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nankeen posted:i really am sorry for bringing the topic of the shoah into this light-hearted thread like i did, i know there are other posters here with similar history who just want somewhere to talk cartoons and am so sorry for shattering the mood. i was (incredibly) unaware of bakshi as an artist, the content and the context of his work, and knowing that i'd probably liveblog the thing itt in my own irritating way i tried to choose the film that, from its wikipedia summary, sounded least loaded. please understand i was posting in real time and actually don't have anybody nearby to talk to about this very specific topic irl so just offloaded emotionally on the forums as i am wont to do. i promise not to do it again in this thread, it's not the place for it. i might talk bakshi, but will keep it light. Honestly, I liked reading your commentary on it! It reminded me that Wizards exists...and that a good chunk of my friends haven't seen it nor do they know what it even is. That will have to change. It's a weird experience. Honestly, I think I might like the movie a little bit. But yeah, count me in as not minding your commentary. He makes/made animated movies. This thread is for animated stuff. I think it fits just fine. Yeah, they're tough subjects but, as previously stated, movies have tough subjects and we should be able to talk about them if the movie in question is animated.
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# ? Jan 26, 2020 02:50 |
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# ? Apr 19, 2024 21:00 |
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nankeen posted:i really am sorry for bringing the topic of the shoah into this light-hearted thread like i did, i know there are other posters here with similar history who just want somewhere to talk cartoons and am so sorry for shattering the mood. i was (incredibly) unaware of bakshi as an artist, the content and the context of his work, and knowing that i'd probably liveblog the thing itt in my own irritating way i tried to choose the film that, from its wikipedia summary, sounded least loaded. please understand i was posting in real time and actually don't have anybody nearby to talk to about this very specific topic irl so just offloaded emotionally on the forums as i am wont to do. i promise not to do it again in this thread, it's not the place for it. i might talk bakshi, but will keep it light. I think unless you know that the movie was deliberately about the holocaust, the Nazis in the film just come across as being in there to just emphasize how evil the villains are. Nazis have come to represent people who are unambiguously evil.
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# ? Jan 26, 2020 03:03 |
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flashy_mcflash posted:Has anyone watched Balto recently? We just watched that live action Togo movie and now I'm kinda itching to revisit the historically inaccurate original. Balto is, overall, a good movie with some really excellent stylistic choices and super great animation on so many elements. Sadly its handicapped by: 1) A relatively formulaic script about the outsider proving himself by saving the town and getting the girl 2) Over-reliance on comic relief characters (Who are well animated but still...) 3) The main character having the most snore-inducing design possible I mean seriously, Balto is just brown, brown and more brown. Only the antagonists get interesting designs and animations. Compare and contrast:
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# ? Jan 26, 2020 04:08 |
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Over the winter break I rewatched my two favorite animation documentaries, "Persistence of Vision", about Richard William's 30 year attempt to make a feature animated film in London , and "Joy In Motion", a documentary about Miyazaki's mentor Yasuo Otsuka, his career, and the history of the development of animation in Japan. Thought I'd do an effort post about those two films while they're still fresh in my mind. Persistence of Vision is available to rent and view online for a modest fee, so I won't go as much into that. Joy In Motion, however, was only available to buy through the Ghibli museum website and is region locked to Japan, so I'll post more screenshots from it since it's an excellent documentary most people will never get to see. Here's where you can rent Persistence of Vision: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/persistenceofvision Examples of Otsuka's animation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXXvjJ7BkOY Examples of Williams animation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08QfGxzvZA4 The similarity between both men, Williams and Otsuka, is that they really are Animation Directors, and not Directors. Both were obsessed with the technique of animation and its expressive capability, but neither really have the talent for directing a feature film or crafting the story. Luckily Otsuka realized that early in his career and let his talent be guided by Miyazaki and Isao Takahata (who needed someone like Otsuka because he himself couldn't draw.) Williams had no one around who would make use of his animation skills in a feature role (until Roger Rabbit, late in his career) so he tried to do it on his own, combining his meticulous eye for detail and disdain for budgets and schedules on an "opus" of a project. You can tell pretty early on in the documentary that Williams was never that concerned with narrative. He talks about himself as a craftsman who has finally "mastered" animation, and a theatrical film will be his "masterpiece", in the style of the old painters, to prove to the world that he has mastered this medium. The feature also served as a creative outlet. He ran a very successful studio doing commercials and opening titles which generated acclaim and awards. That work was profitable (at one point he says he'd sunk 3 million of the profits from commercials into The Thief and the Cobbler) but animators who worked with Williams say he felt money was out to "destroy his life." Because of the long production time, the motivations for the film and the industry landscape around it shifted over the decades. Williams initially wanted to to "save" golden age animation, by bringing superstar Hollywood animators over to London to train his crew. Animation in the 70s and early 80s was a pretty scarce, and the work that existed was tv productions whose budgets paled in comparison with what Disney used to work with (and even the Disney budgets during those years were more limited.) By the time Williams actually found funding from Warner Brothers, the animation biz was healthy again. And adding insult to injury, Katzenberg employed one of his famous strategies of beating a competitor to market by releasing Aladdin before William's film was due to come out. (Katzenberg would later pull this stunt with the film "The Wild" made in Toronto, by touring the facility that was making it and then producing and releasing Madagascar a year before The Wild was set to hit cinemas.) But William's really doomed his own film by not sticking to the agreed upon budget or schedule and not having completed a storyboard before animation production commenced. Like Otsuka, Williams spent his dotage teaching animation, and much of his career can be summarized as a passing on of techniques that would later shape the look of films everyone remembers. "Joy In Motion" trace Otsuka's career from the earliest features at Toei in 1958 through his current role teaching animation to new recruits at TMS (the studio that animated all the best looking episodes of 90s cartoons.) For a prominent anime figure, Otsuka has very western sensibilities. He shakes his head at the overly complex character designs that anime since the 80s have been known for, finding it a waste of the animators time. He considers motion to be of primary importance to animated media, and is sad that anime series in the '70s used 5-8,000 drawings, while today's shows only use 3-5,000 drawings per episode. He collected army cartoons during America's occupation of Japan and Mad Magazines during his career that influenced his style, and was chosen as Animation Director of the first Lupin series as he shared sensibilities with the creator. You can get a sense that Otsuka would be a much more pleasant person to work with than Williams or Miyazaki. He is not the taskmaster. He has high standards but delivers his notes in a "why don't you consider it" way. Probably a lot of that is he doesn't have the pretensions of a director that many dissatisfied animators do. Speaking of, Otsuka was there to see the "transformation" that happened with Miyazaki from his animator to director days. On the series "Future Boy Conan", Miyazaki has transitioned from talented animator to a genius control freak, the kind that did layout for every scene, which was unheard of, and then corrected all the key animation after he didn't approve of Otsuka's pass. When Ghibli was founded, Otsuka moved away from animating and concentrated more on teaching and producing, becoming a backbone of the network that animators in Japan use when moving onto new projects. His approach is always to identify talent and ask "Why don't you consider it?" in a non-aggressive manner. The main producer at Studio Ghibli, Toshio Suzuki, credits Otsuka for bringing together the right people at that studio, and for negotiating Miyazaki and Takahata's salaries. Otsuka on Miyazaki's "Transformation" during Future Boy Conan There's a number of other interesting bits in the documentary, such as a casual mention of a Union effort among japanese animators in the late 60s. Japanese animation currently doesn't have a union so I assume it wasn't successful, or maybe one existed for a short time at the feature studios, and then disappeared once tv series led to a huge opening of other studios. Rates never recovered from the cheap prices set by Osamu Tezuka's Mushi Pro, which itself was started as a rival studio to Toei after Tezuka's contract there expired. It'd be interesting to see how much better the working life of an animator would be in Japan today if a union persisted. Overall, Otsuka seems to have a wisdom that William's lacked. He understood his strengths but also his weaknesses, or was made to understand them by the titanic talents that surrounded him. He exemplifies that kind of "elder statesman" that industries benefit from tremendously.
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# ? Jan 26, 2020 04:30 |
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Disney Plus doesn’t have “Donald Duck and the Gorilla” and this is bullshit because I want my son to be irrationally terrified of gorillas like I was.
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# ? Jan 26, 2020 04:39 |
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LeJackal posted:Balto is, overall, a good movie with some really excellent stylistic choices and super great animation on so many elements. Sadly its handicapped by: 1) and 3) echo my criticisms of Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, which is on all the time because my kids love it, so I've learned to kind of excuse those. Balto weirdly sounds both better and worse than I imagined but I'd still like to rewatch it.
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# ? Jan 26, 2020 05:16 |
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Edit: it occurs to me that this might have been But just Google it.
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# ? Jan 26, 2020 05:25 |
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There's kind of a theme with older animation especially, and perhaps Disney in general, that the protagonists get really boring and generic designs while all the creativity (and probably budget) goes into the villains. I'm not sure if it's a marketing thing where the protagonists are supposed to look generic to have broad appeal/not offend anyone, or a budget thing where a less detailed and exaggerated design is cheaper to animate for the character who'll have the most screentime. Or maybe both. It's a bit like in anime, where the main characters tend to have relatively subdued designs while the villains they go nuts with, though obviously that's not a hard and fast rule. (Is pretty common though that even in shows with a variety of character designs, characters that are meant to be attractive tend to all look pretty much the same, and closest to what the creators think will be most merchandisable)
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# ? Jan 26, 2020 05:51 |
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Balto looks like an off brand Don Bluth movie
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# ? Jan 26, 2020 12:59 |
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Macaluso posted:Balto looks like an off brand Don Bluth movie Goddamn, I can't unsee it now.
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# ? Jan 26, 2020 13:13 |
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Ghost Leviathan posted:There's kind of a theme with older animation especially, and perhaps Disney in general, that the protagonists get really boring and generic designs while all the creativity (and probably budget) goes into the villains. I'm not sure if it's a marketing thing where the protagonists are supposed to look generic to have broad appeal/not offend anyone, or a budget thing where a less detailed and exaggerated design is cheaper to animate for the character who'll have the most screentime. Or maybe both. But I think it's just an extension of Walt liking the idea of live action things existing with cartoons. It's kind of a hold over of the animation-as-magic-trick works of Winsor McCay. It's interesting how it evolves over time. In Snow White, More Cartoony=More Fantastic Elements (The Dwarves, the Queen's disguise). But in Pinocchio, it's inverted. The Blue Fairy is the realistic looking woman in a world of cartoon characters, making her appear otherworldy. As you get into the 50s, they start to cut the difference. Cinderella, the Evil Step Mother, and Prince are pretty realistic characters compared to the more comedic characters like the step-sisters. The child characters in Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland are more big eyed and cartoony--partially because they're kids--while villains like Hook or weirdos like the Mad Hatter still get more exaggerated designs. I think that that Sleeping Beauty is when we actually get the modern balance of Disney characters. Aurora and the Prince are still realistic compared to the Fairies--but there is something more subtly stylized about them. Snow White and Cinderella have this softness to their faces, their faces look malleable as opposed to Aurora who has this really defined jaw line, pointed chin, and things that can only exist in animation like her white outlines for her blonde hair. Timeless Appeal fucked around with this message at 19:42 on Jan 26, 2020 |
# ? Jan 26, 2020 17:33 |
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I like that idea, and I can see how it ends up diluted; the protagonists in those shorts still have their own distinct and interesting designs, being more realistic in a world of cartoon critters is its own kind of standing out, while the later examples are just less interesting cartoon critters, since they've lost track of what the point was. Bone comes to mind, as a work where the protagonists are in a world with a massively different art style from their own- in that case, extremely abstracted comic strip critters in an elaborately illustrated high fantasy world. It's an interesting aesthetic when you do it right, with different character designs contrasted against each other, reflecting an alien nature and their roles. Steven Universe comes to mind, with characters introduced later being of noticeably different designs that reflect their nature in various ways. The different styles make their differences stand out. It's a pretty common problem that comes to mind from TVtropes threads; people used to conventions forget what they actually do and what they're for. With Balto being the topic the whole Sparkledog fad comes to mind; say what you will, but all those people are generally earnestly trying to make a character design that's unique and memorable, even if they suck at it.
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# ? Jan 26, 2020 17:51 |
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The trope of comedic relief/villains being denoted as such by the exaggeration of their designs also gets tricky once you get more diverse with your casting. Despite the white washing voice acting and vague ethnicity, Aladdin and Jasmine's character designs are pretty good at invoking the vague ethnicity they're going for. It makes Jafar's design or the shopkeeper's design feel more problematic because you're cranking up the exaggeration level. You have a more subdued presentation of the same vague ethnicity to judge it against. Similarly, Dr. Facilier is a legitimately cool design and I don't think problematic in of itself--but you do get into this issue that he's the villain and he has a gap and more pronounced lips than Tiana who is not being white washed, but given realistic proportions that make his feel questionable in comparison.
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# ? Jan 26, 2020 19:52 |
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I also find Facilier interesting because every voodoo thing in TV and movies makes the same mistake of evoking the wrong Loa - they always evoke Baron Samedi as the villain/guy who the people look like, and they commonly are making zombies, when Samedi is the complete opposite of that. He's a psychopomp who makes sure the dead STAY dead, all these wannabes that try to ape his design would just piss him off because they are interrupting the rest of his charges. He'd probably be more likely to be on the hero's side (as long as he gets to play with the tosser who's making him look bad, who would be severely punished by him), they'd just need to offer a cigar and rum and he'd be on board. I got curious and looked up the Loa a couple of years ago. There's also a neat thing with Princess and the Frog in Lottie, aka Charlotte - she is the only important white character and she is named after the loa who represents the idea of the caucasian aristocrat, although the loa Lady Charlotte is 100% french.
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# ? Jan 26, 2020 20:44 |
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Sir Lemming posted:My kids have moved on to The Little Mermaid, and I'm happy to say that drat, those songs really hold up. It's easy to see why this was such a big deal. Maybe they just thought there was no need to really promote it - that anyone who subscribes to Disney+ already knows what it is.
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# ? Jan 26, 2020 23:17 |
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BioEnchanted posted:I also find Facilier interesting because every voodoo thing in TV and movies makes the same mistake of evoking the wrong Loa - they always evoke Baron Samedi as the villain/guy who the people look like, and they commonly are making zombies, when Samedi is the complete opposite of that. He's a psychopomp who makes sure the dead STAY dead, all these wannabes that try to ape his design would just piss him off because they are interrupting the rest of his charges. He'd probably be more likely to be on the hero's side (as long as he gets to play with the tosser who's making him look bad, who would be severely punished by him), they'd just need to offer a cigar and rum and he'd be on board. Apparently they did quite a bit of research into voodoo, and made sure that they didn't use any authentic symbols or glyphs in the movie, as to not evoke anything unnecessarily. Also, one of the dancing dolls is Lilo's.
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# ? Jan 27, 2020 08:58 |
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LeJackal posted:[timg]https://i.imgur.com/2y5kd7m.gif[/img] B-B-B-BUT THATS THE POOR BOX!!
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# ? Jan 27, 2020 09:24 |
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This year we're traveling to America and we're going to Disney world. However, as we were discussing it and how hype me and my wife were for going to the capitalist overabundance of Disney world we found that my 7yo son doesn't give a poo poo. As we were talking about it, what's happening is that my son doesn't have much of a connection to Disney at all. This is actually something Disney is doing to itself. The biggest more recent "Disney" movies were geared more towards girls than boys, with movies like Frozen, Vaiana etc. While Toy Story is more both genders he currently doesn't like Toy Story. Most Marvel stuff wasn't really aimed for his age originally. Now that he is the age for it, none of it is on the biggest streaming service of the country (currently the only one I have) and kids these days don't watch TV. Starwars still technically isn't for his age yet (At least the advised age for the movies is a few years older still). Maybe Resistance, but the same thing applies. It's not on the streaming platforms and kids don't watch TV. Yes we can buy toys but the surrounding media actually has a different age categories. But either way, the toys without the media don't build a connection. So my wife and I have been pushing him to watch some Disney movies with us. We must brainwash him. Fortunately, my son recently came home with talks about having watched some Goof Troop at school. (Remember that?) So last night we watched A Very Goofy Movie, which my wife bought on DVD ages ago. Man, that's some 90s poo poo right there. And I mean that in a good way, it was an entertaining movie. Very standard plotting, but enjoyable enough with some humor. Amusingly, we caught my son red handed to lying to us so this movie making a big point out of the lies Max told was hilariously topical. The most important thing at least was that my son thoroughly enjoyed it, especially the scenes with Giga Foot. While watching it though the thing that stood out the most to me was the artstyle. Man, I missed those chaotically drawn lines. Amusingly, after the movie my son noted that the art style was so weird compared to other stuff he watches. But he liked this as well, no preference on his side.
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# ? Jan 27, 2020 09:30 |
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Uncle Wemus posted:B-B-B-BUT THATS THE POOR BOX!! Robin Hood is my favorite Disney movie ever, so hats off to you for this reference
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# ? Jan 27, 2020 11:02 |
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The new DuckTales is pretty good too, but Disney's only recently started to actually put effort into TV animation for more than one show at a time again. I worked at a video store briefly and one think the manager talked about was how stingy Disney always was with video and DVD releases- making their back catalogue so hard to get has been a problem in the long run because their TV cartoons basically vanish into the ether never to be seen again. I suppose they seem to definitely be low priority for Disney, but I think that's a mistake; kids loving LOVE TV cartoons, and when the media refused to age with them they all turned on to anime instead, and now pretty much all the new cartoons are made by huge anime fans.
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# ? Jan 27, 2020 11:34 |
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Apparently they did quite a bit of research into voodoo, and made sure that they didn't use any authentic symbols or glyphs in the movie, as to not evoke anything unnecessarily. Thanks, this will be a useful tidbit to repeat to the grandparents when they inevitably get weirded out by my kids watching that movie.
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# ? Jan 27, 2020 14:05 |
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I would genuinely like to see a movie that explores the actual Voodoo mythology though. Like the loa could have a similar role to the Greek Gods in The Odyssey where they are constantly interacting with one another and trying their own conflicting agendas and bickering while doing their actual jobs.
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# ? Jan 27, 2020 16:16 |
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Having researched voodoo and the loa for something I’ve been writing, I’ve found it extremely frustrating that no two sources generally agree on anything about them.
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# ? Jan 27, 2020 19:49 |
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The_Doctor posted:Having researched voodoo and the loa for something I’ve been writing, I’ve found it extremely frustrating that no two sources generally agree on anything about them. this is kind of a thing with folk magic. unless you actually know practitioners whose brains you can pick, there's gonna be a lot of contradictory sources and you basically just have to pick the one that seems the best.
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# ? Jan 27, 2020 19:53 |
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The_Doctor posted:Having researched voodoo and the loa for something I’ve been writing, I’ve found it extremely frustrating that no two sources generally agree on anything about them. Ask two different white people about their religion some time
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# ? Jan 27, 2020 22:04 |
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starkebn posted:Ask two different white people about their religion some time vs oh poo poo eyes fire wings? EYES
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# ? Jan 28, 2020 00:37 |
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A good chunk of Christian iconography as we know it today is neither written in the Bible nor a part of the church’s teachings. Most Christians don’t realize they’ve completely mythologized their own religion. I used to teach catechism and I started doing lessons about Christian mythology after one of the chapters in the books provided by the diocese focused on the Seven Deadly Sins...which is not an actual teaching of the church. It did give me a chance to ask the kids to describe what God/the devil/demons/angels looked like, and then reveal they had just described characters from Disney’s Hercules though.
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# ? Jan 28, 2020 08:59 |
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flashy_mcflash posted:Has anyone watched Balto recently? We just watched that live action Togo movie and now I'm kinda itching to revisit the historically inaccurate original. If you watch the Balto cartoon you also have to watch the sequels.
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# ? Jan 28, 2020 14:30 |
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Pyrotoad posted:If you watch the Balto cartoon you also have to watch the sequels. I think I've seen part of one of those, with a lady fox hitting on Balto. And yes, this franchise has produced a lot of porn.
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# ? Jan 28, 2020 14:39 |
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Ghost Leviathan posted:I think I've seen part of one of those, with a lady fox hitting on Balto. Hell there were people openly lusting for the antagonist dude husky in this thread like, three iterations ago.
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# ? Jan 28, 2020 15:08 |
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Acebuckeye13 posted:Hell there were people openly lusting for the antagonist dude husky in this thread like, three iterations ago. I mostly blame the voice acting. Same with Renamon.
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# ? Jan 28, 2020 15:45 |
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I remember in a recent iteration of this thread someone posted screenshots of two villain dobermans from some movie, and it took several pages before someone finally noticed and asked "hey why do they have human shoulders?"
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# ? Jan 28, 2020 19:46 |
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Fish Noise posted:I remember in a recent iteration of this thread someone posted screenshots of two villain dobermans from some movie , and it took several pages before someone finally noticed and asked "hey why do they have human shoulders?" Oliver and Company
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# ? Jan 29, 2020 01:25 |
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The_Doctor posted:Having researched voodoo and the loa for something I’ve been writing, I’ve found it extremely frustrating that no two sources generally agree on anything about them. (Wait, wrong voodoo.) Darth TNT posted:So my wife and I have been pushing him to watch some Disney movies with us. We must brainwash him.
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# ? Jan 29, 2020 02:17 |
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its absolutely criminal that most of the disney tv shows dont have full dvd sets. Buzz Lightyear of Star Command was
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# ? Jan 29, 2020 03:20 |
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Did it "get away" with being a quality program or are you still just excited by poop jokes
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# ? Jan 29, 2020 03:47 |
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Darth TNT posted:This year we're traveling to America and we're going to Disney world. However, as we were discussing it and how hype me and my wife were for going to the capitalist overabundance of Disney world we found that my 7yo son doesn't give a poo poo. I'll save the serious Disneychat for the Disney World thread in travel, but I wouldn't stress about it. Remember that until recently, the Disney Vault (tm) policy meant that you couldn't freely get to a lot of these movies. Plenty of kids have ridden Dumbo without knowing what Timothy's name is. I'd wager more people have been through the Swiss Family Robinson Treehouse in the last year than have seen the movie in that time span. There'll be some things that miss outright (as you noted,) but don't write off meeting characters. They really do have personalities, and you can get fun interactions with them. Double so for face characters. Use the opportunity to get the kid to emotionally imprint on a park original, like the Jungle Cruise, the Tiki Room, or the Haunted Mansion. Also, A Goofy Movie is way better than the sequel.
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# ? Jan 29, 2020 03:48 |
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Pick posted:Did it "get away" with being a quality program or are you still just excited by poop jokes I also remember it being a lot of fun. Many of those shows dealt with adult topics. I remember I learned about the concept of credit card debt from a Disney cartoon episode.
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# ? Jan 29, 2020 05:06 |
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Shadow Hog posted:General consensus I've seen is that the Voodoo3 is generally considered the best one to go for, although the Voodoo5 is the strongest one on offer and the only one to offer 32-bit color and anti-aliasing, and also that some DOS programs only look for the original Voodoo, though you can trick them into using the Voodoo2 with a batch file setting some parameters. The Voodoo4 is just a weaker Voodoo5 and thus not really remarkable. Boxman posted:I'll save the serious Disneychat for the Disney World thread in travel, but I wouldn't stress about it. Remember that until recently, the Disney Vault (tm) policy meant that you couldn't freely get to a lot of these movies. Plenty of kids have ridden Dumbo without knowing what Timothy's name is. I'd wager more people have been through the Swiss Family Robinson Treehouse in the last year than have seen the movie in that time span. There'll be some things that miss outright (as you noted,) but don't write off meeting characters. They really do have personalities, and you can get fun interactions with them. Double so for face characters. My wife is a big Disney fan and she managed to collect all the movies regardless of the vault policy. Although I don't think she has the Goofy movie sequel. I'm not sure if it was even released in Europe. I'm not stressing, it's just an observation. And I'm obviously not going to force him to watch stuff he doesn't want. It's wild that when we grew up there was a lot of Disney on TV and there really isn't that much of that on anymore. I mean there's some stuff, but that's not really the stuff you see in the parks. Also thank for the heads up on the WDW thread. Going to check it out for more tips.
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# ? Jan 29, 2020 11:30 |
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# ? Apr 19, 2024 21:00 |
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Ccs posted:I also remember it being a lot of fun. Many of those shows dealt with adult topics. I remember I learned about the concept of credit card debt from a Disney cartoon episode. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aq3PMtbVzLo man, gargoyles was good
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# ? Jan 29, 2020 11:51 |