

The Boy on the Heron

(2023)

—Animated Fantasy Adventure

A boy with a tragic past must make an important choice for his future when he discovers the entrance to a magical world.

I'll need to rewatch this one after I've read up on it some, because I'm pretty sure some of the themes were going over my head. But I was a rather underwhelmed. It tonally felt a lot like Spirited Away to me, just not as good.

Also I need an animator to watch it and tell me if I'm crazy or if the proportions are sometimes really weird? Like when they did a close-up of a face where a hand was in the shot it looked like the hand was HUGE?

Angst

(1983)

—Horror Thriller

A man gets out of prison and almost immediately begins to act out his twisted fantasies on an unsuspecting family he comes across.

This one made me really uncomfortable. I realize that that was the point, but that still doesn't make me like it. I know some other Horror fans love it, but it definitely wasn't my jam.

4.*

Palm Springs

(2020)

—Sci-Fi Rom-Com

While attending a wedding two guests become stuck in a time loop and are forced to relive the day of the wedding day after day. In order to move on with their lives the two must battle against the nihilism of their situation and discover what it really means to be alive.

Those that know me know that I'm a sucker for a good time loop movie and this one is no exception. Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti have a really fun chemistry. And I enjoy the very Millennial take on the genre.

John Wick: Chapter 4

(2023)

—Action Adventure

John Wick discovers a way to get out from under the thumb of the council, but things get complicated when old friends are turned into enemies.

I know some people who love, love, love the John Wick movies and I wish I was one of them. I am typically a sucker for really well choreographed action movies, but I just cannot get into these. They just burn-out my brain with non-stop really long action scenes. It's too much action!

And I don't even really care about the stakes behind it all, so for me it's just like watching action for action's sake.

6.*

Exit Through the Gift Shop

(2010)

—Documentary

An eccentric French man's attempt at making a documentary on street art is turned on its head when one of the artists documents him instead.

I really liked this documentary when it came out and I've thought about it a lot over the years. All this discussion about AI art recently made me want to revisit it. The film asks some really interesting questions around the nature of art and of whether or not art made from copying other artists' styles and for purely commercial reasons (not self-expression) is still art.

Jerry & Marge Go Large

(2022)

—Feel-good Bio-Pic

The dramatization of the true story of a married couple who discovered a loophole in their state lottery and proceeded to use it to help their small town.

It's the kind of middle-of-the road movie designed to be watched by families when they want to do something together but don't like the same things. The kind that when they're over will make everyone go, "Well that was nice, wasn't it?" and then immediately forget about it.

Bunny Lake Is Missing

(1965)

—Mystery Thriller

A woman's young daughter goes missing while at school, but did she ever even have a daughter at all?

This movie is a wild ride. Plus it's one of those black & white movies that looks so crisp that you have to wonder why so many modern movies look so bad in comparison. My only big complaint is that the tension of its Thriller moments are often undercut by its wilder moments so it has you ping-ponging between two very different tones sometimes.

9.*

Winnie the Pooh

(2011)

—Animated Family Musical

Christopher Robin is missing and the gang of the Hundred Acre Woods is on a mission to save him...and also find what happened to Eeyore's tail.

Back in the day this movie made the mistake of releasing the same weekend as the last Harry Potter movie and subsequently got obliterated at the box office and most people just never saw it.

But it is so cute and funny and the animation is SUPERB! They aren't animating anything super crazy or flashy, so I think it flies under some radars, but it is so crisp! Like the animators in this are just so friggin' talented.

10.

Big Fish & Begonia

(2016)

—Animated Fantasy Adventure

A girl from a fantastical world under the sea puts everything on the line in order to save the soul of a young man who died while trying to save her life.

It's only been a couple months since I saw this and I don't think I could even properly explain the entire plot to you. Even while I was watching it I was having trouble following what exactly was going on.

It didn't help that I watched this after Winnie the Pooh, because the animation is a big step down in comparison. I get that they had a much smaller budget, but if you know you have a small budget you gotta plot accordingly or you're just gonna have to wind up cutting every corner you can find.

11.

Encanto

(2021)

—Animated Fantasy Musical

The only normal member of a magical family must go to extreme lengths to discover the secrets behind her family's powers.

I don't even know what to say. It's fine? The main character is great. There's some great animation to be found in here. But it feels like it was afraid of really committing to its themes and often plays it really safe.

Plus it is guilty of one of my many story pet peeves: when characters do some truly fucked up shit and then at the end they just say they're sorry and suddenly everything is perfect.

ESPECIALLY in movies for kids.

It is dangerous to teach kids that apologizing makes everything better, because it doesn't. It's a good first step, but if the person doesn't put in actual work into bettering themselves and making amends then apologies are just empty words. And far too many abusers and far too few victims know this.

12.

Suzume

(2022)

—Animated Fantasy Drama Adventure

A teenage girl inadvertently sets off a chain reaction that puts all of Japan at risk and embarks on a journey to set things right.

Considering it's directly dealing with the aftermath of the Great East Japan Earthquake from 2011, it's impossible to judge it properly from an outsider perspective.

It's a very ambitious film and I've thought about it quite a bit since seeing it.

My issue is that it was just trying to do way too much in too little time. If this had been a mini series or something though? Holy shit, it would be so good in that format.

13.

Self Reliance

(2023)

—Comedy Thriller

A depressed loser is offered a bizarre opportunity: the chance to receive a million dollars if he's able to avoid being murdered by a squad of hitmen for a month.

I was intrigued in the first act, having an absolute ball in the second act, and then the third act really spoiled everything for me.

Jake Johnson and Anna Kendrick are delightful though. I can't take that away from them.

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January Stats

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Movies watched this month: 13

Rewatches: 30.8% (4/13)

Favorite new movie of the month: Suzume

Least favorite movie: Big Fish & Begonia

#xcusethequality

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