Triumph of the toons: how animation came to rule the box office
economist.com
economist.com
Reminds me very much of Roger Scruton's diagnosis that our popular culture is defined by kitsch (which in turn is defined by sentimentality), echoing Wilde that the big problem of the latter is that it wants to have an emotion without paying for it, gratification on the cheap.
And I think animation is particularly ripe for nostalgia, just like gaming because effectively it never ages. The Scrubs reboot is an interesting case because just watching the first episode I think you can actually see Scruton's point, there's something immediately off about seeing the same jokes and characters played out by people well into their 50s in a painfully way too HD recreated set.
Today's Fortnite, Minecraft, Roblox (blegh) will be tomorrow's nostalgia. I just don't know if there will be cheap hardware available for future adults to experience it though. Plus it seems that pop culture is so much more fragmented now thanks to social media, so it's harder to capitalize on a single IP to milk later on.
Discussion at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36465528
I suppose that will change for the games if truly high fidelity head mounted displays ever take off. For the hardware I'm less certain because aside from pointlessly bloated web frontends nothing that I do on a day to day basis actually consumes more resources than it did in 2015. Perhaps local AI on low power devices will be the critical point for me there?
Mark Fisher/K-punk on hauntology.
I read somewhere that nostalgia is just bitterness towards the present. It's an emotional trap and best not to linger in nostalgia too long. Change is inevitable, we can't go backwards.
I guess that's normal? I dunno, I dont have any further conclusions. Maybe we should be concerned about it?
For me it is kind of hard to like the things I produce, because of the obvious egocentrism bias. Do I like it, because I like it, or do I like it, because I made it and had to sacrifice something for it?
When I'm judging other people's work and I like it, I consider that feeling to be more genuine, even if the creator outright panders to my preferences.
That does make me wonder if anyone has started shooting in SD again to make things look "nostalgic". The only ones I'm aware of are some art films that used super 8 for that effect.
Individual games do. Characters don't. Tifa and Cloud don't age even when you republish Final Fantasy VII decades over. The Toy Story characters and Mickey Mouse are ageless.
Hollywood has the problem that is has to resurrect actors from the dead or painfully de-age them and they still move like old people. It makes the morbid character and false economy of nostalgia very hard to ignore. If animation and game characters had creaky knees and sagging skin because they've been doing the same thing for 40 years maybe we'd let them retire and focus on something new.
Those are not the same characters at all. The remake made them into different characters altogether.
Plus you are talking about RPGs only so moving goalposts. A 3d platformer that was the best from the 90s would be considered awful to play in 2026.
I always thought the reason Toy Story works for adults and children is that the toys are the 'parents': caring for their child, but with the awareness that their job is to render themselves unnecessary.
Not having watched the reboot yet, what are your thoughts?
I'm not sure I understood this criticism since it will be filmed in HD this time... is it that the sets mimic, but imperfectly and look wrong now?
I've also definitely wondered how it works with the actors. When I saw the trailer, my first thought was that Zach Braff looked old -- not in the age sense, but his haircut and clothes were simply... ones that didn't suit him.
Sometimes due to peer pressure of the group I’m with, sometimes due to the fact that they’re guaranteed to be an okay time.
The most recent non remake I watched was hamnet, and basically the whole thing went over my head.
Well I hoped with each one there would be a different plot.
The only thing essentially different is the Reylo plot which is kinda spread between the three movies. It makes for like half of an original movie.
They live on opposite sides of the uncanny valley. One is meant to appear completely realistic. The other is intended to be stylized, and would be ruined by being realistic.
It's one reason why live-action remakes of animated shows so rarely work. Humans can't act, move, or look like cartoons. The result is usually dull, not because anything looks wrong but because it looked so much better fully animated.
When you watch CGI superheroes, they're supposed to trick you into thinking you're watching a real thing. The filmmakers would have done it live if they could; the option simply wasn't available.
But a couple times they actually optioned something he wrote. What followed was a rewrite process involving no less than six other authors that were tasked with adding things the studio wanted into his script. No love story? Well, we'll just have to shoe-horn that in, because otherwise the women might not see it. Anything offensive to a major market, particularly China? That gets ripped out. Does it have merchandising? If not, we'll add characters, or robots, or whatever so we can sell toys and video games.
Etc, etc. The script that actually gets made bears no resemblance to his original work, and more importantly, they turned his original scripts into Generic Hollywood Movies that were virtually indistinguishable from the others.
The real problem here is for a couple decades nearly every well financed movie made money. So the studios analyzed just what a successful movie needs to have and created an assembly line to produce them. After awhile audiences were bound to look elsewhere for something new.