Secondlina's Panels

 

Just a little sketch of Princess Serenity from Sailor Moon. Inspired by the "Tangled" art book.

You guys "Tangled" comes out sooooon!!!!

This is SUCH a good year for animation. And with Ghibli's new feature "Arietty the Borrower" coming out in December, it's just going to get better. I just can't wait for this movie too. I love stories with "little people". And I love the Borrowers. And Ghibli. 

In a somewhat related note, i'm kinda getting tired of all the Dreamworks bashing. It's no secret that I adored Megamind. However, upon reading reviews of the movie online, I felt like the negative reviews were written by people that may have not have seen the movie at all. For starters, they got major plot points fully wrong. And also, almost all these reviews opened with the line "Dreamworks sucks". 

Personally, I love a TON of Dreamworks movies. All the Shreks minus the third, How to Train your Dragon, Megamind, Prince of Egypt, Road to El Dorado, Antz, all feature among my favorite movies. Yeah, it's true, Dreamworks does seem to be very different from Disney. They have more "pop" references and have animation that seems to speak more to teens and adults then children. But is that really deserving of so much aggressive reviews? Even "How to Train your dragon" reviews opened with the line "Look, Dreamworks stopped sucking!" I found that wasn't fair. It's a good studio. Their work is just different. Not all animation companies can produce the same thing. Disney has the heartwarming. Dreamworks has the zany. And sometimes, they trade (Darkwing duck anyone?). Dreamworks are learning to be more subtle in their style (Megamind's pop culture references were very fitting of the character and story). So people really should give it more of a chance and stop dismissing it just because "It's Dreamworks". I'm sorry, but not being Disney should not be a crime.  So they had a few flops. So did Disney. The only flop-free studio seems to be Pixar. For now. Critics have been pretty harsh on Disney lately too (Bolt and The Princess and the Frog got ripped the shreds) but never on the grounds that they were a specific studio.

Little joke to conclude - You know how everybody jokes that Dreamwork's M.O. is to have critters do something critters that do something critters don't do? Well, the new M.O. seems to be "Gadgeteer genius switches sides, has a scaly companion, defeat something big and powerful and gets the girl while learning to be himself". This fits both Hiccup and Megamind. New trend? Perhaps.

- Isa