Nostalgia? Or Something Else? A Personal Story About Drawing and Media

I am often a stern critic of nostalgia.

What even is nostalgia? It’s the sweet feeling you get when you remember a time in your life, presumably one that occurred long ago. Nostalgia can be triggered by looking at something you once enjoyed, or something you’ve enjoyed all your life even. To me, it’s like a turbo shot of sorts. It’s like a sort of canned happiness that you can enjoy in brief spurts. I once learned the hard way that trying to recreate it constantly can lead to pain… A severe out-of-touch attitude with the present and the future begins to take place, and soon that great thing you’re trying to relive feels like a pale shadow of what it once was.

I feel that nostalgia is overdosed in this day and age. We are living in a decade where everything from the 1990s is making some sort of comeback, and that whole generation insinuates nonstop that the products they were spoonfed were the greatest things in the whole wide world. If you were to ask anyone who is around my age, you’d think the 90s was some golden decade of sheer perfection. Cartoons from the 90s were the best, video games from the 90s were the best, Disney animated movies released in the 90s are the best the studio has ever made, we had far superior childhoods than the ones today’s kids are having. Of course, if you have a little common sense, all of that is very untrue. Your childhood seemed amazing because you were a child, when everything seemed wrapped up in bright, welcoming wrapper. The 90s, by most accounts I’ve read, weren’t exactly a pie-in-the-sky time. Recessions, political happenings, cynicism, this, that… I was oblivious to all of that, for obvious reasons.

Image from IGN.

Nostalgia is often used to downplay a work of art’s significance. This happens a lot with animation. Animation, to begin with, is often considered an inferior children’s medium. Second, all of the Disney animated classics tend to be looked down upon as mere children’s entertainments. I’ve seen it many times before, someone will only admit to liking an animated feature because of “nostalgia,” because it made them “feel like a kid again.” When Pixar released “nostalgia”-sequels like Toy Story 3 and Finding Dory, you had a gaggle of people saying “I’m going to see it and I’m gonna be a 6-year-old again!” As if they went into the theater, turned their brains off, and didn’t watch the movie to… You know… Watch the movie. They only went just to feel 6-years-old again. When I saw Toy Story 3 and Finding Dory, I wasn’t there because “mah childhood!” I was there because I love animation and I know that it’s an art form, I love Pixar, I love the two Toy Story films and I love Finding Nemo, and I like good quality cinema!

I’ve revisited several works of media that I liked as a child during the idyllic 90s, a lot of them did not hold up. Quality is my number one concern, not the cheap jolt of nostalgia that something could give me. This was reaffirmed to me many years back when Nickelodeon’s 90s shows were re-run on the TeenNick block “The 90s Are All That.” Some of the shows were still great, some were just alright, nothing truly spectacular or anything. Then there were some rather embarrassing ones… “I liked that as a kid???” I thought when watching All That! Yet it seemed all great because it was familiar stuff, and when you’re a kid, you’re not as demanding as you are now. Especially if you’re someone like me who is into the art of storytelling. I know of lot of folks who routinely see badly-reviewed movies, they come out enjoying them. Me, I go in expecting something of substance, or something that’ll hit me in some way. Nostalgia is not enough, either.

Anyways, I’m on no quest to relive my childhood. I love animation because I love good quality stuff, not because I’m some manbaby trying to cope with being 24-going-on-25. I also love the art form itself, and have known what it takes to make good animation since I was little. (My VHS releases of Bambi and The Jungle Book had behind-the-scenes specials at the end, and I watched them religiously.) The things from the 90s that I still enjoy? I enjoy them because I think they’re good quality things. I can determine if something from the 90s isn’t very good.

Yet… Something had happened recently.

One of the things from the 1990s that made a big comeback recently was a video game franchise.

Crash Bandicoot.

The original Crash Bandicoot, a platforming adventure game with a funny animal protagonist, was nearly released 21 years ago. Developed by the powerhouse Naughty Dog, two superior sequels (Cortex Strikes Back, Warped) and a kart racer (Crash Team Racing) followed. As a kid, my exposure to Crash was at a cousin’s house. They had the original game on PlayStation, and I played it quite a bit. Another relative had the demo of Crash Bandicoot 2, and I vividly remember playing that in a cramped room stacked with all kinds of junk, eating through a pack of Chips Ahoy, and continuously failing to beat the snowy level that was provided in the demo. That must’ve been sometime around 1998 or 1999.

I then got Crash Bandicoot: Warped when I was in first grade, around spring 1999, because I don’t quite remember getting the game when I got my PlayStation in Christmas 1998. Crash Bandicoot: Warped was a regular rotation in my house, alongside Test Drive 5, the A Bug’s Life game, a demo disc full of 1998 holiday season titles, and many more. My PlayStation had ceased to work in 2002, so I went a couple of years without my classics. In the meantime, I had a GameBoy Advance and an Xbox. In Christmas 2004, I got a PlayStation 2 and was able to replay Crash Bandicoot: Warped… And no shock, it still held up, and I loved it in ways I didn’t in the past. I still dug the level design, the colors, the music, the gameplay, the comic nature of the whole game.

I continued to play Crash Bandicoot: Warped. I’d revisit it every few years and still get some kind of kick out of it. In 2012, I bought a digital version of the game on the PlayStation Store for my PS3, alongside Crash Bandicoot and Cortex Strikes Back. After years of not owning the full games of Crash 1 & 2, I finally played them all the way through. I dug one, I really loved two, I still love three. Is it because of nostalgia? NO. The Crash Bandicoot trilogy is a series of genuinely good games that have aged pretty well. Since the Crash series took a very cartoony route that was meant to channel the great animated shorts of animation’s Golden Age (the 1930s and ’40s), it’s no surprise that it isn’t dated. This tradition oozed into the post-PS1 games, such as the 2004 game Crash Twinsanity, which also holds up nicely.

The orange marsupial’s last proper game was 2008’s Crash: Mind Over Mutant. Naughty Dog left the series after Crash Team Racing in 1999, other developers picked up the slack. Mind Over Mutant‘s developers, Radical Entertainment, faced layoffs. The series didn’t continue after that, and I believe rights issues persisted into the 2010s, which is why we didn’t get a new game. Vicarious Visions finally got the go-head to do a game, but instead of creating a new chapter, they recreated the original three games… From scratch! And did an overall impressive job.

The result was Crash Bandicoot: N. Sane Trilogy, which I’ve been playing nonstop for weeks. I was actually almost hesitant to pick it up, actually. While I was interested in seeing how the original three Crash games would translate into today’s ridiculous and detailed graphics, I was also very unsure. They were the same games with some little additions, yes, but was that worth it? Turns out, it was. I’m glad I own both the original trilogy and this “remastered” collection. 3 redone Crash games for a fair price? Well, yeah! Plus its sales might just ensure a new Crash Bandicoot game in the future. If any 90s video game franchise needed a revival, it was Crash, because like I said beforehand… Crash is like a classic cartoon, it’s timeless and you can do anything with the character.

When playing, I was hit with something… Not necessarily nostalgia, because I never stopped playing Crash games after the 90s, but I was reminded of a time when I played it. The year 2004…

I was 12 in late 2004. By all accounts, late 2004 could’ve been an awful, depressing time for me. I barely got along with most folk in my classes, I was even odds with some of my teachers, and there were some in-home problems here and there. I didn’t mature as fast as other people around me, 12-year-old me had the mentality of an 8-year-old. Perhaps my Asperger’s syndrome can explain that, maybe not, but something was wrong. Looking back… Yes, I regret the way I acted that year and when I was young, but I felt there were things I was doing right. For one, I didn’t care when people knocked me down. I just kept going, feeling that they were in the wrong.

Nowadays, I overthink things. I tend to put too much stock into people who aren’t, well, very nice. I worry about other things, I have anxieties that have anxieties, if that makes any damn sense! Not a problem with me back in 2004, though. I sort of felt that feeling when playing the games, that un-bothered, confident, 2004 me. I know what happened to all of that, I don’t want to dredge that up right now. The experience then lead me to ask… Is nostalgia blinding me and I don’t even know it? What even is nostalgia?

For years, I’ve been trying to get my life to a state that I think is suitable. One that I find not-so-dissimilar to where I was in 2004. Last year, I bought some sketchbooks and required myself to make 100 sketches by the end of the year. This year, I’m doing the same, except I’ve launched some drawing challenges, too. Last autumn I participated in Inktober, but barely. (An event where artists all around social media draw things using mostly or only ink for the whole month of October.) I think from summer 2016 to now, I’ve made more drawings than I did in the past 3-4 years. I take my sketchbooks to classes, I consider even taking them to work, but I get antsy because the break room there could be extremely dirty and I don’t want to risk getting my nice sketchbook wet! Maybe I’ll buy a little one for work, who knows!

I feel that my lack of drawing for a while hurt me badly in the last decade, so I’m catching up once more and drawing constantly. I’m at the end of a sketchbook I started this past December, and intend to buy a new one soon and fill that all the way up before the year’s end. Practice makes perfect, right? I’ve been having a creative rush lately in terms of both writing and drawing, and am currently working hard on many stories, and having a blast while doing so. Playing the Crash Bandicoot games, oddly enough, fueled this. As if it reminded me of when I had a certain spark, and gave me the jolt to push ahead, despite current issues and anxieties in my life.

My life has been strange and sometimes frustrating since roughly 2011, long before I established my Kyle’s Animated World blog. After I had graduated high school, I was generally optimistic about where things were going, but I wasn’t taking advantage of certain other things. In community college, I was going for “general studies,” because I still assumed my art was terrible and that I didn’t have what it takes. In another post on here, I went into detail why I stopped doing art, something I was so passionate about my whole life.

2007, near the end of freshman year, a student in my “animation” class (it sorta-kinda was an animation class, but it kinda wasn’t – I liked it, though) came up to me and simply told me “You don’t draw very good.” In sophomore year, I took a drawing class that I just wasn’t enjoying, but it was mostly for dumb reasons. I was spiraling into a deep depression and other things were bothering me, I didn’t want to draw what I was assigned to draw in that class… And yes, I keep thinking nowadays, I want to meet this teacher again sometime in the future and let her know how I feel now about the way I acted back then. Don’t we all have moments like this?

I just sort of doodled and sketched throughout the rest of high school, but still had my sights on an animated future. A few years into college, I had to be pragmatic. I started drawing more at the end of 2011, when I was in my second year. A lot of things had gone down in 2011 that nearly wrecked me. Not that it sent me into a depression, but it threw me off course and I’ve been trying to catch the proverbial train since then. After a productive spring semester, I decided to take a summer class for the very first time… I signed up for trigonometry and macroeconomics, the latter was an online course… A very convoluted online course, at that!

There was a death in the family in May, and then it triggered some unpleasant family drama. Well into the summer classes, my parents – who had been working at a particular place for a long, long time – were screwed over by their boss. A boss who treated them like family up until then, no less. That lead to a whole ball of drama and unrest, and they ultimately retaliated by starting their own business. Here. At the house I live in! So now home is like an office, busy and noisy and sometimes pretty stressful! I barely passed the trigonometry class, and I outright failed the macroeconomics one. My first ever F, I was completely distraught, and have made doubly sure that it wouldn’t ever happen again. After getting my license and practicing driving, I got in an accident in August and I still fear being on the road because of it, though I am taking steps to gaining confidence again.

Long story short, the end of 2011 had me teeter-tottering between who am I and what my stressful side is. I’ve been fighting it since, as 2012 threw more anxiety-driving things at me in full force. By the middle of 2013, I was beat and exhausted, almost burnt out in a way – creatively and mentally. I didn’t make too much writing progress that year, or any real drawing progress. A few crumby sketches here and there, nothing too spectacular. That year, I had also decided to risk it all… I switched from “general studies” (as I was nearly a year into being at the state university I’m still attending) to a studio art/graphic design major.

Yours truly, November 2012. In my element!

At that point in life, I felt like I wasn’t going anywhere. It was either do or die, get better at art! I’ve been avoiding it for nearly six years, now it was time to fully commit to this future. So I signed up for a drawing class that fall, and boy… I loved the class, I admired my professor, he gave me excellent advice. For me, the hard part was simply getting better. My early stuff was so bad, I’m surprised I even made it to the halfway point! Towards the end? I started to “get it,” and I listened carefully to what my professor was telling me. All my worries about how my stuff looked, I used that to make something better, and by the end things were looking up. My final set of drawings were pretty good, and I passed the class quite nicely, but I took a break. I signed up for regular classes in spring 2014, before getting to the heavy stuff the following fall, anxieties be damned. They persisted, yes, but so did my will to get better.

Fall 2014 was the big turning point. Drawing II class, as it was called… New professor, new outlook, bigger challenges. Early on, I was expected to be the best I could be, so I ran with that and pushed myself. Soon enough, I was doing well and discovered something… I knew I could do this if I really put my all into it, and just do it, with less worrying on the side. I felt passion I hadn’t felt in years, years. I discovered something inside me and unlocked a long-enclosed box. I further explored this in the third drawing class and my graphic design courses, and am still ready to learn more before my eventual graduation – presumably some time next year.

Self-portrait for figure drawing class. Spring 2015.

But for a little while for the past few years, I wasn’t doing enough drawing on my own time, for my own projects… So I started pushing that more and more, with the goals I’ve set for each year, and that has been very fulfilling…

Art and college progress aside, the other anxiety issues from 2011 to now still persist, but it’s come to a point where I just want to be productive despite everything. Apparently the business may be moved from home to an office building in town, so I think that might clear up a lot of what’s been going on, should that plan go through. I’ve had my cinema job for two years now, and I feel having that has really whipped me into shape in several ways, being my first outside job ever. Up until then? I did office work for my parents’ business. It’s like a halfway point, my job keeps me busy during off-seasons, but work still needs to be done. I have conquer several anxieties and just push through despite them, like I did with drawing.

How does this relate to the fuzzy orange critter from the video game? Well, simple… Playing the game reminded me of when I felt like I was in control and didn’t give two darns about stupid things, what other people thought of me, and life’s general bullcrap that should just come and go. What should matter most to me is my family, my future, and what I’m doing for them. Of course, my anxiety comes in and says, “But you have to consider other people!” I want to, but I don’t want to consider the crap some of them may throw at me. That’s all nonsense and I need to negate that, I need to focus on my passion and those who are close to me, even if some people in my family are having their own issues that are alienating me. 2004 me was not necessarily a good person, I was immature and prone to having fits. 2004 me dealt with similar crap, I just walked it off. An adult who gives you trouble, no matter his or her profession or position, is no different from that kid who bullied you in middle school. I need to keep telling myself that…

So it isn’t, to me, necessarily a jolt from the past, but rather a feeling of who I could be and what I once was. It wasn’t a drive to limit my scope and be the exact person I was in 2004, but rather… Use some of the ideals from back then, and apply them to where I’m at now, what my tastes are now, etc. I always want to expand and try new things, but at the same time I needn’t forget about staying productive and being stable despite life’s problems. I felt I had that down pat back then, not so much today. So to mix that with a positive, open-minded, modern, looking-to-the-future attitude… is the mission. I like a challenge.