u/ValentinesStar

I want to preface this by saying I do not think this looks like a great film and I’m not super excited for it. The visuals look pretty cool, but the story looks like a very generic misfit teenager becomes the chosen one plot. The kind of plot that dominated Wattpad in the early 2010s. With that said, I think some of the criticisms of the movie are baseless and some of the common talking points about both the movie and Disney as a whole are kind of irritating me.

1. HEXED RIPPED OFF THE OWL HOUSE: No, it didn’t. Owl House didn’t invent portal fantasy. A story is not a rip-off of another story because they use the same common trope. I’ve even seen some people in the comment section of the Hexed trailer try to spin this narrative that Disney made a crappy rip-off of Dana Terrace’s show after they treated her so badly and threw her out. That idea is absolutely laughable. Disney TV animation and Disney theatrical animation are very much different entities, it’s more than likely just a coincidence.
2. SAME FACE SYNDROME: I’ve been seeing a lot of those comparison pictures of all of the CGI Disney characters next to each other to show they all have the same face/facial expressions in marketing. I do kind of see it. The main female characters all have very large eyes, small noses and mouths, and round faces. But I think saying they all look exactly the same is a stretch. Whenever I see one of those comparison images, I legitimately can’t see it. I saw a thumbnail of the Hexed girl next to Rapunzel, Anna, and the Wish girl. She has significantly thicker eyebrows than all of them and a slightly different eye shape. What are we doing?
3. ADORKABLE MAIN CHARACTER: Something else I’ve seen people say in those same face syndrome posts is all of Disney’s female characters these days are written the exact same way because they’re all cheerful/quirky/silly/whatever. I really think it’s a stretch to say Anna and Moana are basically the exact same character just because they’re both generally cheerful and Moana has a handful of moments where she’s a little clumsy or dumb. Also, notice how when a female character is silly and dorky everyone and their dog starts writing think pieces about how it’s bad, lazy writing, but I’ve never heard anyone say anything bad about Miles Morales. I get the observation, but a lot of people pointing this out ignore the fact that these characters have other traits, backstories, and motivations that give them more depth and set them apart from each other.

I don’t like playing defense for Disney and I don’t want to play defense for what will likely be a very mediocre movie. But this is an issue that’s been bugging me for some time. I think some people are just way too eager to criticize Disney for anything even when the criticism doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Disney is lazy and all of their movies and characters are the exact same. I’m going to go write some fanfiction about Disney being cartoonishly evil to the creator of a show I like. Animation fans can be exhausting sometimes.

Very broad, I know. I’m working on a comic about ballet and I want to check out some other media about it. Any genre is fine. Just needs to have ballet in it. I have already seen Black Swan.

Just a weird, random thing that came into my head yesterday and what is Reddit good for if not getting internet strangers to indulge the weird, random things that come into your head.

I don’t think it’s a lot, but I could be wrong.

Example:

Home had Rihanna in it and I think she’s great

The romance subplot in HTTYD was really forced (though Hiccup and Astrid are an absolutely adorable couple in all of the sequels and spin-offs, especially the second movie)

Over the years, I’ve seen people rush to this character’s defense because he was “the most normal person in the movie”, which is an exceptionally low bar to clear. Also saying he was the unsung hero/victim of the movie because he only wanted to kill Barry because he was allergic to bees and he ended up losing his girl to a bee. Does this interpretation of the movie make sense or is he just the villain?

And there’s also that post I’ve seen floating around Reddit saying he’s more pathetic than the guy in Turbo who lost the Indy 500 to a snail. I think they’re tied.

I just saw a video where two little kids, they were probably four or five, stood in front of a whole airport gate, said "Welcome to our show, sit down if you want to watch our show", and proceeded to sing the National Anthem at the top of their lungs. And at the end, everyone cheered for them. And the parent was filming this to post it on TikTok. They also put a caption on the video saying they weren't paying attention to their kids until they noticed them doing this.

Do parents think that everyone in the world loves their kids as much as they do? Do they think that everyone thinks their child is the cutest, more special, most important thing in the entire world and everything they do is precious and funny? Is it that hard for people to understand that not everyone finds children doing something stupid and annoying in public charming?

I truly can't stand parents who let their kids do stuff like that in public because they find it adorable. It's very "My kid and I are the main characters and we should be able to do whatever we want to do and the whole world should revolve around us". Airports and flying are really stressful for me because I'm autistic and airports suck for autistic people. When I get to my gate, I don't want to hear two little kids, or anyone for that matter, making a ton of noise. I definitely wouldn't want to politely go along with it and clap for them.

Is this just a thing with the current generation of parents? I hate to pull the old "Back in my day", but I cannot imagine my parents ever letting me do this at that age. And I was born in 2002. That wasn't that long ago.

I'm not angry at the children because they were playing and they were too young to understand they were doing something inappropriate. But their parents should have stepped in and made them stop. Teach the kids that when you're in public, you can't be loud and disruptive because that's rude. I am just so done with modern parents.

I actually enjoyed the live action HTTYD, but that film’s existence does open the floodgates. But I don’t think DreamWorks has a lot of movies that could work in live action.

Many DreamWorks movies have main characters that are anthropomorphic animals or other non-human creatures. Anthropomorphic animal characters tend to not work in live action remakes of animated movies. At best, you get Disney’s “live action” Lion King remake where all of the animals look less expressive than they did in the original because they have to look realistic now. At worst, you get Hei Hei in the new Moana remake which looks absolutely horrifying because they failed to grasp that just because a design looks good in a cartoon doesn’t mean it’ll look good as a hyper realistic CGI character. Pretty much any live action DreamWorks remake would have to be very CGI heavy which is always a risk. You have to put a lot of time and money into making them not look like garbage, especially when the main character is a purely CGI character. And DreamWorks tends to go for more cartoony character designs so there’s a decent chance of running into that Hei Hei problem. Just because of that, I don’t want to imagine live action remakes of most of the DreamWorks movies. Does a remake of Madagascar where all of the animals look like the animals in the Lion King remake sound appealing to anyone?

The only movies I think would be decent candidates for live action remakes are the early 2D movies, excluding Spirit. It’d actually be pretty cool to see DreamWorks acknowledge that they made Sinbad again. Those are just my opinions, tell me if you think there are other DreamWorks movies that could work in live action.

Been doing a little research on the topic recently.

In my layman opinion, I find the idea of a non-human animal learning a human language hard to believe and frankly stupid. An animal can learn to recognize a word and associate it with an action, that’s why dogs can learn tricks, but that’s not the same as understanding a human language or communicating like a human.

I see some parallels between the stuff Penny Patterson did and the John C. Lily dolphin experiment. Now it’s really easy to relentlessly mock Lily and boil his career and existence down to “the guy that gave a dolphin LSD with NASA’s money”. It’s funny to do that. But, utterly insane as that story got, Lily did make some important contributions to the study of dolphins. But I really think the main contribution scientists should have taken from that story was never try to make animals speak a human language again because that’s not going to happen. And then along came Penny Patterson.

From everything I’ve learned about Patterson and Koko, including seeing some videos of Koko “communicating”, I think it’s more likely that Koko essentially learned tricks (something we already knew any animal with anything resembling a brain can do), Patterson greatly exaggerated her abilities, and the Clever Hans effect was doing some heavy lifting. In some videos of them, I saw Koko make some random hand gesture or a sign she wasn’t meant to and Patterson respond by saying she’s acting silly or messing with them which feels like either a way to conceal the fact Koko doesn’t actually know what’s she’s doing or some deep denial. On that note, I think there was also some humanization going on since everyone seemed involved seemed to assume gorillas think exactly like humans.

There are definitely things we can learn from Koko’s story. I’d love to learn what her thing with taking off people’s shirts was all about. But I don’t think she was some special animal that could communicate with humans or proof that could be done. I also don’t see her as proof that gorillas are more intelligent or more human-like than other species (I mean, as a species that’s closely related to us they are more human-like than most other species, but they don’t act human).

I also think it’s questionable that Patterson and everyone working with or supporting her were more interested with getting a gorilla to communicate like a human than learn about the way gorillas communicate. Same with Lily. They were both essentially trying to make an animal act human. And if you’re going to try that, you might as well throw a human in the ocean and tell them to act like a dolphin or drop them in front a troop of gorillas and tell them to become part of the troop.

Those are my thoughts, I’d love to hear what other people on the sub think.

Animated kids' movies as a whole do not do this trope very well (with some genuinely great exceptions), but I think DreamWorks does it even worse than the competitors. So much so that I don't actually have a best. I just threw that in to give you guys a challenge and make this a little more interesting.

I was really torn between Turbo, Ruby Gillman, and The Bad Guys here. Whatshisface from Turbo added nothing to a story that could have easily just not had a villain (I am one of the ten people on the planet who will kind of vouch for that movie, but I find myself unable to summon the effort to remember this character's name). Whatshisface 2 from the Bad Guys was an incredibly predictable twist villain (I like this movie, it's fun, but I refuse to remember this character's name).

But Chelsea...Chelsea is something else. The twist actively made the movie worse. A version of this movie without the twist is more interesting. If Chelsea was just the daughter of Evil Mermaid Lady (don't tell me any of these characters' names in the comments, I do not care), instead of just being Evil Mermaid Lady, you would have had a more interesting character. Chelsea actually being driven by a desire to avenge her mom or maybe me like her mom would have made an interesting villain. A lot of things could have stayed the same. Chelsea befriends Ruby in order to manipulate her into getting the MacGuffin for her. And from there you could have had the story go in one of two ways: Chelsea actually starts to care for Ruby and she is redeemed or Chelsea is conflicted, but she still goes through with her plan because her grief or anger or longing to live up to her mom takes control of her. Maybe Evil Mermaid Lady is actually still alive, but still not Chelsea and she's forcing her daughter to do this for her. I guess this is really turning her into a less painful twist villain. But I actually do think a twist villain could work with this story. The very young and sheltered Ruby who is learning to live up to her family's legacy is manipulated into making a catastrophic mistake is a good way for that story to go. But the way they did it was stupid and creates and very dull and generic antagonist, which is sad since Chelsea was actually a pretty fun and funny character when she was first introduced.

A general rule I’ve heard is that animals that only have one baby or a few babies at a time will protect and feed them (mammals and birds), but animals that can have lay over 100 eggs at a time will lay the eggs and leave, maybe even eat their offspring (many insects, fish, and reptiles).

Are there exceptions to this? Is taking care of offspring that common in nature?

Please be civil, we’re talking about cartoon movies and it ain’t that deep. I’ll begin.

I acknowledge it is the weakest film in the series and has significant issues, but I actually like Shrek the Third. It has some of my favorite moments in the entire series and I think Arthur is a good character.

Turbo isn’t “Cars, but with snails”. Aside from the fact they’re both about car racing and have really weird premises, they have very little in common when it comes to their stories, characters, or themes. People have been comparing them for 13 years and I don’t get it. (And if we are going to compare them, Cars would have benefited from having a protagonist that doesn’t take half the movie to become remotely likable and Turbo would have benefited from an actually good and not pointless antagonist).

I unironically like The Bee Movie. I just think it’s funny and I like how chaotic it is.

Here’s the spicy one. The Bad Guys is overrated. I’m not saying it’s bad. The animation, characters, action and heist scenes, and comedy are great and fun. But the story is really meh. Very predictable, I knew who the twist villain was going to be right away. And I’m sorry, but the fact that some of the animals were anthropomorphic and some were normal weirded me out a little. It was confusing. Haven’t seen the sequel, not because I didn’t want to, I just didn’t have time to see it while it was in theaters.

Teenage Kraken wouldn’t be as widely disliked if people hadn’t been hyping it up as much.