{"id":4855,"date":"2023-04-13T00:41:03","date_gmt":"2023-04-13T05:41:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sighinide.com\/?p=4855"},"modified":"2023-04-13T00:41:03","modified_gmt":"2023-04-13T05:41:03","slug":"disney-stuff-april-2023-part-iii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sighinide.com\/?p=4855","title":{"rendered":"Disney+ Stuff, April 2023, Part III"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Random notes… tonight I watched 20 minutes of Strange Magic<\/em>, followed by the entirety of Brother Bear 2<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You can probably already guess where I’m going with this one, lol.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Strange Magic<\/em> is… a bad, bad movie. I didn’t see the whole thing of course, but jeezus christ. It’s a Lucasfilm flick, made before the Disney trilogy, and holy shit, you could already see the writing on the wall, there. I mean it’s not as overwhelmingly dreadful as The Last Jedi<\/em>– at least, I don’t think- but I could tell it was going to be close.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I promised myself that I would watch all of these fairy-themed movies to their ends, and I really enjoyed the Tinker Bell<\/em> ones, I mean, so much- they were great fun, with really likeable characters, a bright, beautiful, wonderful world that opened itself up further with each movie, great acting and a ton of charm. They were well made and very efficient movies. None of them were very long- I think none of them are over 90 minutes, but they packed a lot into their running times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With that in mind I tried tackling Strange Magic<\/em> and holy shit, yeah. Well… I tried, lol. Initially I was really enthused owing to the obvious bump in production values but… no, I didn’t like it. The world felt “off”. It has the same problems that the new Star Wars<\/em> stuff has, which says everything I need to say in a nutshell. Like… the visuals were impressive and detailed, but… characterless, and oddly boring. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Disney outsourced the animation of the Tinker Bell<\/em> movies and you could tell, but the visuals had soul<\/em>. You could tell the animators cared and respected the source material and their audience, and the movies just seemed pure<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

IDK, the cgi in Strange Magic<\/em> seemed overly detailed, almost, like the animators were trying too hard, perhaps to make up for some obvious deficiency. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For once the critics got a Lucasfilm movie right, and pegged this one at 18% fresh. That’s a decent rating, at least based on the twenty minutes of this that I could suffer through. God knows why, though, they didn’t like this movie and yet loved The Last Jedi<\/em>. Doesn’t make any sense; they were clearly both cut from the same mold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maybe I’ll soldier on and choke this movie down fifteen minutes at a time, like some kind of penance, just to watch the damned thing. I mean I promised myself that I would watch all of these fairy movies, and I hate to break a promise, so… yeah, but gods, this movie is just SO bad, lol.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ugh.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Well, I watched Brother Bear 2<\/em> after trying in vain to suffer through Strange Magic<\/em>, and loved it. Another animated sequel better than the original. It was touching, with a very human story and familiar characters. The music was great, and there were real laughs. It also had a reverence for nature that I found refreshing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was a nice contrast to Strange Magic<\/em>, which, even though also set in nature, seemed offputtingly mechanical, if not outright anti-nature, oddly. IDK, it’s hard to put my finger on why that movie is just so uncomfortable to watch, but the whole thing doesn’t gel. It has a ton of modern pop songs randomly sung by weird, ugly-ish uncanny valley type cgi fairy things, and… IDK.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maybe I’ll try again tomorrow, but… ugh, really.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You know- maybe Lucasfilm was always kind of an overrated company. It could be. They made Star Wars<\/em> and Raiders of the Lost Ark<\/em>, yes, but then, they’ve made shedloads of stinkers, too. Probably most of the movies they’ve released have been bad if not terrible. And they seem to almost be getting worse, year by year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’ve said before here how the Star Wars<\/em> movies get worse, slowly with each release. The best of them by far was Star Wars<\/em>, Empire<\/em> was second best and clearly inferior to the first flick, and then so on, down and down, until you get to repulsive dreck like Last Jedi<\/em>, and the last one, whatever that one was called.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And then there’s Red Tails<\/em> and Crystal Skull<\/em> and probably some other shit, too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Willow<\/em> was a very good movie, a great kid’s movie, and I watched it dozens of times as a tyke. Loved it. I shudder when looking at the follow up series, tho. Not for me, I guess. I’ll never know, either way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kinda rambling here but man was this such a missed opportunity. The budget for SM<\/em> must have been huge, and the possibility for a masterpiece of a more adult Tinker Bell<\/em> movie was there, I mean it really could have been great, but they just whiffed so hard, lol. Real disappointing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I note that Mandy Moore starred in Brother Bear 2<\/em>. She did great. She’s a very talented voice actor. I love her as Rapunzel too. Good stuff, she’s really good.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Based on what I saw tonight I no longer have any doubts about the next two seasons of the Tangled cartoon. I’m sure they’re wonderful, and I look forward to finishing the series.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’ll be skipping Lucasfilm stuff though for the time being, if not altogether forever, lol.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yup.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Random notes… tonight I watched 20 minutes of Strange Magic, followed by the entirety of Brother Bear 2. You can probably already guess where I’m going with this one, lol. Strange Magic is… a bad, bad movie. I didn’t see the whole thing of course, but jeezus christ. It’s a Lucasfilm flick, made before the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sighinide.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4855"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sighinide.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sighinide.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sighinide.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sighinide.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4855"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/sighinide.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4855\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4861,"href":"https:\/\/sighinide.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4855\/revisions\/4861"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sighinide.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4855"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sighinide.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4855"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sighinide.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4855"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}