QMAB

january 6th is the feast of epiphany in christian tradition AND it's topsy turvy day in disney's hunchback of notre dame AND it's the fanon accepted birthday of sherlock holmes omg wow what a special day 💖💖💖

wishing you a Serperior New Year! 🐍❤️✨

They De-Tumblrized Ms. Frizzle

@transfagsculine​

#how do yall whitewash a white woman 

why would you leave this in the tags lmao

Allow me to explain:

Everyone dropping this pic

And talking about how the new frizz her is her niece, allow me to do a direct side by side instead

These are STILL not the same woman. Where is the icon fashion, the earrings (the chameleon, which might be in the new show idk I haven't watched it), the prominent hooked nose, the broader shoulders, the volume to her hair, the LIFE IN HER EYES

This frizzle looks like she's been called into the school board for inappropriate behavior and dress one too many times and has been broken.

Also others have said it before me but I couldn't find it in the scroll backs but they whitewashed all the kids too. They same face syndromed everyone to either be easier to draw or be more ambiguous so as not to offend or both or something, and it just makes me sad

Fuck it I did the digging cause I'm still mad

And that’s not even to mention what they did to the bus itself.

The old bus had a personality and life and fun and now it’s just… a bus.

HOW DO Y’ALL WHITEWASH A BUS?!

It's gives "anti abortion Jehova's Witness cartoon" now

Vector puppet animation and a shocking drop off in investment in kidvid is largely at fault, but international marketing is also to blame.

What's important to remember is that the whitewashy approach to character design in kidvid is a backslide.

Representation in cartoons had generally been on an upswing since the 1980s, even though efforts were often minimal, clumsy, or badly executed. Diversity helped sell action figures in the lucrative US/Canadian market and it was recognized as a prosocial value on the production side.

"Prosocial messages" are a major part of kidvid TV pitches and development, nearly every show has specific prosocial lessons the narrative themes are intended to work around, even if its an action-figure ad. These range from sincere expressions of the creator's intent (Gargoyles, OG Magic Schoolbus, OG He-Man (no, for real)) to the entertainment equivalent of carbon credits.

Slight aside. Actual ink-and-paint animation tended to lock characters down into more distinct tones because there were only so many standard paint colors. Which is why Kwame from Captain Planet, Roadblock from GI-Joe, and Tim from OG magic schoolbus all use essentially the same pantone.

Ralphie gets skinny because not only fatphobia, but I suspect because he would need slightly different rigging and would add just a teensy bit to the budget adjusting his animations when they could just copy-paste from one of the other identically built kids. If they need to put them all in spacesuits or diving suits or whatever, they just make the one body and slap the heads on, eazy-pezy.

Decals on the schoolbus mean they have to be tracked, they have to use different versions of the bus in flipped shots, same with Mrs. Frizzle's clothing patterns. Wouldn't want to spend time flipping Ralphie's "R' around.

And with the marketing for everything now being global, there's an impulse to average everything down to appeal to all markets to a general degree. Making stories oversimple makes them easy to translate. Humor varies culture to culture, keep it slapstick or quick quips that can be localized easily. Everything that makes the Chinese censor boards happy also makes US reactionaries less likely to kick up a protest, the incentive is to keep everything:

ALSO: These characters have the same face. They probably use the same eye and mouth parts for character animations.

It's all to do it as cheap and broadly appealing as possible, as determined by business weirdos who know nothing about art and care nothing about kids, and they're more than willing to leverage racism (or just ignore that its happening) for the promise of a tenth of a percent more profit.

And what's galling is that this kind of animation software doesn't have to make crap. It can be used to make amazing stuff and still be vastly cheaper than traditional hand-drawn, but the same quality at 60% of the cost is never going to beat 1/2 the quality at 5% of the cost for the money-men.

The path of least resistance rolls over a lot of people.

Reblogging for "the path of least resistance rolls over a lot of people"

Hey hi hello I would just like to clarify that one of the big benefits of vector puppet animation is that it allows for much more detailed characters that would be a huge pain in the ass to draw by hand over and over. Instead you have a library of reusable parts that just gets bigger as the show goes on. Every hand you have to draw you only have to draw once as that hand can then be reused forever, and because of that you can put more time into it than would be viable for a cell that you have to redraw over and over. So for example here's a character from El Tigre, which was one of the earlier vector puppet shows, back when we still called it "Flash Animation:"

Look at all them details! The star patterns, the asymmetrical face, the little skulls on her hat, all of these things which would be an absolute nightmare to draw over and over. But this picture isn't one drawing, it's a combination of multiple parts that can be individually manipulated or swapped out without having to redo the whole thing. And because of that...

She animates perfectly fine! And she's not the only character like this, the show is full of character designs that not even Vizviepop would force people to animate by hand!

And remember this was an early vector rigged show! The technology has only gotten better!

Wakfu has rigs so layered and dimensional that it can be hard to tell at a glance that it's rigged at all!

Tangled the Series managed to fulfill an early concept from the movie, using vector puppets to make the characters look like digital paintings come to life!

Motorcity looks like this! The series' animators also developed a revolutionary plugin that allowed them to manipulate 2D heads as if they were 3D!

All of this to say that the Magic School Bus reboot doesn't look like that as a result of the technology. In fact, since they used vector puppets, it would have been easier to have the same level of detail than it was for the original series!!!

I won't call it lazy since I don't know what the animators on that show were put through, but it absolutely demonstrates a lack of care from the producers and executives who organized the production. They wanted characters to be as cost effective as possible. And it doesn't even translate to good looking animation!

The animation is fine, it does the job and I don't have anything major to complain about but god is it boring! It looks as sterile and disposable as the character designs. And that doesn't even necessarily come from cheapness, it comes from a lack of creative vision on the part of the showrunners. The people in charge well and truly just did not give a shit.

I get that this is essentially the same conclusion as the other guy, I just had to hop in and defend my main man Vector Puppet Animation, I'm tired of it being treated as inherently cheap, and I don't think the little paragraph at the end there is good enough to keep people from walking away assuming the worst of vector animation.

they should invent feet that stay warm

on the note of batfam siblings being more sibling like in fics, i also need tim drake (only child but he has researched sibling relationships) to be almost murdered by jason and instead of being displeased he is just 'ah. excellent. i am being accepted into the family. i should blow up jason's car'

"Bruce isn't really Jewish" right but if his kids come up to him and say "B, it hurts when I do this," he just looks at them deadpan and says "Then...don't do that." That's a Jewish king right there.

people don't talk enough about how fucking funny it is that bruce can sub in his kids as batman when he's too busy. like can you imagine it from the league's perspective? imagine you have this really mysterious, geniusly scary guy that you know next to nothing about, never cracks a smile and yet always comes out on top, and one day he shows up to a league meeting and there's just something... off. about him.

you can't pin it down because he's literally acting exactly the same as usual and there's no reason to think there's anything wrong, but maybe he shifted in his seat one to many times, or he looked just a tad bit too bored during green lantern's case review, but something's just... odd. so you quietly ask superman after the meeting if anything's up with the bat bcs you know those two are closer and also clark can hear heartbeats so if something's wrong surely he'll pick it up? and without hesitation he leans over to you and mumbles 'yeah batman was busy, that's his 17 yr old son. he's a crime lord and kills people sometimes though so we're not allowed to let him into the weapons department.' and then walks away like it's normal.

like the whiplash the league must go through every time they realise that no, this is not their fearless dark and brooding leader, this is in fact one of his dipshit kids being forced to sub in bcs the real batman broke an ankle, is incredible.

they think they've finally sussed out all 2 of batman's kids and then one day during a meeting 'batman' ends up on a 30 minute rant about different hacking methods this tech villain could be using that results in him half way through a sentence breaking off to say '-oh uncle clark could you pass me that pen- thanks, anyway so-' and then five minutes after that when the league have all been exchanging incredulous looks he finally freezes and is like. SHIT.

context: i was just born today and im trying to learn about the world i hope you can help me. whatever you say i will take to heart completely and live by for the rest of my life

thank you for voting

what makes art special is that it's hard to make

@otiksimr

everyone’s talking about how unhinged fans are nowadays about their blorbos. well let me tell you that when the polish writer henryk sienkiewicz first published his novel ‘with fire and sword’ in parts between 1883 and 1884, and killed off the beloved character longinus podbipięta, people nationwide were so upset they’d go to church and ask for requiem masses to be held in his memory. match THAT freak

yes i know about the arthur conan doyle sherlock frenzy this isn’t about that at all stop english cultural imperialism #slavicpride

#also theres a difference between harassing the author and wanting a mass to ask LITERAL GOD for salvation for the character’s soul.

The longer it takes for this to come across your dash the funnier it is

Which will fade first? Memories of the Area 51 "raid", or memories of Internet Explorer?

yes we all know about medieval jesters waging psychological warfare in times of combat, but wait there’s more!

at the beginning of battles they would ride in on horseback, juggling swords or lances, and taunt & bait  the opposition. soldiers would get so angry they would break rank & weaken formations just to try to kill the fool

i should also mention that a female jester was referred to as a “joculatrix,” thank you that is all

PLEASE GIVE ME FRUSTRATED KNIGHT X AMUSED JESTER WHOS TAKEN AN INTEREST IN TAUNTING THEM ESPECIALLY 

ART PROMPT

What if we were both opposite side of a war, and u wouldn’t stop mocking me specifically before we went to battle, and we were both girls?

So like Batman and the Joker?

I….I mean one is a clown and the other is a Dark Knight….

Bruce, visibly overwhelmed by Emotions as he watches a ten-year-old Dick goofing around in the batcave: Alfred. Alfred I think I'd die if something happened to him

Alfred: *carefully doesn't say that he thought the same thing when Martha and Thomas placed a newborn Bruce in his arms for the first time because he knows that'll completely destroy the little emotional bandwidth Bruce has*

having poor circulation is great because people will touch your hand and go 'oh! you're so cold!' and for a moment you get to experience what it's like to be a vampire in a romance novel

Clark wanting to trade up on good cop/bad cop with Bruce is so funny to me because Bruce would, without flinching, push someone off a rooftop, break their leg, and then go down and step on that leg until he got the intel he wanted.

tbh it works though because it's even scarier for the sole reason that while Bruce can pull off good cop, there's no way in hell he'll le the JL know

so he's just standing there while superman is like "are we going to do this the easy way or the hard way" and turns to batman like "was that good? did i do it right?"

and batman is just like "break his wrist to prove you're serious"

"you can't say that! you're supposed to be the good cop!"

"I am being the good cop; notice how i suggested that you break the wrist instead of immediately doing so myself, as i usually do"

superman, nodding along, "good point; you're showing very good restraint"

and the villain is just laying on the floor saying "I Would Like To Go To Jail Now Please"

I could be alone in this .. but um...

fuck, I'll just say it

does anyone on this site like snacks

One of my favourite parts about autistic people is how you can use other peoples' reflections of them like an echolocation bullshit detector. Like they personally do not need to do shit for this to work, they just passively emit their own autistic vibe that bounces off every surface around them, and you can assess another person's level of self-awareness by how they reflect it back.

"Autistic people do not understand social hierarchy" nope, they understand you're supposed to be an authority here, but they won't politely pretend to respect you if they think you're incompetent.

"Autistic people do not understand humour" nope, they just don't politely pretend to laugh to humour you, and you are simply not funny.

"Autistic people are rude" nope, they just don't think it's polite to lie to you, and don't care about trying to tell you what they think you want to hear instead of telling you what they think.

"Autistic people sometimes have emotional meltdowns for absolutely no reason" nope, you're just insufferable to be around and the person with the lowest tolerance of your shit is simply the canary in the coal mine who breaks first.

It's fun when you can tell things about people by what colours they like to surround themselves with. Someone who likes wearing and decorating all their stuff with green is usually a calm, chill, down to earth kind of a person. They don't usually even notice how much of all their things are green, they just see a green thing and think "oh, pretty" and don't even put together just how much of their stuff ends up unintentionally being green.

Someone whose clothes and stuff are predominantly purple is something else, that's a Distinct Kind Of Personality who enjoys having a distinct colour scheme and goes out of their way to get it. Purple is too unusual of a colour to just accumulate unintentionally. A person whose belongings are mainly purple enjoys knowing that the people who know them probably first think "oh, That Person would probably like that" whenever they see something purple.

But someone who specifically enjoys the combination of purple and green? Yeah that's a harder than average herb wizard.

Every time a small child starts crying or having a tantrum in my vicinity and I catch the parents glancing at me I’ve started saying “me when…”.

Friend kept trying to tell his crying kindergartener to calm down and relax and the kid growled “I AM relaxed” while visibly tensing every muscle in his body and I was like “oh that’s me at work every day” and we had a chuckle.

Parents look to other adults like “shit are they mad? Do they think my kid is acting like a demon?” And this response is my attempt to say “no. I think your kid is just acting like a human being.”

I WISH I could fling myself on the ground and cry because I experienced a minor inconvenience.