Well, it’s been interesting, watching more stuff here.
Some general ideas / thoughts…
I saw Pinocchio. And Fantasia, and The Black Cauldron, and some other flicks.
Pinocchio was interesting. It’s an amazing movie. Seriously, it’s incredible. The animation is just so so good. It’s so detailed and natural. The voice acting is perfect, etc. It’s hard to think of a movie in any genre that is “better”. I saw Dumbo, too, and that was a wonderfully entertaining movie. It’s only an hour long but it feels deeper and more satisfying than anything I’ve seen twice it’s length. It’s a masterpiece of efficiency; not one second in that movie is wasted.
Fantasia is just awesome. It’s one of the best movies ever made. Certainly it’s one of the most ambitious. Watching it I could see the impact that it had on later movies like 2001. The visuals are fucking incredible. The amount of work that must have gone into creating the animation must have been staggering. The visuals are so good they are as good as the orchestral masterpieces used as the soundtrack.
Modern culture almost always cheapens music like this. It degrades it, like what you will find in things like commercials that use classical masterpieces, for example. Not here. In Fantasia, the visuals are actually worthy of the music, which is refreshing to say the least.
I haven’t seen these movies in years. I last saw Pinocchio wayyyy back when in Grandma’s old house in Iowa. It was a lifetime ago. I must have been, IDK, ten years old? It was… a long time ago. I remember her old VHS player that I used to watch it. Man was that thing huge, lol.
I remember being introduced to Pinocchio through her even before then. In her Waukegan house I remember rooting through some old toys and board games and finding a View-Master with a few slides of some Pinocchio scenes, like the one with the whale.
God is that old, lol. I mean, it’s funny, but it is. The View-Masters were these plastic handheld toys where you would push a button or turn a crank to advance a series of picture slides. You would look through a pair of plastic lenses to view the pictures. Totally analog. No electronics or batteries involved. They were kind of a kid’s version of those picture shows they had in speakeasies back in the 20’s.
The picture slides were on these little circular paper reels, and you would swap them out one by one to go through a scene. Each reel had something like 10 frames of animation on it, and you would just turn the crank to see each frame.
View-Masters were popular with kids before VHS became affordable. Back in the day, they were kinda awesome, I guess, especially for people way out in rural places, who had no access to… anything, really. So yeah, they were old. God. When I finally saw Pinocchio on VHS, I marveled at the technological sophistication I was witnessing, lol.
You know, I spend so much time with my girlfriends that sometimes I kinda forget how much older I am than they are. Somehow I can’t imagine Kathryn Newton or Jayden Bartels ever enjoying anything like that, lol.
But… yeah, Pinocchio is a fantastic movie. It’s exactly what it needs to be and nothing else. I remember once reading an article on these old Disney films, and I learned that they are in fact the most popular movies of all time, and I wouldn’t doubt it.
From what I understand, other movies may have grossed more money at the box office, but IIRC it was Pinocchio that sold a larger volume of tickets than anything else in history. It just didn’t make as much money, since most of those tickets sold were for kids, and probably because they were daytime showings, and not in Marquee theaters. But in terms of sheer number of tickets sold, stuff like Pinocchio, Snow White, and Dumbo crush everything else.
I don’t remember where I read that but it was an interesting read. I think I have the article bookmarked somewhere. I might look it up later.
The old, hand-drawn animation in these flicks is just gorgeous. They even look better now, since nobody makes stuff like this anymore, and likely will never again. Honestly I wonder if anyone even has the capability. It’s kind of like watching an old Buster Keaton flick. It’s a great experience because you know it’s impossible for anything like it to be made today.
The Black Cauldron was fun. Not great, but fun. I’ve wanted to see it ever since reading the book wayyyy back when in middle school. I guess I can cross that off my bucket list, then.
Other stuff… I’ve been watching Kim Possible, Doug, Pepper Ann, Phineas and Ferb, and a few other animated shows. I suppose at this point it would be redundant to point out that I was all of this stuff. But, it’s still relevant. So yeah, I was all of this stuff.
It boggles the mind that nobody else has noticed that Doug Funnie, Ron Stoppable, Phineas Flynn and Pepper Ann are all just the same person, recycled again and again, from slightly different angles. And that that person is the same kid that inspired Bart, Calvin, and a shedload of other characters. I guess people just assumed, like I did, that every kid was like that.
Regardless I’ve been having one hell of an experience watching the shows, because I’m seeing so many things in them that I’ve forgotten about from my youth. In every episode I see there are at least three major “Oh yeah, THAT!” moments. Whether it’s simply the inside of a house, an arrangement of flowers in a backyard, a car, or a person, a sound effect, a melody, or… anything, potentially, every watch brings back a veritable flood of nostalgia and often good memories. It’s an amazing experience.
There’s so much of me in all of this stuff that I can hardly pick out which of these shows might have taken more from my life. There is in fact more of me in Phineas and Ferb than there is in The Simpsons, if you can believe that. And Doug is some kind of autobiography, I guess(?) that is better than anything I could have come up with myself, ironically.
I’m still not sure how this stuff can or should be quantified, lol.
But the first episode of Doug that I saw, which is I think the first of the series, is about how he reminisces too much about his childhood and needs to learn how to move on, etc. Yeah, seriously.
Baffling stuff, this. It’s… very, very recursive. I get surreal flashbacks from Phineas and Ferb. That backyard… yeah, my God, these people know more about me than I do. And it’s clear they have it down to the… pixel(?) since I’ve seen that same backyard, rendered exactly true to life, in quite a few Disney properties. Like this one show I saw today, with… ducks, that rescued a dog. It’s the same backyard of course with the same tree as Phineas and Ferb, which is the same tree I had in my own backyard, and ye gods, did I get a weird deja vu moment when I saw it rendered so perfectly in that duck show.
There’s a lot going on here. I’ve been watching stuff from my girlfriends’ back catalogues a lot, too. And that… is another hundred essays. I won’t be touching that stuff tonight.
I’ve been watching Droids, that 80’s Star Wars cartoon. Not bad, honestly, for disposable entertainment. It feels more Star Wars-ey then TLJ did, that’s for sure. Something to have on while I exercise or whatever as background noise.
I was distressed when I saw Disney slapped a racial disclaimer in front of Dumbo of all things.
That is… dumb, lol. And I know that this is another essay by itself, but seriously, it makes the people who decide these things at Disney right now look frankly shallow and really stupid and petty. And I mean those words literally. It’s like scotch taping a piece of paper with a disclaimer on it to the wall of the Sistine Chapel. It just looks… dumb, and really pitiful and childish. And since it looks so dumb it doesn’t change the significance of the art at all, but can certainly lower the esteem of people who think that this infantile nonsense is necessary. It makes them look like children, not thinking adults. Pearls before swine, for sure.
I hear there is even one of these before Snow White. Who are these fools to criticize works like these? Snow White is a landmark in human art, being the first full length animated film ever released to theaters. I’m getting the image now of some dumb, sheltered “woke” undergrad communications major interning at Disney and throwing a tantrum over something in these masterpieces she imagines as being problematic, mostly because she’s too immature, close-minded and uneducated to understand history or people in general.
It’s not a good look, to say the least.
Well, it’s getting late so I’m stopping this one.
Uhm, good night, then.