I’ve had to take a break from creative stuff for nearly a week because of the pain from an infected tooth, but it’s now being treated and will be yanked at the end of the month. So to help me get back into my writing groove I thought I’d spit out some quick thoughts on some recent animations I’ve had a chance to watch.

Even before my recent bout with oral tragedies, I hadn’t been watching much of anything new, animated or otherwise. Just wasn’t in that mood, I guess. Lately I’ve much rather be listening to music or playing Don’t Starve with what free time I have, but I have managed to squeeze in some stuff here and there.

TURNING RED

Let me start off by saying that the idiots — and I mean IDIOTS — who were condemning this movie before they even saw it, or were so desperate for criticism that they resorted to its lack of mentioning 9/11 as a condemnation, deserve all the derision they got and so much more. It’s okay to not like a movie, and there are all kinds of reasons why you may not. But to attack it for such transparently dumb bullshit because you have some petty political agenda to push is pretty inexcusable.

But that aside, this turned out to be a thoroughly well-crafted and entertaining movie. What I thought might be a simplistic furry take on the Hulk actually turned out to be a charming, moving, and very funny tale of generational trauma and the pains of growing up. Meilin Lee, a 13-year-old girl in Toronto, finds out that at a certain age the females of her family gain the ability to turn back and forth into giant super-strong red pandas. But before she can sign up for the Avengers, she also learns that the transformation is triggered by any strong emotion, very bad news indeed for a pubescent girl crushing on boys and fangirling over the pop band 4*TOWN.

This sets her on a collision course with her loving but overprotective and controlling mother Ming, who had issues with the panda herself. The heart of the film is about mothers and daughters, and about Mei and Ming’s relationship in particular. Both the ups and downs are handled well and believably even given the fantasy elements present. The film is based heavily on director Domee Shi's’ own childhood in Toronto in 2002, and the verisimilitude that brings really shows.

Some people don’t like the film’s use of the CalArts style of character design, but that approach’s dynamic simplicity is put to good effect here especially for the humor and visual expressiveness of the characters. I especially liked Mei’s group of surprisingly supportive and positive friends, and of course the doofy but quiet and capable dad. All of them had a lot of their nuanced personalities conveyed through visuals as much as through the dialog. The film’s climax at the concert also turned out to be surprisingly epic as well. TURNING RED is definitely worth a watch if you haven’t seen it yet.

HILDA AND THE MOUNTAIN KING

And here we have another girl about the same age as Mei, but dealing with an even more traumatic involuntary transformation. This movie is a capper to the first two seasons of the superlative HILDA series, and I think might have been intended as a series finale before the upcoming third season was approved.

The HILDA series follows the exploits of an eleven-year-old girl and self-proclaimed ‘adventurer.’ It’s set in a pastiche of the modern world and various elements of (loosely interpreted) scandinavian mythology, where dealing with trolls and elves and such can be an everyday occurence.

In the movie, Hilda wakes up in the body of a troll in the middle of troll homeland inside the mountain. Suddenly able to talk and understand them, she learns a devastating secret hidden in her hometown of the human-inhabited Trollberg. She has to race to head off a potential war between the two races before disaster strikes while trying to find a way to turn back human as well.

This movie is an absolute banger and fires on all cylinders. Story, character, animation, production, quality world-building, and more. The only negative is that some parts of the story might be hard to follow for those who haven’t seen the series or read the books. All of the secondary characters get a chance to shine as well, especially Johanna, Hilda’s mum, who we saw in the season 2 finale is not afraid to fight trolls head-on for her daughter, and shows equal courage and tenacity here in her quest to get Hilda back. This is even more of a must-see than TURNING RED, especially if you’ve watched the series as well.

THE LEGEND OF VOX MACHINA

This is a 12-episode animated series on Amazon Prime based on a Critical Role campaign. For those unaware, Critical Role is an online D&D group that livestreams their sessions. Even though I love playing TTRPGs, I find watching other groups play deathly boring. But since CR’s DM and players are composed of voice actors and the like, they can be fairly entertaining and have helped them become pretty popular.

This animated series began as a kickstarter. They originally intended to raise enough to make a ten-minute animated short, but the kickstarter raised so much (like $12 Million) that they were able to turn it into a full-length season of half-hour shows.

I enjoyed the series a lot, but I will also admit that it can be a mixed bag. On one hand, there are a lot of interesting characters and situations. I especially like Percy the gun-wielding Warlock and the adorkable druid Kayleth. It was also neat to see a lot of the elements in the game brought to life through narrative and visuals instead of dry game mechanics. There are whole vids on Youtube that breaks down each episode into what spells/magic/skills/saving throws from the game are used when.

But the individual episodes were also very uneven. The first two were kind of merely serviceable as introductions into the characters, and some character arcs in the latter Briarwood storyline were spotty and all over the place. You can really see a stark contrast between looser RPG-generated stories here and actually tightly-crafted narratives in other fantasy series, such as say RISING OF THE SHIELD HERO. RPG play is by necessity decentralized and chaotic while fictional storycrafting tends to be tightly focused and carefully constructed. Transferring one to the other doesn’t always work well. For example, the whole long sequence in one episode where the group deals with a room filling with acid could have been a fun and exciting encounter in a game, but as a narrative story element it mostly came across as dumb and unnecessary filler.

VOX MACHINA may be a worth a watch if you’re a fan of TTRPGs, D&D, or Critical Role. But as a purely fantasy narrative on its own it’s merely okay and doesn’t reach the heights of other top-quality fantasy series that have come out in the last decade or so. It is an enjoyable series but may not be everyone’s cup of tea.

NINJA SEX PARTY

I admit I’m late to the party — Ninja Sex Party, that is. Even though this band’s been around for 10+ years, I only ran across them recently. But better late than never.

NSP is a comedic rock group made of singer Dan Avidan and keyboardist Brian Wecht, whose stage alter-egos consist of Danny Sexbang, a doofy glam rocker, and Ninja Brian, a dour murdery ninja, respectively. They’re also part of the group Starbomb, frequently collaborate with TWRP, and Dan is co-host of the Game Grumps let’s play channel.

Despite the group’s comedic bent, they create some seriously awesome music as well. I’m talking about them here because in the last five years or so they have created some really outstanding animated music videos, all of which can be found on Youtube.

Probably their best both musically and animation-wise is STARLIGHT BRIGADE, which is a TWRP song they contributed to. The song is great and the animation is no less than stunning. There’s no other way to describe it other than simply epic. That video did Star Wars better in four minutes than the last four Star Wars movies did in 10+ hours.

Other notable animated videos include but are not limited to THE MYSTIC CRYSTAL (an 11-minute rock opera whose animated sequences are done in the style of Don Bluth’s DRAGON LAIR,) 6969 (a fun claymation epic where they time-travel to the future to rescue sex — lol really,) and MANSION PARTY (which is pure hilarious chaos.) Definitely worth a watch.