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 …

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 …

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 …

Adventures into the Past 2: It Holds Up?

To me, there has always been a firm difference between a work of children's media, and a family-friendly, universal work... About a week ago, I took a dip back into an interest of mine that I've had since childhood, and that was the LEGO toyline BIONICLE. As an ardent defender of the often-stigmatized animated medium, …

Adventures into the Past: It Isn’t Nostalgia

Hope you're all getting through 2020 well. I know it's been rough for a multitude of reasons for me, and I've been trying out different ways to destress as the weather thankfully shifts from ludicrously and almost oppressively hot, to a nice and even mix of warm and cool before my favorite season gets here. …

MULAN, and The Ongoing Complications of ’90s Disney Animated Films

The arrival of Disney's new live-action Mulan has opened a few cans of worms, some that definitely relate to Disney's animated adaptation of the Chinese ballad that was released back in 1998... You may know that I've had a history of being very harsh on some of the features released during the esteemed Disney Renaissance period. …

Disney Snobbery

Sometimes, being the kind of Disney "fan" I am is full of contradictions... Cliche as it is to say, the work of The Walt Disney Company has millions and millions of fans, and not everybody is going to view that massive, gargantuan body of work the same way. That is obvious, isn't it? Even when …