I was just talking about this with Alicia - Spongebob is hilarious and manages to retain some of the grotesquery of Ren and Stimpy without the…well, rest of it.
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I think Flapjack also carries on some of the better parts of R&S but with a better heart
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it totally is, flapjack and k’nuckles are like if ren actually kind of liked stimpy. (though i suppose its meant to be a long john silver/jim hawkins thing)
im enough of a dork to have watched commentaries for adventure time (which is also a cartoon in the ren and stimpy tradition imo) and i remember in an episode where finn and jake are fighting, pen ward says something like “a lot of people want to pitch episodes where finn and jake get in an argument, but i usually don’t want to do it because i think it sucks to see two friends fight all the time” and that stuck with me. i never really liked bits like ren rambling about how he wanted to choke stimpy to death, it felt overly mean and edgelordy long before that term existed
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God damn, look at this anime
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Rintaro directed iirc so visually wonderful but horridly paced
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I gotta say The Great Pretender has one of the most complicated localisations I’ve ever seen in a dub
So in the original Japanese version, the characters talk Japanese in Japan and speak a mix of English and Japanese with a French character for a while until they get to America and a sign pops up that says: EVERYTHING FROM THIS POINT WILL BE IN JAPANESE and everyone speaks Japanese
In the English dub, they actually keep all the original voice actors for the parts where they speak Japanese but dub the English parts even mid conversation with new soundalike actors who speak with a Japanese and French accent respectively until the: EVERYTHING WILL BE IN JAPANESE sign pops up at which point they stop having French and Japanese accents and just sound American
Extremely interesting and weird way to go about it
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Colour me even more curious to watch this, then.
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Meanwhile, Infinity Train Book 3.
…
Jesus fucking Christ.
Anyone who’s been through some abusive situations, the whole dynamic after episode five is… uh.
Yikes.
(In a good way. But, fuck.)
I’m watching Korra for the first time and the animation and music is pretty nice, but good god this has TERRIBLE politics! Avatar’s politics weren’t perfect, but they were pretty good for a children’s show in the 2000’s; the show did revolve around a surprisingly nuanced critique of imperialism.
With Korra, however, we’re meant to side with the counter-revolutionaries using the police to crack down on a revolutionary group seeking to break down oppressive power structures. The revolutionary group is massively coded as communist, except in this world their ideology makes absolutely no sense and their methods are disgusting and oppressive. At one point, it’s revealed that the fantasy Henry Ford, biggest capitalist in the city, has teamed up with the communists because… a liberal accidentally killed his wife??
The show is really confusing and inconsistent in its outlook too. Like, when Korra first gets to Republic City, it’s depicted as a nightmare capitalist hellscape. Korra is surprised and dismayed by massive wealth inequality, restrictive property relations, overbearing police, and homelessness. Except then she meets a homeless person and he’s really happy that he has to live in a bush, and he endorses the social order? And then she spends the rest of the show allying with the police to preserve the city’s power structure?
I hear the show gets better after season 1. I hope it also gets less reactionary.
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The politics never really get any better. The last season tries to make you sympathize with a nazi.
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gosh darnit!
to be fair, it’s part of a poorly handled twist where its revealed that the nazi is… a nazi.
The political low point is def season 3 where the villain of the season is an Anarchist voiced by Henry Rollins and the Anarchist is so cartoonish. Its very “his ideas are right but his methods are wrong”.
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the revolutionary group is actually coded as national socialist rather than regular socialist. The politics are absolutely confused the whole time, though.
I dunno, I haven’t finished season 1 yet, but so far I’m getting distinctly Mao / Stalin pastiche vibes from Amon. Like, it feels like they’re going for a totalitarian leftist thing. What makes you say they’re nazi coded?
the whole “ethnic” cleansing angle + scapegoating minorities angle
Fair enough, though I think that’s part of the intense confusion the show has. Like, aesthetically they’re coded as leftist revolutionaries, but their actual goals and methods are fascist. It’s incoherent.
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Korra is uneven. Supremely so. There are fun parts like watching the world develop and new bender stuff. I’m not crazy about the parts where they demystify the avatar but they do fill in some blanks.
There was a lot of mismanagement behind it so I can’t get to angry. Nickelodeon kept giving an extensions when they scheduled 1 season at a time so the writers were always off balance. Because they made each season thinking it would be the last it felt like they missed a few key writers from the past show thinking they could keep the scope narrow.
At the end of the day Korra’s political messages usually boil down to “The status quo is great, why rock the boat”.
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