Animation’s Weird History With Sequels

Sequels, sequels, sequels... Apparently the mark of creative stagnation. Even more so with animation, even more so with the supposedly too-holy-for-sequels Pixar... The very studio that wasn't allowed by the company they were once in a contract with to make sequels. Oh yeah, did you ever miss those fine details? On how Pixar's original contract …

Staying Inside with Demons: COVID-19, Quarantine, and Anxiety

What is about to follow has little, if nothing to do, with animation or film or video games or music... Nothing about an animated movie about demons in a house, though admittedly that concept would intrigue me... I set this blog up as a personal one, that wasn't just about animation opinions or thoughts on …

Dynergy; or, Death of a Mouse?

Forgive a bad pun, but... The Walt Disney Company is one hell of a family. Note, The Walt Disney Company is. Not necessarily "Disney"... Is Disney dead? Well, that is certainly a loaded question if there ever was one. To even begin to unpack such a question, first of all... It all depends on what …

The Chris Sanders Trilogy

You know what's fascinating? Director Chris Sanders has never directed sequels to his own animated features. In his lengthy career, he has directed three all-animated features total: Lilo & Stitch for Walt Disney Animation Studios (then "Feature Animation"), and then How To Train Your Dragon and The Croods for DreamWorks. His latest feature is a …

Adventures into the Past 3: Thomas on TV / Is It Nostalgic Bias?

I'm talking about Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends again. A comfort series in hell-times. In the previous post on those anthropomorphic locomotives, I talked about how much the series meant to me as a child and why I still find its earlier incarnations - namely the original books written by Rev. W. Awdry and …

Always Halloween

Another year, another Halloween over... Or is it? This was a largely unfulfilling Halloween for me. I suspect it was for many other people, too. It isn't just that we couldn't celebrate it the way we normally do... Halloween, truthfully, can be just a night of you watching Halloween stuff alone, whether it's specials or …

KUNG FU PANDA and My Autistic Experience

Ska-doosh! DreamWorks' Kung Fu Panda came out over 12 years ago, and a real standout amongst their library of over 30 animated features. The Mark Osborne/John Stevenson film marked something of a departure in the realm of computer animated DreamWorks films, in that it wove fun humor and slapstick into a martial arts adventure epic …

‘Crash Bandicoot 4’ Thought Stew

22 years after the release of its previous installment... Crash Bandicoot, the beloved 1990s platforming video game franchise, sees a continuation in Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time. Wait... For the uninitiated, Crash Bandicoot is something you might remember from decades ago. A bright and appealing platformer with a cartoony marsupial protagonist that arguably had …

Streamation

I have wondered all throughout the spring and summer of this disastrous year if the most recent animated features were all going to go to streaming, and possibly relegate animated features to the small screen only in the foreseeable future. Sometimes the Chicken Little in my head goes off in scenarios like these, because animation …

SpIns: A Love for Logos

What does "SpIn" mean? Recently, I found out through fellow autistics that "SpIn" is short for "special interest", which a lot of use to describe the very things we are deeply invested in... Be it movies, TV shows, books, video games, the nature of some every day thing... It is something you have an encyclopedic …