There are a lot of crazy connections in animation, and here are some of my favorites.
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and The Last Unicorn were both produced by Rankin-Bass, and it’s honestly kind of funny considering that when you watch them both back to back.
However, TLU was animated by Topcraft, which was a Japanese studio that later animated Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind before evolving into Studio Ghibli. So that means there’s a direct link between Rudolph and Princess Mononoke.
Plus, some of RB’s stop-motion animators also worked on a film from 1979 called Nutcracker Fantasy, including Tadahito Mochinaga, the animation director on most of the sixties stuff like Rudolph. It has a very similar style to the stop-motion RB specials, but was actually produced by Sanrio. So there’s also a direct link from Rudolph to Aggretsuko.
Romeo Muller wrote the majority of the Rankin-Bass stuff, but he also did work for Fred Wolf Films, including writing all three Puff the Magic Dragon specials. And Fred Wolf Films also provided the animation for The Mouse and His Child, another Sanrio film.
Oh, and both Rankin-Bass AND Sanrio have a direct link to Osamu Tezuka as well. Like, you probably already know Sanrio produced both Unico films, which were adaptations of Tezuka’s work. But Mushi Productions, the same studio that animated a lot of Tezuka shows like Astro Boy and Kimba the White Lion, animated Frosty the Snowman for Rankin-Bass!
Speaking of Unico, both films were animated by Madhouse, which later made a lot of really edgy and mature anime like Ninja Scroll, Perfect Blue, Death Note, and Black Lagoon.
Before starting up Mushi Productions, Tezuka briefly worked for Toei Animation. Toei is a studio you know best for stuff like Dragon Ball, Sailor Moon, and One Piece, but they also did some outsourced work for some American studios back in the day, including some work for Rankin-Bass (again!), and the eighties My Little Pony series. Oh, and Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata did work there early on, so there’s another Ghibli connection.
Speaking of My Little Pony, the G1 series (along with other Hasbro cartoons like Transformers and G.I. Joe) was produced by Marvel Productions, which was actually directly spun off from DePatie-Freleng Enterprises, the studio that produced both the Pink Panther cartoons and most of the seventies Dr. Seuss specials like The Cat in the Hat and The Lorax. If DePatie-Freleng’s name sounds familiar, that’s because one of the founders was famed Looney Tunes director Friz Freleng. So I guess MLP has a connection to both Dr. Seuss AND Looney Tunes.
I could go on and on, and maybe I will in an eventual reblog, but I think you get the point by now.
I’m not going to lie, as a member of the LGBTQ+ community, I’ve never felt more seen by a movie than through Thor: Love and Thunder.
I mean honestly, I’m not even mad at the light use of bury the gays, mostly because they both still made it out alive, or the fact that Krog apparently has both a mom and stepdad, but was created by his two fathers I mean how does that even work
And you can tell it’s for the gay because of how much I saw Tessa Thompson on that screen. I mean Natalie Portman is a treasure and I love watching her, but everytime Valkyrie appeared on the screen I nearly burst with excitement. She is just so pretty.
Even the outfits they wore, like Thor’s little vest fit, or Valkyrie Phantom of the Opera noodie were all something I definitely could go pull out of my closet.
In all, I really loved this movie and I cannot wait to sit down and watch it twelve more times. Thor is truly the god of lesbians.
BW Media Spotlight goes to Transformers: The Basics to hear The Untold Story Of Transformers: The Movie
Transformers: The Movie is an interesting footnote in media history. A TV show getting a movie while the series was still on the air and ties in to the TV continuity? That doesn’t happen very often, and I don’t remember an example of one before this. There were movies based on finished shows, some of which continue the TV show rather than being a reboot but there weren’t too many. A toyline…
Spider-Verse Artists Say Working on the Sequel Was ‘Death by a Thousand Paper Cuts’
Why don’t more animated movies look this good? According to people who worked on the sequel, Across the Spider-Verse, it’s because the working conditions required to produce such artistry are not sustainable.
Multiple Across the Spider-Verse crew members — ranging from artists to production executives who have worked anywhere from five to a dozen years in the animation business — describe the process of making the the $150 million Sony project as uniquely arduous, involving a relentless kind of revisionism that compelled approximately 100 artists to flee the movie before its completion.
While frequent major overhauls are standard operating procedure in animation (Pixar films can take between four and seven years to plot, animate, and render), those changes typically occur early on during development and storyboarding stages. But these Spider-Verse 2 crew members say they were asked to make alterations to already-approved animated sequences that created a backlog of work across multiple late-stage departments. Across the Spider-Verse was meant to debut in theaters in April of 2022, before it was postponed to October of that year and then June 2023 owing to what Entertainment Weekly reported as “pandemic-related delays.” However, the four crew members say animators who were hired in the spring of 2021 sat idle for anywhere from three to six months that year while Phil Lord tinkered with the movie in the layout stage, when the first 3-D representation of storyboards are created.
As a result, these individuals say, they were pushed to work more than 11 hours a day, seven days a week, for more than a year to make up for time lost and were forced back to the drawing board as many as five times to revise work during the final rendering stage.
"For animated movies, the majority of the trial-and-error process happens during writing and storyboarding. Not with fully completed animation. Phil’s mentality was, This change makes for a better movie, so why aren’t we doing it? It’s obviously been very expensive having to redo the same shot several times over and have every department touch it so many times. The changes in the writing would go through storyboarding. Then it gets to layout, then animation, then final layout, which is adjusting cameras and placements of things in the environment. Then there’s cloth and hair effects, which have to repeatedly be redone anytime there’s an animation change. The effects department also passes over the characters with ink lines and does all the crazy stuff like explosions, smoke, and water. And they work closely with lighting and compositing on all the color and visual treatments in this movie. Every pass is plugged into editing. Smaller changes tend to start with animation, and big story changes can involve more departments like visual development, modeling, rigging, and texture painting. These are a lot of artists affected by one change. Imagine an endless stream of them."
"Over 100 people left the project because they couldn’t take it anymore. But a lot stayed on just so they could make sure their work survived until the end — because if it gets changed, it’s no longer yours. I know people who were on the project for over a year who left, and now they have little to show for it because everything was changed. They went through the hell of the production and then got none of their work coming out the other side."
don’t let the critics trick y’all on this one bc the marvels is so fucking good I’m so serious. “oh it’s rushed” “oh it’s not serious enough” “oh the villain is cookie cutter” you know what. is it not enough that movies can be fun anymore
comic sales are down because the industry is inaccessible and expensive, not because piracy exists
Higher piracy rates are what happens when you make buying comics expensive, difficult, platform-dependent, and inherently exclusionary while pretending trades and digital don't count as sales.
if any single comic book company decided to be a competent publishing company for even a year comic piracy rates would plummet
Robotix is a 1985 American animated series based on the original Milton Bradley toyline of the same name featured on the Super Sunday programming block. The toyline is of the construction type that includes motors, wheels and pincers and similar to the Erector Set and K'Nex. The series follows the conflict between the peaceful, white Protectons and the warmongering, black Terrakors on the prehistoric alien world Skalorr V in an alternate universe in the distant future and two groups of humans who get caught up in it.
The show was produced by Sunbow Productions and Marvel Productions and animated in Japan by Toei Animation, which also animated other cartoons featured on Super Sunday.
i know that disney is too big to boycott effectively but that shouldn't translate to "and so we should keep buying their products like normal" but rather "at the very least we should try"