Archive for August, 2021

Well, perhaps not a new me. But a new world? Absolutely.

It’s been a while since I’ve even touched this site. To say I’ve been incredibly busy is an understatement. I managed to acquire two actual, genuine writing gigs for animated shows (and always looking for more!), but as the COVID pandemic swept–and continues to sweep–across the nation, my attention had been primarily focused on more visual arts. I’d dabbled in Resolve, After Effects, Unity, and Blender. I did more exercise. I wrote a bit more for The AVClub and Den of Geek. I’ve certainly kept busy, but most of my time has been focused on keeping healthy. This pandemic, as been mentioned several times on social media, has been hell for mental health: trauma, paranoia, ignorance, fear, and outright hostility has become the norm. So, it’s been nigh impossible to really… “get” into a mindset that’s feels appropriate to think about, and write about, cartoons and animation.

This isn’t to say that I haven’t been watching them, though. In fact, I’ve been watching a ton of them, partly because I have to, partly as a means to keep up with the sheer number of new animated shows that’s been dropping on Netflix, Hulu, Nick, Disney, CN, and HBO Max. It’s an onslaught, and for the most part, nothing has been terrible, but I have yet to truly apply any of the robust analytical thinking I used to towards them. I want to get back to that. I want to return to those deep dives, those off-kilter, academic rambles that made this blog a “bit” popular at its small but notable peak. There’s certainly a lot to discuss, and over the next few weeks (months?) I’m hoping to play a little catch up with all the shows I’ve seen.

The plan, as of now, is to present a more informal blog/journal where I mostly talk about the thoughts I have about the cartoons I’m watching. While I’ll still be a bit analytical and all, I think this will best be handle with more of a casual flair, to get my writing juices flowing again, to see if I can foster some non-angry discussion about what’s on the air these days. There’s not gonna be any rhyme or reason to what I talk about, at least for the first couple of weeks: I’m gonna let whatever animated show I feel like discussing flow through my brain and vomit onto the page.

So, let’s just get to it.

The Mighty Ones is dumb. I mean this as a compliment. The show stars four moronic talking, anthropomorphic objects in nature (a rock, a leaf, a twig, and a berry) fumbling about in a yard own by three women who are equally, if not more so, moronic. Stupidity thrives on this show, the dumbness and confusion structured to maximize laughs and cringe, tinged with the kind of weird and absurd energy that thrived in many post-Spongebob cartoons in the late 2000s, early 2010s. In the very first episode, Rocksy, Twig, Leaf, and Berry don’t know what a “game” is. Later, they talk about, and play, all the dumb games they randomly make up. (Continuity is not a thing here.) It’s cutely funny at times, although the idiocy of the first season can be overwhelming, with an energy that posits throwing as much dumbness at the wall and seeing what sticks. This doesn’t quite make for a binge-able show, but watching one or two episodes at a time is workable. More specifically, it seems to me that the show struggled the most with Leaf. He’s Twig’s brother, but aside from a early benevolent moment in the first season, he treats Twig like shit and mostly plays an arrogant prick. He’s mean, but not really in a funny way. His actions and behavior isolates him from the cast, making him unable to establish a comical rapport among the characters; instead of being a sour, self-centered character communicating with everyone else within the show’s rhythms, Leaf mostly was the guy who couldn’t grasp “Yes and…” and ruined a lot of comic momentum.

So didn’t really surprise me to notice Leaf being mostly absent in season two, which also had the added benefit of bringing in more outside characters into the mix (Leaf–in addition to calming him down a bit, making him a bit more pathetic, and having him speak more comic asides–mostly spends a lot of time gone or in the background.) The Mighty Ones isn’t a particularly deep show, but the sparse, barely populated feel of the yard felt limited, where the idiocy was a function of pure, isolated boredom–just something to do. Season two feels… well, not “purposeful,” but “fuller,” where the four main characters and their actions now can function in something that could plausibly be defined as “a world”. It pushes a comic energy where the dumbness had more to work with, a dumbness in a dumb world, where everyone now competes for… I guess, maximum dumbness. This also has the darkly-relating result of a more fatalist season; characters are placed in absolute harm’s way. The first season was dumb in a silly way; season two very notably has its moronic characters damn near die or killed. Leaf wastes away to barely nothing, Twig is skinned and chewed on repeatedly, and Berry falls in love with a crow that viscously peaks and eats at her fruity, gushy head. The last episode has the crew swallowed by a snake, and… living within the belly, I suppose. With the dark energy of a final episode, they way goodbye to their friends from within the eye of the snake that swallowed them as the snake slithers off into the distance. The Mighty Ones is a tricky show to wrap around; towards the end, I found myself more enjoying the three dim-witted homeowners who thrive in an entirely warped reality that ended up being hilarious. I don’t want to dismiss the antics of the main cast though, even if the show overall never quite snapped into place, which, to be fair, seemed to be the point.

As much as I’d like to discuss more cartoons further, I think I’ll end on a few words on the Disney+ animated show Monsters At Work. A friend of mine once remarked that Pixar films are incredible, amazing films that are best watched once; while I don’t think I’d subscribe to that sentiment full tilt, I do understand that it sort of represents a kind of limitation to the Pixar formula. It seems to have reached its limit with Soul and the assortment of weaker, clumsier sequels churned out by the studio recently; now, imagine that formula chopped up, squeezed, and broken down into 25-minute chunks, and you’d have Pixar’s first foray into animated television.

Again, Monsters At Work isn’t bad. In fact, it’s past three episodes have been a step up from its first three, as the cast starts to feel more interactive with each other, and, more crucially, the lead monster takes on a more active role. The first three episodes mostly has Tyler being a bit clumsy but mostly brushing aside his new coworkers as said coworkers cluelessly quip and praise each other around them. It struggled to work because no one was actually talking to each other? Tyler kept saying specific things that no one would respond to, making the show a bit frustrating watch. There was no interplay among the characters. It also put a bit more emphasis on Mike and Sully who are clearly phoning it in (Goodman more so than Crystal, but both of them really sound like they’re doing their VO work while lying in bed).

But when “The Big Wazowskis” comes around, a shift notably occurs. Tyler takes a more active, if sitcom-lazy, role, which really showcases how pathetic and (slightly) self-absorbed he is. Admittedly, if he started off like that, I could see that leaving a bad taste in viewers mouths, but at the very least Tyler now has a personality that’s more than “knocked-around”. In a desperate attempt to nab Mike’s attention, Tyler distracts his irritating coworkers and their bowling desires and brings in a much better group of bowlers. It’s pretty funny to watch Tyler’s flop-sweat work at a more active level than passive, which also allows for a tad bit more poignancy to the events when he’s caught. “The Cover Up” is even funnier, where Tyler is directly pitted up “against” Duncan (the conflict is one-sided, in that Duncan’s hostility towards Tyler is never reciprocated) but still are often forced to work together to solve problems that they cause. In this episode, there’s a tinge of American Dad nuttiness, where an inspector arrives to shut them down, but Tyler and Duncan knock him out, then try to get rid of the body. Monsters At Work still has issues, mostly stemming from the core premise–monsters working to make children laugh via a bureaucratic infrastructure that recently switched from scares has too many open-ended questions (Why aren’t adult laughs as effective? What does a society driven on scare/laugh power look like? Are there other organizations that do this?) that makes a unstable foundation. But a sillier, more flippant narrative to everything could help. And honestly? They should drop Sully and Mike if they continue to be so lackluster, especially the “Mike’s Comedy Class” bit.

Next week I’m going to share my thoughts on Jellystone and The Owl House I think! We shall see. But thanks for checking back into this blog, and I do hope to continue this for the next couple of weeks!