0080 is one of my favorites actually, and Unicorn is looking great so far!! I felt bad picking on Gundam, but SEED was pretty surprising when I saw it.

I was like aauuugg bllbllblb when I saw Audry's hair because I was in the middle of scraping for character design ideas for the visual novel I'm doing (what all the pilots are for) and now I couldn't do any woman-regents or anything like that. Daaarrr I'm not a good designer, it's tough for me to come up with interesting things like that XP I like straight hair, because it cuts into such crisp angles, and curves can be very fickle on you if you're not careful. The main character's design is actually modified from a different story I'm working on (Adrien in the other drawings) because the writer saw some concept art for him and told me only he could be the star Now I've got two very different Adriens, which I'm glad for because that hair is fun to draw - if a little terrifying to get right. It has such wild folds that you can do it wrong (and clip into his head) easily if you're not planning things well.



Yeah, at first I really liked the 'nondescript' race thing many creators were doing, but now it's getting sort of weird. People are actually diverse, not homogenous, as much as we seem to want to pretend? Has our fear of racism made us fear acknowledging race and how people around us are different than us? Is that still somehow not okay? Jeez.

As a note about the 'handsomeness' factor, I used to hate the beast's human form. I think in retrospect, given what Glen Keane was going for as far as what he was taking in from his museum visits, it's really supposed to be like a sculpture come to life, but man, there was something much more ...attractive??? to his beast form. Not sure how to put it I think I mean just that. Attractive, something that pulls you to look, and doesn't repulse you to regard. Despite his nubby fangs and underbite, you can look at his face a long time without feeling weird. Human beast looks a little weird. He's really stylized (ethnic?) - which I should appreciate, but is so odd next to the other characters who are so cartoony and much less chiseled He has so much more FACE

Anyway, regarding Princess and the Frog, darn there are some really ludicrously good looking black dudes out there, I could even say 'classic' really. Everyone knows what that looks like. Maybe it's just too hard to draw so many distinguishing features, when white cartoons (cartoons who are white) are so established. Then =everyone's= gotta have distinguishing features and then it becomes a clusterf**k of lines which isn't the disney style - or change the style to simplify everyone the =same way=, which isn't disney style either. It's some other style.

My vote, walking out, was that the movie should have been done entirely like this: [link] this was definitely the best part of the movie, and the most vibrant and creative. Also, the most 'black', since historically jazz was very hip at the time, and all that, and that there is some jazz poster images. It resonates culturally and historically and was well done to boot - everything moved a lot more and was vibrant, reminiscent (in both meaning and visually) of 'I just can't wait to be king'.

Almost every scene and song in the movie is cut and pasted from other Disney movies, an almost desperate attempt to ensure that it 'felt' like a Disney movie. It was a downer that the confidence was gone. It was a double downer that nobody seemed to even notice. It's not that it wasn't done creatively or well, it was just so predictable and worse - desperate. I would have enjoyed a fresh, 2-D animation that featured something that was a little different instead of the Same disney movie I've actually watched a million times by now. Treasure Planet? It was different. That did poorly at the box office though, sadly.

I find our princess looks a whole lot like jasmine - but her mom is believable, now that I look at her? Boy they tried hard to put lines that are not traditionally 'caracturish' JUST IN CASE. I have to applaud them for managing with just facial outlines. That's pretty tough in this particular artstyle.

I feel like this movie suffered from a bit of the Obama effect, where everyone was so excited and pleased that there was a black movie now that no one wanted to - or dared - say anything bad about it. Thankfully there was totally nothing -wrong- with it. Sadly, that's about it. Most previous Disney films did, at least the major ones -something- new, even if it does have a very particular feel to it (maybe in part due to the people animating it). The ballroom scene in Beauty and the Beast (at the time it was pretty awesome), or the astonishing stampede in the Lion King.


If you watch her motions at the beginning of this clip, several times she moves her arms or head, and her body doesn't move at all. That's actually so anti disney that it jumped out at me even at the time. Every line from the wrist to the ankle is normally treated as an object unto itself. If the arm moves, the entire figure moves with it, in some way or another. Stuff sticks to each other, pushes a lot, that kind of thing. I can imagine, as the mother pulls the broom from her, her arms going a lot further than they do here, making her bend over more, and then have to travel back, maybe even making a face, as the mother continues to speak. Here, the motion is discussed rationally and realistically rather than flamboyantly. If you're missing the plot (because you are just too young to understand anything or don't care, for example) then there's not much to look at or be dazzled by, when characters are delivering lines. It just wasn't very -entertaining-. Given the plot is quite simple, I think adults were probably more bored than they'd like to admit, compared to films like the Lion King, which was bright and active for little kids, and had sufficient darkness for adults - like the actually kind of shocking Nazi march. I didn't notice up until my most recent viewing. I had to wonder what my parents had thought of that! The plot is sort of ludicrously simple in that film too, but I don't think a lot of people mind all that much.
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This was always my favorite disney movie, as much as Beauty and the Beast was awesome. They could never, never get away with that much violence if they were humans! In what other Disney film does a woman get backhanded so hard she flies across the room?
So it was exciting, and I happen to think animals are great and I love watching them move - they did such an excellent job convincing us they were real lions. That talked (Even the way Scar slowly sits up at the end there is wholly accurate to the animal kingdom)

Scenes in the Frog where people just aren't 'following through' enough on motions is really where the life drained out of the movie, I find. Maybe it does have something to do with korea - not the country or its skillset, but the fact that a lead artist who has been doing this for decades is not there to help a younger artist through a troublesome scene as the disney style would dictate - a style that wasn't just arbitrarily decided, but was crafted by the masters as they worked through their own problems, sketching for bambi or figuring out just how Ariel would move this way or that while totally floating in near-zero G the whole time.

Now watch how she moves in the 'poster' styled wish song. It's completely different - it isn't just the flashy style or inventiveness at work here, it's actually animated better. There's a lot of really fast cuts immediately after that and a scene change that I think disguises the difference quite a bit.