I watched the miraculous movie and can't stop seeing things

@zootopiathingz

Leo is waiting on a miracle

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Surface Pressure is SUCH a Willow Park song when you think about it!!! Luisa singing this song that’s about not cracking or showing weakness to support everyone around you to the point that you feel like you’re not even yourself anymore???? 

honestly one of the biggest things in encanto that gets me is how even as Casita is crumbling and mirabelle is trying to get the candle Casita still protects her.

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Just watched Encanto and damn, that family really fucked Bruno over.

Also, after Antonio's ceremony, they all posed to a photo as a family... WITHOUT Mirabel wtffff??? Like damn. I know the whole movie was about the family being imperfect and having issues, but some casual instances of cruelty were never really acknowledged.

But I still dig the movie, it was awesome. Anyway, I have been listening to Surface Pressure on repeat for 2h now, send help.

Also; I feel like this is gonna be unpopular, as this movie is well loved and it really was good, but I miss the times when Disney had villains. They were so fun and imaginative. I think the last Disney villain I really enjoyed was Mother Gothel.

someone on here said they liked that Encanto didn't have a real villain ... that animated movies lately just had life situations that needed to be sorted ... but the villain in Encanto was Abuela. she made everyone perform who she wanted them to be ... she was manipulative and she acted like the people with no powers or powers she didn't like weren't part of the family. her resolution was too easy. people like that don't see what they're doing. Bruno stuck around ... he was torturing himself because of her ... and honestly it sucks for that to be in a kids' movie ... and for Abuela to just get away with treating everyone like that with no consequences.

I think the reason why I almost cried over the boy and the heron's animation is because it's hand drawn in a world full of 3d animation that tries to impress you at every stage.

(Minor spoilers for the boy and the heron, no plot points tho)

Encanto's animation was impressive for the first few minutes, then it looked every other animates movie from the 2020s. The boy and the heron does a lot less than western (and 3d) animated movies for most of the movie (excluding the backgrounds because those were paintings. Like, actual paintings.) But when it needs to, it can do more than you thought possible. They clearly spent more time on making the movements human than making it colourful and flashy.

This subtlety is also extended into the character designs. In anime especially, but to some extent pixar as well, they make regular people look like humans have sexual dimorphism, but I couldn’t tell what gender Kiriko was supposed to be until she started to speak and until my suspicions were confirmed that the clothes she wore were in fact the same ones she wore in the other world. I am also a big fan of old wrinkly people so I'm glad they were once again present in a ghibli film. I think they have a knack for portraying people from different stages of life realistically. Also a big fan of how Mahito had so much personality, especially for a 12 yo protagonist of an adventure movie. Those tweens are usually given the cookie cutter hero personality, but robbed of actual humanity.

This is a really good piece about Encanto that I recommend everybody read.

spoilers for palisade

"Captain Brnine! The Divine Devotion has been Norted! Come on - we have to open the Chimera's Lantern and retrieve the True Power of Volition, otherwise the The Figure in Bismuth will be forever chained to The Witch in Glass and her Iconoclastic power. Coincidentally, we have to make a pitstop in the movie Encanto"

Wish spoilers ahead.

The start of Wish is exactly like that of Encanto but without all the heart. It is literally the meme of "Can I copy your homework?" "Yeah but change a few things so it is not too obvious."

Also Asha deserved a pretty dress in the end like wth are you going to sell to little girls Disney you are all about money and you failed miserably even at that.

And it is for real soooo unfair how the queen did get a pretty dress the whole movie and Asha only got some lazy ass sparkles added to her boring ass dress.

Asha... not bad, ok, but she is copy paste Anna, Mirabel, and Rapunzel. Youtuber ModernGurlz is right about Disney's "adorkable" problem. All their main girls since Rapunzel have the same "quirky" personality save a few details. I have liked them all but it is getting boring. Give me a princess with a monotone, sad personality, give me a shy princess who only smiles and talks around close friends, give me back the classic super girly personality Aurora and Snow White style, give me an angry girl with a brutal sense of humor like Merida. Be creative, please!!!

I love the queen's design, super gorgeous. Too bad her character added nothing. Her help was barely needed since Asha's friend had already sneaked them into the castle and it was her who deciphered the king's magic. A super villain couple would have been way more fun.

Oh, yeah, Asha's friends. There were so-damn-many of them and only like 3 were rememberable or needed for the story.

The villain is a complicated issue. I appreciated Disney's attempt at another fully evil character, I liked how he wasn't yet another badly set up "twist villain" revealed only at the end. But I didn't like the end result that much.

His backstory was super underdeveloped and to "get" his motives better, if they really wanted to make him evil-yet-complex, they should have shown us a flashback of him losing his family Encanto style (They copy pasted the start might as well do the same with the antagonist backstory.

What the hell was the missing piece of tapestry for if it wasn't going to have any significance later on? Did the writers just forget or what even?

Worst part for me: The stakes were low as fuck. Disney doesn't respect its target audience, nowadays it thinks that children can't handle anything worse than a main character getting disappointed. The worst this "super evil" villain does is make people sad temporarily, for like two minutes (Kid you not), like one character stays sad for longer but MOST people in the kingdom seem happy and normal after giving up their wishes, he legit just makes people sad a few minutes (Again, I kid you not, no one dies, the wishes he "eats" to make himself stronger come back, nothing he does has a permanent, devastating effect, he is not even revealed to have killed Asha's father in a dramatic way or something). Yeah he makes people forget their wishes which is pretty sketchy but up to that point he seemed to have complex reasons for that, reasons that seem to disappear or have never even been there the second half of the movie when he magically becomes more evil due to a forbidden green spooky magic he uses, and then suddenly he becomes Maleficent (The cool, perfect villain version, not the woobie one) style evil in a very, very rushed and over the top way. I feel like he should have started up as fully evil with no backstory (Just a simple, Gaston or original Maleficent style, self centered guy, who wants more and more power and adoration), and simply gotten worse and stronger OR given more complexity as to why he became that way, but instead we got this weird thing in between where it is clear he just wants power and love from the people for the sake of it and yet he has this half-made sob story on how his family died.

There was a great lack of originality in this movie at the climax as well. Anyone watched "The little mermaid II"? That was pretty much it. Villain gets power boner, says he will enslave everyone (Worst thing he does in whole movie and yet no one trying to defy him dies at least off screen or gets hurt in any meaningful way). Then heroine saves the day.

The funniest part of this movie is that the villain's fate is worse than anything he ever did in the movie I swear. He gets trapped in a freaking mirror and then locked up in a cell (Similar to the Little mermaid II villain's end too lol). That is straight up torture till death, it is so fucked up. And his wife who literally sees how the green spooky magic is the main thing responsible for his bad day (If we are being honest that is all it was, other than the taking wishes part he seemed to be a good king) leaves him to rot and becomes queen Catherine II style, it is hilarious. Like girl, you turned against your husband like five minutes ago because apparently through decades of seemingly loving marriage, you never knew he was evil but now somehow you are ok with him rotting in solitary confinement till the end of time? So dorky and silly. So bad, so bad.

Lastly, that goat was annoying as hell.

A Case for Disney’s “Strange World”

No one seems to know anything about this movie. I didn’t before I saw it yesterday. I went to the movies on a whim and chose this one because the pickings were a bit slim and this one looked like the best out of the bunch.

Guys. This movie is good.

Disney has done this film real dirty by not marketing it properly. I mean, it probably won’t ever take over the world by storm like Encanto did, but it deserves better than what it’s getting. As I said on my Twitter, it is 100% a stunningly beautiful solarpunk film and everyone needs to go see it.

Here’s a brief synopsis since the trailer was garbage and no one saw it anyway:

***The Spoiler-Free Zone***

The story mostly focuses on Searcher, the son of famous explorer Jaeger Clade whose mission in life is to find a passage over the impassable mountains that surrounds their community of Avalonia. While on an expedition to try and scale the peaks, Searcher finds Pando, a mysterious plant that generates a renewable source of electricity. Searcher, tired of exploring and wanting to quit the life, takes the Pando back to Avalonia. Jaeger, still determined to find a way through the mountains, keeps going alone, never to return.

25 years later, Pando has transformed Avalonia into a bustling sci-fi uptopia. Searcher is renowned for having discovered Pando, and now lives a quiet life growing Pando crops with his wife and teenage son. One day, however, the Pando starts dying. In search of a cure, one of Jaeger’s former crew comes to Searcher asking for his help to lead an expedition down underground to figure out what’s killing it and save the society they’ve built with it.

If that sounds like a movie you’d like to see, stop reading now and go see it. Because from here, I’ll be busting out spoilers to talk about themes and why this movie is solarpunk. So I’ll be writing as if you, dear reader, have seen the film.

***The Spoiler Zone***

First of all, this movie is goddamn gorgeous. I really liked the opening comic-panel sequence and all, but I fell in love with the visuals once the story opened up and began showing us Searcher’s farm and Avalonia. Aesthetically, this is about as solarpunk as you can get. Art nouveau-inspired stained glass windows, visible mending on clothes, and really cool-looking tech that’s not at all in conflict with its environment.

That’s not even touching on the world inside Avalonia. I loved the shades of pinks and purples. And the creature design! Absolute chef’s kiss. That whole part of the movie reminded me of this one book I’ve read called ‘Expedition’ by Wayne Douglas Barlowe, which is just about exploring the ecosystem of alien life-forms on a planet called Darwin IV. It’s mostly a collection of really detailed sci-fi paintings of alien creatures. Fantastic stuff. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if someone at the Disney studio had a copy and passed it around for inspiration during production.

In terms of the characters, i thought everyone was engaging and all the voice actors gave really good performances. I really liked Jaeger in particular (yes, he comes back, of course), but all three of the main characters were really well developed.

But, of course, there is The Gay Character. We all know about HIM.

I kid, I kid, I capitalize with irony. They did a good job with him, actually.

I’ve seen a lot of people on Twitter respond to the idea of Ethan Clade with a very cynical shrug without having seen the movie. I have to say, I think people would be genuinely pleased with his portrayal if they gave the movie a chance. There’s no goofy wink-wink LeFou-ing about here. He’s a main character throughout the movie, his love interest is presented upfront with sincerity, and everyone within the world accepts it as normal. He’s not fighting anyone to be gay or trying to hide it, nor is it his one defining trait. He just has a crush on a dude and his dad embarrasses him a bit in front of him. Normal teenage stuff. His character arc is about sorting out his identify in relation to his family, especially his dad. Being gay literally has nothing to do with his character any more than his mom and dad being straight. Which is how it should be.

The story is a fun ride. It’s really well-paced. I was never bored, personally. There are some really great action scenes, some cute comedy with a three-legged dog and a goo creature called Splat, and the emotional beats all made sense with the characters and moved the story forward. It has a lot of qualities that reminded me of Up! and some parts of The Incredibles without directly being a rip-off of either of those. It’s its own thing, and I look forward to being able to watch it again on DVD/streaming.

***I know some of you kept reading anyway so for real, this is where I’m about to get into True Spoilers so save yourselves now y’allllllll***

Ultimately, this is a movie about legacy. Specifically, the legacy we want to leave our children (i.e. those who will come after us). I love the way this movie manages to take the existential crisis we face now in our blessed, beautiful world and condense it into a story where that issue of legacy, of our priorities, and of who we want to be is made clear.

Jaeger Clade is the society that brought us to where we are now. He’s a loud, brash, bush-whacking old man who’s driven to overcome obstacles. Searcher Clade is us now. Not looking to conquer for conquering’s sake, but complacent and only interested in continuing the status quo. He’s proud of what he’s made and sees no reason to change. Ethan Clade is who we should want to be. Someone looking for a third option, who wants to co-exist with the world around them, and be curious without being destructive.

These three outlooks correlate directly to the reveal that Avalonia is actually a living creature, and Pando is a disease that is literally wrapped around the living, beating heart of their world and slowly killing it. It was Jaeger’s drive to explore that led to the discovery of Pando. Searcher was unintentionally making the problem worse by growing more and more Pando to fuel their society. And throughout the movie, everyone is working together to save Pando, and it’s Ethan alone who tries to get them to stop and think more about what they’re looking at, and that things might not be as simple and straight-forward as they appear.

And this is why I think this movie is solarpunk, and not just aesthetically. Obviously, there are direct parallels to our use of fossil fuels, but I think it’s important that in the universe of Strange World, Pando is not an obvious poison or something they have to destructively mine to get. It’s a plant. Something that appears so innocuous at first, but under the surface, grows into a huge, overwhelming problem. No one is an evil bad guy looking to make profit off Pando or keep on destroying the world because it makes them money to do so. Everyone in the movie does what they do because they think they’re doing the right thing. What is the right and wrong answer isn’t always clear, and rather than being a result of them being outright evil, it’s just because they don’t fully understand the consequences.

While I was in the theater watching this, I thought about the Himalayan blackberries that have taken over the Pacific Northwest. It was introduced in the late 1800s by a botanist named Luther Burbank. He prized it for how much produce one blackberry bush could make in a single season, as opposed to the native blackberries that made smaller berries in smaller quantities. His intent was genuinely for the good. He wanted to propagate a crop that could accessibly feed the growing urban areas of the PNW. Create a food forest, in a sense. He sold the seeds because it was easy to grow and would feed people.

Obviously, it’s not bad to want to feed people. But now the damn plant has invested everything, and while the berries are still very much edible (and people do still eat them), it’s also created impenetrable thickets that kill everything around them and interfere with the ability of wildlife to get around. It got out of control. Even though the intent was meant well, the outcome created a problem that is now essentially impossible to overcome. People try anyway, because we have to, but the odds are not in our favor.

Solarpunk isn’t about growing more plants or having more trees in our cities or building solar panels and wind farms everywhere. Well, it’s not JUST that. Of course those things are good things, but every solution offered needs the proper context to work. And that’s the real nature of the movement, right? It’s finding solutions that lead to the best outcomes for everyone. Being invested in our world, learning about it, falling in love with it, discovering the intricacies of how everything is interconnected and how we fit into that. Everything we do will have inevitable impacts on everything around us, but what those impacts are can change radically depending on how carefully we consider our actions. We know we have to change. The question is, how do we change? How do we change for everyone?

And that is the ending message of the film. The heroes choose to save Avalonia. They destroy the Pando, knowing that it means they can’t have their society the way it was anymore. They choose that, because it is right to do. And the movie ends with the resilience of humanity as they come together and try to find a different solution to build their society on, the third solution of people like Ethan Clade who bring together the bravery and curiosity of Jaeger with the steadfastness and dedication of Searcher, and create a world that’s built on understanding and co-existence. In a world that constantly feels like it could teeter over at any minute, that’s a beautiful message to see in a goddamn Disney film.

P.S. I just want to say before I go that I really really really want Ethan’s boyfriend’s sweater. When you see it, you’ll understand, but I NEED the sweater in my life more than air.

Sophie! We got some more plural headcannon!

Disney's Dreamlight Valley is a story of a fictive heavy P-DID system going through a syscovery and exploring their headspace while working through some of their trauma and amnesia.

Idk where this verges into spoiler territory, so I'll just preempt this with "Spoilers ahead"

Okay so, this life sim game starts off with the classic "You quit your job and go off to live a simpler life." You find a place you used to daydream in your childhood and get transported to the titular Dreamlight Valley.

The place is in shambles because of The Forgetting that has caused everyone to struggle with memory issues and cut off various locations and characters. It's revealed in relatively short order that you used to spend a lot of time here with all of these disney characters. You uncover memories as you do stuff to help these folks out.

Eventually the villain shows up known as the Forgotten who's eventually revealed to be your "inner child" and otherwise described as a part or version of yourself. Eventually you free them from the dark place where they're trapped through things like, reliving the Forgotten's memories, and showing them that they are loved, accepted, and safe.

So like, it strikes us as immediately plural coded. Obviously the protag and the Forgotten are plural, being split from each other (bonus points that they don't make you and the Forgotten fuse/merge/integrate). The Valley strikes us as their headspace. The protag goes through a major life change, which, can be a trigger for overt symptoms of DID in adulthood. And of course, all of the themes around amnesia and memories fit right in.

More speculatively, the various disney characters are non-fronting fictives. Interestingly, these characters eventually remember spending time with the protagonist as a child, or to have been around before the Forgetting (implied to happen years ago). However, one of these characters is Moana who's movie was in 2016 and Mirabel from 2021's Encanto. Which reminds us of a phenomenon of fictives existing in their systems before prior to the discovery or even creation of their source.

I'm sure that there's more we could go into, but those are the most solid points we can think of at the moment.

Anyways, good job Disney for accidentally making a great little plural video game. Or hey, maybe it wasn't an accident. This game hit our little pretty hard right in the feels regarding our own trauma so like, maybe this was all intentional!

This sounds so fascinating! Thanks for the description! 💖

I'm surprised to hear something with lore this deep coming from what amounts to a Disney lifesim!

My thoughts on Disney's Wish (Spoilers)

Let me preface this by saying that I haven't heard all of the negative things that have been circling around the movie, but I've heard more than a few things that painted a pretty grim picture of the movie before I went to see it. I was going in expecting something akin to Strange World going in, which I really didn't like (and that's coming from someone who likes unique worldbuilding.)

After I left the theater yesterday, my thoughts were just, "This is the worst Disney movie of 2023?" I really didn't have any issues with it at all, and even if I usually tend to have a more positive outlook on movies I watch in comparison to others, I just have to say that this was NOT a terrible movie. Disney has had a LOT of blunders in 2023, but I can't say that this was one of them. I know that a lot of people out there might disagree with me or even hate me, but Wish made me feel something that I don't feel very often: magic.

It's hard for me to know what specifically to talk about since I don't know about all the criticisms the movie's gotten, though I do know about a few. The first one that sticks out to me is the movie's art style, and how some people have called it ugly and even unfinished looking. But... I honestly don't get it. Nothing strikes me as unfinished, and I never found the art style to be irritating. It was something new, and I thought it was fine. It uses shading and colors that are a bit flatter than some of their previous works, but I saw that as it being a sort of in-between of the 2D look of the classics and the 3D look of the newer movies. There was probably only one time where I noticed something was slightly off, and that was where Asha is waving around some flags at the beginning and having no motion blur or smear frames on it looked a little awkward. I can also understand how some of the shots can feel a bit flat, but once again that's something that makes it feel similar to the 2D classics.

Up next, I heard some things about some of the characters being trash. The main two I heard about were Asha and King Magnifico. Some of the main things I heard concerning Asha was that she's dorky and silly to a fault, and what I have to say to that is that although she's pretty silly at the beginning of the movie and sometimes it can be a bit embarrassing to watch, that's just Asha being Asha before the adventure kicks off. As the story progressed, I thought that she learned to be more serious over time as she learned the truth about the wishes and Magnifico and what she really wanted to do, and most of her antics after that point are mostly concerning the actions of other characters. I never felt like she was silly in places where it was inappropriate, and I actually ended up liking her a lot. As for Magnifico, I haven't heard anything specific about him other than the fact that he's supposedly the worst Disney villain of all time. But... I just don't see it. His motivations are believable (according to my standards), he's shown to be a narcissist who doesn't truly listen to other people's criticisms, and him turning from a king who wants to maintain order while very rarely giving people what they want into a power hungry madman who wants nothing more than for his subjects to bend to his will and lick his boots feels in character for him and it had the right setup. I thought that the supporting characters were all good as well, but my least favorite was probably Valentino. He was alright and he did his job, but he really felt like more of a gimmick than anything else.

The next thing I want to talk about is the music. I don't know if anybody's had a lot of bad things to say about it, but I thought the songs were great. After Encanto I was wondering what they'd have in store for this movie, because although Encanto had some banger songs there were one or two that I didn't really like. Not so for Wish though, because I liked every last song that was in the movie. I'm... not really sure what else to say here.

I heard about there being a few cameos in the movie as well, and I picked up on a lot of them as I watched it. But the references feel tasteful, not overblown and obvious, and something you'll really only notice if you're looking for it (except for the Peter Pan reference maybe, but that's just one.)

One last thing I want to talk about is how I've seen some people calling the film's main source of conflict something that makes Asha a bad person. Basically, they say that her mission goes against Magnifico's warnings of what could happen if everybody is allowed to keep their wishes and that there could be some serious consequences that she's too headstrong to consider. But... they address all these points in the movie. Even if someone's wish turns out to be a rotten one, you can always try to step in and make sure it doesn't get too out of hand.

And I think those are all the things I had to say concerning Wish. I personally feel like it paid some good tribute to the animated classics with its story and familiar themes, and it was a good way to celebrate 100 years of the Walt Disney company, though I'm well aware that there are plenty who disagree. If there are some things that I didn't cover or consider please let me know, and I'd like to hear what you all have to say about the movie as well.

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