The Life Experience ~ Autumn '13

[bloodyrosemccoy]

We're a little heavy on the animation this quarter. For reasons!

What I Learned Since The Autumn Equinox

• Groucho Marx had some excellent writing, but his delivery needed work. You could say they were "rapid-fire" jokes, but I say he didn't give you time to get them.


• Looking up where to buy a simple pepper sprayer in case the stupid asshole pit bull next door breaks through the neighbors' poorly-maintained fence will lead you into an internet rabbit hole of super-paranoid home security products.


• Amtrak bunks are fun to use, but don't really help one sleep too well.


• You are required to sit with others on train dining cars.


• Sea Salt Caramel Cocoa is the New Thing.


• Birds are a very good indicator of the exact instant your fruit should be harvested. And you are on your own if you miss that instant.


• Sherlock is a pretty awesome show.


• Wine presses are fun to operate!


• Lauren MacMullan was the first woman to direct a Disney animated theatrical film. Good thing it was the unbelievably awesome "Get a Horse"!


• I was missing the concept of sisterly love as true love in Disney movies. And I didn't even know it.


• Twitter is a site capable of both great beauty and great horror. Social justice and mob rule both abound.


• Before being a full silent cinematic movie, Gertie the Dinosaur was meant as a Vaudeville act in which its creator, Winsor McKay, would play the part of her trainer.


• Some cats do play fetch.


• Studio Ghibli, in its previous incarnations, was responsible for the animation on those godawfully animated Rankin/Bass specials, including The Hobbit. Ghibli has come a long way.


• People with spinal cord injuries have to be careful not to scoot when transferring, since they can't feel if they catch on something or tear their skin.


• Pumpkins will ripen on your counter if it gets too cold to leave them outside.


• Columbus Day can be celebrated as the much less annoying Indigenous Peoples Day.


• And not all 15th- and 16th-Century Spaniards were mass-murdering fuckheads. That's nice to know.


• Selfies could be as old as art itself.


• When trying to create Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, one of the big concerns in selling it was whether audiences could actually become emotionally invested in cartoon characters. Oh, if only they knew.


• Another concern was that they had never actually made realistic cartoon characters--until this point they were all rubber-hose stretch-and-squash little funny animals. One of the reasons The Prince doesn't make much of an appearance was that they were still not entirely sure how to animate men without making them look stupid. (The Dwarfs don't count; they were squashy cartoon characters.)*


• Last thing about Snow White: the artists (or, as they're referred to in this interesting old-timey How A Cartoon Is Made short, "pretty girls") responsible for cel coloration decided that Snow White needed makeup--and so they simply applied their own blush to the cels. Disney reportedly worried that they might not know how to apply it correctly, which got him the Are You Fucking Kidding Me stare it deserved.

*I can see why Tolkien resented Disney. Here he's trying to make unVictorian, respectable Dwarves, and just a year later out come these goddamn doofuses. Singing about the washing-up, no less!** IT'S NOT LIKE THE DWARVES IN THE HOBBIT EVER SANG ABOUT THE WASHING-UP, RIGHT?! ... Oh, right.

**By the way, according to my DVD chapter menu, that song is entitled "Bluddle-Uddle-Um-Dum." You're welcome.

Comments

[madripoor-rose.livejournal.com]

I always enjoy these posts. Where did you get the idea to do a round up like this instead of the cliched New Years' one?

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

I'm not terribly sure. I think it might have something to do with school quarters, but mostly it just seemed like a nice manageable span of time to look back on.

[acrossthelake.livejournal.com]

Groucho Marx had some excellent writing, but his delivery needed work. You could say they were "rapid-fire" jokes, but I say he didn't give you time to get them.

I'm very much afraid we'll have to disagree on this point. Though you do remind me I still need to see Sherlock at some point...

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Hmm, interesting. I had never seen an actual Groucho performance before. I'd seen trillions of references, and I'd read his quotes. When the siblings and I watched Duck Soup, though, his hilarious wordplay got buried at times. I'll have to watch some more ...

[linda-lupos.livejournal.com]

One of the reasons The Prince doesn't make much of an appearance was that they were still not entirely sure how to animate men without making them look stupid.
Hee. This is especially amusing when you compare it to the fact that Flynn Ryder's look was basically designed by committee to be as hot/attractive as possible. Disney's come a long way. :p

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Hmm. The committee must have been targeting someone other than me.

As a kid I used to wonder why it was okay for cartoon heroes to look derpy (as in Pecos Bill or Ichabod Crane) but heroines/love interests HAD to look lovely (Slue-Foot Sue, Katrina van Tassel). Sadly I figured out that it was a double-standard.

[linda-lupos.livejournal.com]

That puts me in mind of this tumblr post: http://twirlytumblfluff.tumblr.com/post/69333076761/azvolrien-bubblyskootch#notes :)

[childthursday.livejournal.com]

Finding out that it was considered "hard" to animate a man made me laugh/cry, since the animators for "Frozen" were claiming that it's "too hard" to make WOMEN look good and unique in animation: http://www.themarysue.com/frozen-animating-female-characters/

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

That comment was pretty stupid. But I think I did see what he was getting at--it's what I mentioned above. In the old cartoons, the ladies were all kind of generically pretty, without much of a range of expression. If that tradition's been around for long enough, then I can totally believe artists would struggle to figure out how to break free of it. There's unfortunately less practice and less precedent, making it new territory. So basically, Disney sabotaged itself through years of failing to explore the range of female faces/emotions.

After that, though, I was pleasantly surprised with Frozen. You ... uh ... might have noticed that I really liked it. For Disney, it breaks a lot of the molds--it focuses on sister love, with the romance off to the side, and it really does let the women take charge of their destiny. (One of them winds up with a curse that needs an act of True Love to break. Watching the progression of those kinds of curses over the course of Disney's history has been interesting. With Snow White and Sleeping Beauty, the cursed princess waits passively, and in fact senselessly, for some hero to show up and bestow upon her the Act of True Love. In the Little Mermaid, she doesn't sit around waiting--she actively goes to convince him to bestow it upon her--but she still is at his mercy. In Frozen, they start the same way--our heroine goes to straight up demand that the hero help her out. Which ... well, spoiler? I don't know if you mind those. But let me tell you, the way it turns out is AWESOME.)

And ursulav has mentioned another reason why it busts the mold: the older sister. She has been hiding her awesome magic powers all her life, and as soon as she doesn't have to hide them anymore she's like "HELL YEAH I'VE GOT FREEZY POWERS! TIME TO BUILD ICE CASTLES AND SNOW GOLEMS!" And she sings an unbelievable showstopping number about it. And while her powers cause her issues, she never wishes she didn't have them. And she gets to KEEP them, which doesn't happen with nice girls, because their power is too much to trust them with. And she gets to be an actual queen, not just a princess! And she's not even the villain! OH MAN, THIS MOVIE.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

By the way, I know it's a week later and you probably knew this already, but I wanted to tell you that the comment I was referring to as "stupid" was the animator's, not yours. Your comment was not stupid!

[black-rider.livejournal.com]

Sea Salt Caramel Hot Chocolate is as close to drinking angel's tears as we mortals will ever get. At least until the next best thing comes along.

Also I'd suggest a really high-pitched whistle instead of pepper spray for asshole pitbull, pepper spray is just going to piss it off.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

I did enjoy some at a Ghirardelli bar in San Francisco! It was pretty good, but I think I still prefer Mocafe's Azteca d'Oro. (Although it occurs to me that I might like the other stuff just fine if I was allowed to control how much I added ... I like about a third as much cocoa mix as is usually recommended.)

I'm mostly counting on the pepper spray slowing him down long enough for me to scramble away. My backyard isn't very navigable for dogs. But really, it's a long shot either way.

[gwalla.livejournal.com]

Ghiradelli is pretty good, but DAMN their stuff is overpriced. Even for San Francisco!

[childthursday.livejournal.com]

Disney's first woman director is in 2013?! Goodness gracious, Disney, get with the times.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

... Well, it's with some of those super-specific caveats that I didn't add: she became the first woman to solo-direct a Disney animated film. (I did know that one of the co-directors of Brave was Brenda Chapman, so there's that.) But yeah, hopefully this is a sign that Disney's getting with the times. Because jeezus, that short was the coolest thing I'd seen in a long time.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_wastrel/]

Sherlock is a pretty awesome show.
I'd been wondering whether that was any good or not.

Twitter is a site capable of both great beauty and great horror. Social justice and mob rule both abound.
I've discovered both of these truths this year as well.

whether audiences could actually become emotionally invested in cartoon characters. Oh, if only they knew.
*SPITTAKE* ... This is one of those situations where I'm the wrong kind of person to ask about this, aren't I? >.>

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Well, the first episode of Sherlock is, anyway. That's as far as I've gotten ...

As for the cartoon thing--I know, right? It's fascinating. As someone who grew up during the Disney Renaissance, it wouldn't even occur to me to question whether someone can be invested in a cartoon character's fate--and not just the ones who move/look like humans, either. But it was a big worry when they'd never made a feature-length animated movie before. The story goes that the storyboard artists and writers had their breakthrough when discussing Snow White's flight through the scary woods, and the pit she falls into. When they were considering how deep to make it one person burst out, "But we don't want her to get HURT!" and they realized that they were on the right track.

[kittikattie.livejournal.com]

I will eventually see Frozen--I don't want to see it in the theater, I'm annoyed with Disney and a lot of Disney fandom going "There we gave you Tiana, that's enough princesses of color for now, now WHITE ALL THE THINGS", but I love the currently circulating idea of Elsa as queer. I've also seen the "Let It Go" clip.