#ive been trying not to let that get me down too much u_u

[coccoart]

Looking through my stuff I've realized there's actually a lot of things I never posted here =⁠_⁠=;;

[clownmoontoon]

Recently found your blog so I was wondering, thoughts on the Animaniacs reboot?

AAAA OMG WELCOME!!! HOPE UR ENJOYIN IT SO FAR \OUO/!!!

i LOVE this question and i have sO MANY THOUGHTS ABOUT THE REBOOT so ima try to break it down into my likes, dislikes, and hit or miss (things i liked some of the time but not all the time)

🌈  10 things i liked!!!!! 🌈 <-- in no particular order

1. THE THEME SONG REWRITE!!!! ITS GREAT!!! og series callbacks, DELIGHTFULLY MORE INCLUSIVE, all those unnecessary side characters cut out, no weird celebrity references JUST RLLY WELL DONE and im glad they just redid the old one instead of making a brand new one ITS A CLASSIC!! plus this way u rlly notice those differences and how great they are

2. SPEAKING OF nO BORING SIDE CHARAS... YEAH!! THAT!! perhaps an unpopular opinion but ive never been a fan of the side characters and watched the og show p much exclusively for the warners so i LOVE that its mostly about them now!! (( i do miss the mime tho but they shoulda been nicer to him u_u ))

3. also like the theme song: MUCH LESS CELEBRITY CAMEOS/REFERENCES there are still a few but i feel like they were WAY more abundant in the og series and im rlly glad they calmed down w that, its actually Not That Fun to try and spot all the celebrities 

4. mORE “IRL”/TIME IN THE TOWER!!! while there are some shorts where the warners are “acting” (gold meddlers, warners unbound etc) the VAST MAJORITY(19) of the 26 warner shorts take place “irl”!! WE GET TO SEE THEM IN THE TOWER SO MUCH!! eating together, shopping together, TRICK OR TREATING TOGETHER!!! and i just LOVE this stuff its sO GOOD FOR CHARACTER BUILDING!! 

5. DIVERSITY!!!! EVEN THE BG CHARACTERS!! EVEN IN BODY TYPE!!! no more fatness only as a joke and hotness as the only other option for women, PPL ARE AVERAGE AND I LOVE IT

6. OVERALL CONSISTENT QUALITY!!! THE ANIMATION IS REALLY INCREDIBLE AND BEAUTIFUL TO WATCH!!! that was one of the BIGGEST flaws of the og series, so many eps were animated poorly bc they were handed off to studios that rlly didnt know how to draw the warners so its HELLA to see them beautifully animated in EVERY ep of the reboot so far

^^ animation by @/lemurasart on twitter!! 

7. nO HORNY JOKES...POSSIBLY ANOTHER UNPOPULAR OPINION?? bUT I NEVER RLLY LIKED ALL THESE HORNY JOKES GIVEN TO KIDS IN THE FIRST PLACE LKDKD its actually rlly neat to see how creative the writing gets when they cant just horny joke their way out of a situation ALSO THIS BIT WAS AMAZING 

8. I RLLY LOVE THAT THE CEO DOESNT HATE THEM!!!!! it was so frustrating in the og series that the ceo wouldnt even hear them out EVEN WHEN IT WAS STUFF THAT WOULD BENEFIT HIM its nice that this lady is insane AND greedy aND YET ISNT REALLY MALICIOUS TOWARDS THE WARNERS AT ALL at least not any more than she is to anybody else ITS REFRESHING!! I LIKE NORITA

9. ANIME-NIACS!!!!! thATS ALL I GOTTA SAY ABOUT THAT LDJLKD

10. FANGIES!!!!!!!!! they always had fangy energy im so glad it finally manifested...

⭐ 4 things i didnt like ⭐  i was gonna make this a top 10 list but i couldnt think of 10 things i didnt like djkldkljd

1. THE REDESIGN.... yes i know i was just celebrating the fangs bUT other than that i rlly wasnt a fan of the redesign.. its just too ...animal?? the triangle noses and changing their white faces to beige just seemed rlly unnecessary imo..

aLSO THEY LOST THEIR CLOWNINESS!!! ;;;;; i miss that clown aesthetic... big round red noses, white faces.. also i loved it when characters would try to describe them and say things like THEY HAVE FACES LIKE A CREEPY CLOWN dLdlkjdJLK

im not sure why they couldnt at least stay w the white n black like the old cartoons theyre based on??? THERES EVEN A SONG IN THE REBOOT THAT SAYS “LIKE US, ITS BLACK AND WHITE” bUT... THEYRE NOT BLACK N WHITE ANYMORE LDKKDJ 

also the redesign is a lot more angular/less round than the original and i jus prefer the sof..

i miss this ;n;

2. GROSS OUT HUMOR  ..LIKE HONESTLY WTF LDLJKLJKDD theres not too much of it thankfully but the og series had like.. nONE so it was a shock when theyd suddenly zoom in on marie antoinette’s finger and it was LIKE THAT and the pigeon scene at the end of “the cutening” actually made me feel sick sdjkdjk JUST IN GENERAL IM NOT A FAN OF GROSS OUT HUMOR SO .. EUUGHGH 

3. those random new shorts that are like???? whyd u get rid of the side characters if ur gonna have these guys anyway?? the gnome in ppls mouths and the alien guy?? neither were funny to me and again the gnome short was mostly gross 

4. YAKKO CANT DO MATH?? YAKKO DOESNT KNOW WHAT PLEBIAN MEANS??? HELLO?? HE HAS A VERY COMPLICATED SONG WHERE HE BREAKS DOWN MULTIPLICATION AND ANOTHER WHERE HE SINGS EVERY WORD IN THE DICTIONARY!! hES SO SMART LET HIM BE SMART hES A HUGE NERD PLS...

💣 HIT OR MISS 💣 

THE SONGS!!! while i love that they brought back the musical aspect of the show (its rlly not animaniacs without singing tbh) the songs were sUPER VARIED IN QUALITY IMO 

the reboot song? AMAZING

the song about dot’s zit??? ... no..

🌈  OVERALL I HAVE A LOT MORE POSITIVE TO SAY ABOUT THE SHOW THAN NEGATIVE AND IF ANYBODY ASKS I ALWAYS SAY I LOVED IT!!! 🌈

IS IT PERFECT? NAH

IS IT FUNNY AND FUN AND IN GENERAL A SHOW THAT MAKES ME AS HAPPY AS THE OG SERIES DID? ABSOLUTELY 100%!!! 

✨ GO WATCH IT!!! ✨

(( ironically this scene RIGHT BEFORE THE PIGEON SCENE is one of my absolute faves DLKLKJDJKD ))

[zenosanalytic]

People What Aint From Round Here Is The Problem...

So I just watched Once Upon a Time... In Hollywood and I have THOUGHTS:

Ive read a few reviews&ruminations on this film at this point and I can’t believe that none of them got(or at least, mentioned explicitly) the primary thesis of this movie, spcl given that Tarentino flatly states it out the mouth of his primary protagonist within, like, the first 15-20mins of the film: “...most important thing in this town is when you’re making money you buy a house in town. You don’t rent... Hollywood real estate means you live here. You’re not just visiting, not just passing through. You fuckin live here.” i.e., the most important thing in Hollywood, to Hollywood, is the people FROM Hollywood; Everyone else is just a filthy, trouble-making tourist or profiteer who is “Passing Through” and “Doesnt Get It” and  “Is Fucking It Up”(It being the film industry), and probably “Secretly Hates Movies”. There are places and aspects of this movie that are basically a Nativist Angeleno rant, written by a life-long Angeleno film-nerd-turned-film-maker, against Hollywood’s critics(and his critics which he just totally conflates with the former), and probably non-Angelenos(and non-Californians?) in general.

There are two ways to read this thesis: Straight and Subverted/Satirized.

The evidence for reading it straight is pretty plentiful. Lots of reviews have puzzled at where the line connecting the constant hippie-bashing, the weird focus on knocking Polanski’s Polishness & preference for shooting in London, and the inexplicable pot-shot at Bruce Lee is, and I think this is it. “The Hippies” are repeatedly presented as a corrupting force: digging through trash, living in squalourous filth at the Spahn Ranch dragging members of “Old Hollywood” like its owner into it with them, selling drugs, and using sex to “control” men. And attached to this is presenting “The Hippies” as foreign; not only from another place, but refusing to assimilate with the LA way of life and hostile to it. The Manson family are the only explicitly identified “Hippies” in the film(other than, possibly, the one who sells Cliff an acid cig). The only “positive” portrayals of Bruce Lee in the film are silent ones of him teaching anglos kung fu, which has some fairly obvs and well-understood Implications.

But there’s also good evidence for reading it as subverted and satirized. Both Tate and Dalton are NOT from California, let alone LA, and Booth’s origins are left unclear. Dalton’s the only one of them explicitly id’d as being from elsewhere(Missouri), but Tate’s easy to google and she was a military kid who grew up all over the place. When Dalton returns from Italy, that sequence and his look in it are VERY reminiscent of the scenes introducing Polanski at the beginning of the film. The side-characters around Tate, perennially shown in a positive light, are also non-Angelenos. Doing Spaghetti Westerns revitalizes Dalton’s career, despite his disdain for Italian cinema. Tate and her crew, while not explicitly ID’d as “Hippies” and often shown in Mod and other fashion styles, are also presented in “Hippie” fashion, shown listening to “Hippie” music, smoking the “Hippie” Reefer(Im sorry, but Comedy Demanded this phrasing and I am Devout u_u), and implied to be living a polyamorous “Hippie” life.

It really is difficult for me to say which predominates. On the one entirely metaphorical hand, the ways in which Dalton’s Angeleno chauvinism are subverted and mocked are fairly obvs, but on the other emh, the film is FILLED with LITERALLY GLOWING nostalgia for this pre-Hippy, pre-Lefty, pre-70s, Conservative and Republican California&Los Angeles. Dalton’s focus on property-ownership&the film industry in the opening thesis could easily be seen as resolving these subversive contradictions to allow for a straight read(ie: Tate, Booth, and Dalton are “Hollywood People” who’ve both bought real-estate in LA, and who’ve grown up in film or film-adjacent fields and choose to center their adult lives in the film industry). So much, in fact, that I kinda started to wonder abt QT’s politics while watching it. And, if it WAS satirical, then what’s the point of the knock to Bruce Lee and focusing criticisms of Polanski on his Polishness and shooting in London? Is that just meant to characterize Dalton and Booth as nativists and racists?

It really cannot be said enough that there are REALLY MORE APPROPRIATE CRITICISMS to make of Polanski than 1)begin Polish, 2)possessing boyish effeminacy, and 3)preferring to shoot movies in London instead of LA. Which are this movie’s only problems with him(though it also takes the time to show him bitchily smoking a cigarette in an evening gown while being rude to a dog). Obvsl I dont object to villainizing an ACTUAL REAL LIFE VILLAIN like this shitstain, but I DO object to being asked(albeit gently) to participate in this film’s understated nationalist bigotry.

It’s possible that Cliff’s turning Pussycat down during the drive to the ranch was intended to be this but I highly doubt it. And if it was it’d be misrepresenting Polanski’s misdeeds enormously, considering that Pussycat, the too-young girl, is the sexual instigator in this film. Polanski liked to manipulate, drug, and rape underaged girls(he pulled the same shit with models in Europe before getting busted for it in LA, btw, then continued doing it after fleeing back to Europe); really not the same situation.

There’s another irony in that, while the film goes out of its way to call Polanski “boyish” and imply that makes him feminine and that this is Bad, there’s also a subtle under-current that... Tarentino sees himself in his youth the same way? He’s certainly never been short like Polanski and Jay Sebring are/were, QT’s 6 1, but the actors he cast to play them and the description made of the pair in-film are more than a bit reminiscent of how Tarentino looked&was discussed in the press back in the 90s when he was starting out. AAAaaand the film explicitly calls that Tate’s “Type”; leaving me with the question: would Tarentino be able to stop himself from implying a dead starlet would have been attracted to him? I leave the answer to your imaginations, Dear Readers u_u

Having said all that it IS a really good film, which I liked, I dont think it’d be very hard to set aside this political stuff while watching, the driving sequences are especially emotive&exhilarating, and there’s some seriously great acting in it. IDK if I’d say I liked it more than the recent Emma movie, tho.

I feel like each of the trio, Tate, Dalton, and Booth, were meant to symbolically Embody LA/Hollywood/California? Like Pitt especially seemed to be channeling movie characters and CJ from GTA: San Andreas throughout his performance, while I couldnt help but think of Ronald Reagan watching DiCaprio(spcl given the character’s likely politics). So there’s this sense in which the film is a fantasy of “Old Hollywood”, embodied by these three, Vanquishing its “Enemies”, represented by The Hippies(moralizing, pretentious, gross leftist) and potentially Polanski&Lee(foreign film ppl who refuse to integrate into the LA scene). Again, given the political history of Cali after this era, this embodiment raises some questions for me abt the film and QT’s politics(particularly in re: misogyny and feminism).

Also DiCaprio is totally going to get pitched a Reagan biopic off of this role and I sincerely hope he has the good sense to turn that shit the fuck down.

Circling back to the ranting at his critics, this movie was definitely and consciously a response to them. Like: up until the last 5-15 minutes of the film, and aside from a handful of too-lingering too fetishistic too on-the-nose creep shots of the female cast that Tarentino simply could not stop himself from making, OUATiH is precisely the sort of “Serious” film Tarentino’s critics have been saying he should make for decades now(of course he did Jackie Brown, which was that and which he blew Completely out of the park). And then there’s that bloody, gross-out, exploitation-movie ending. I dont actually think it was as bad as many critics were saying it was? For some reason I was thinking there was gonna be a massacre of the ENTIRE Manson family, which would have been totally out of left-field. But it WAS clearly a stinger of a major tone-shift thrown in as a Fuck You to the ppl who’ve called out his violent and exploitative preferences throughout the years. As for me I generally like his movies and think he’s a great filmmaker but he absolutely does go too far sometimes.

Rick Dalton, in an evening-gown, with a mixer full of iced-margarita in one hand, getting all up in the face of the driver of a loud exhaust-spewing jalope in his PRIVATE STREET was TOTALLY Tarentino himself :| By which I mean NOT ONLY that That’s ABSOLUTELY the sort of cameo he would have given himself 30 years ago and if it made any sort of sense at all in the film(which here it wouldnt have, obvsl), BUT ALSO that I feel 94% confident that Tarentino has actually done that at least once in his lifetime :| :|

I think the monologue&interactions T gives Bruce Lee leading up to the fight were probably more insulting to him than the fight itself. Contrary to popular discussion, it isn’t Pitt’s character totally trashing Lee, he gets in one good throw after Lee repeats a successful attack at his request(which I doubt Lee would have ever done from what little I know about him; not being predictable in a fight was his whole Deal), but rather an even duel between them(most of the fight is just the two blocking each others’ attacks). I dont think the film was trying to say “Lee was full of hot-air”, if it wanted to say that it’d have shown him getting trounced instead of showing him knock Booth down then trade him blow for blow, but more “Lee was pretty arrogant and a bit pretentious”.

OK, that’s abt all that I can think of right now: thanks for reading ^v^