I watched all the episodes. They raised a lot of questions related to AI, war trauma, the western wars in the Middle East and what really make us humans. It is good, but I found it a strange case. There wasn’t much that excited me. Few characters awakened my empathy. But the issues raised in the cartoon are so engaging, sometimes hurled without the slightest subtlety in our faces that we can’t stop watching. If I were a teacher, I would show this cartoon to my students.
Now a spoiler: I really liked Uran, Astroboy’s sister. She has a lot of empathy. I don´t know if she was programmed like that or developed that personality. In one scene in particular, involving people who are suffering, I felt like holding the little robot and saying to her: Ah, poor little robot, we humans suffer a lot. We create a lot of suffering and we suffer when we run away from it. Rest a little, you can´t save us all.
We’re 2 episodes from wrapping it up, so I’ll watch those then…
I’d recommend Monster, too, though that’s much longer (70 episodes), but you see similar themes about the Cold War and it’s impact on people’s mental health.
The Marvels deserved a better premier weekend opening. It topped the box office, but it now has the lowest opening of all Marvel films. It’s a particularly fun Marvel film and was allowed to be a little weirder at times, which I appreciate.
I hate hate hate how an weekend opening which tops the time but doesn’t live up to the inflated bullshit expectations makes something a failure, and I hate even more how if it “merely” performs to expectations it’s somehow disappointing, and I really really hate all the blog posts and youtube videos declaring it the worst thing ever projected onto a screen by people who are very certain that it’s because it’s the worst thing ever made, and not because they’re white men who are determined to make sure that Carol Danvers and Brie Larson must be cancelled because her existence as a woman who doesn’t even pretend to need a man telling her what to do hurts their feelings.
I didn’t see it on the weekend because my weekend was already full of things. But we’re hoping to see it next weekend, and I’m looking forward to it, and you, the haters who hated it before you even saw it, I see you, and I see how small and scared and angry you are trying to pretend you’re not, and I would simply pity you, except that you are the reason I can’t have nice things, so fuck you and your entitled self-centered whinging.
I’m with you in those feelings. Because it has nothing to do with story, performances, and overall production. It has everything to do with marketing, timing, and a host of other things that say nothing about film itself (or book or game or whatever is being released). The focus is entirely on whether or not people think they’ll like something – or even if they can make time for it – instead of if they actually like it. And it’s considered bad performance if people don’t flock to something immediately.
Then they’re surprised when something starts doing well later. Disney is most guilty of this at this point. Encanto and Elemental were considered sleeper hits because they didn’t immediately climb the charts or hit sales goals. They’re now considered hits. Maybe, just maybe, they and the industry as a whole need to reconsider what any of these things mean moving forward.
I enjoyed it too and ended up binging the whole season over a couple of days. Some great visuals.
One very minor quibble that I had with the show was that the main antagonist ends up being an Irish arms-smuggling merchant who lives on an island off the coast of Japan. He’s an interesting enough character, but we’ve already seen plenty of films and shows with colonial Brits as antagonists, and very few with Dutch colonizers as antagonists, so I think it would have been interesting to show the Dutch because they really did have a presence and a monopoly in foreign trade with the West during the Edo Period, and were restricted to the island of Deshima in Nagasaki harbor.
Potential un-cancellation of Coyote vs ACME film, which depends on someone else being willing to pick it up and distribute it. That’s an improvement, at least.
