aeronik - Tumblr blog

[aeronik]

“For some time, Hollywood has marketed family entertainment according to a two-pronged strategy, with cute stuff and kinetic motion for the kids and sly pop-cultural references and tame double entendres for mom and dad. Miyazaki has no interest in such trickery, or in the alternative method, most successfully deployed in Pixar features like Finding Nemo, Toy Story 3 and Inside/Out, of blending silliness with sentimentality.”

“Most films made for children are flashy adventure-comedies. Structurally and tonally, they feel almost exactly like blockbusters made for adults, scrubbed of any potentially offensive material. They aren’t so much made for children as they’re made to be not not for children. It’s perhaps telling that the genre is generally called “Family,” rather than “Children’s.” The films are designed to be pleasing to a broad, age-diverse audience, but they’re not necessarily specially made for young minds.”

“My Neighbor Totoro, on the other hand, is a genuine children’s film, attuned to child psychology. Satsuki and Mei move and speak like children: they run and romp, giggle and yell. The sibling dynamic is sensitively rendered: Satsuki is eager to impress her parents but sometimes succumbs to silliness, while Mei is Satsuki’s shadow and echo (with an independent streak). But perhaps most uniquely, My Neighbor Totoro follows children’s goals and concerns. Its protagonists aren’t given a mission or a call to adventure - in the absence of a larger drama, they create their own, as children in stable environments do. They play.”

“Consider the sequence just before Mei first encounters Totoro. Satsuki has left for school, and Dad is working from home, so Mei dons a hat and a shoulder bag and tells her father that she’s “off to run some errands” - The film is hers for the next ten minutes, with very little dialogue. She’s seized by ideas, and then abandons them; her goals switch from moment to moment. First she wants to play “flower shop” with her dad, but then she becomes distracted by a pool full of tadpoles. Then, of course, she needs a bucket to catch tadpoles in - but the bucket has a hole in it. And on it goes, but we’re never bored, because Mei is never bored.”

“[…] You can only ride a ride so many times before the thrill wears off. But a child can never exhaust the possibilities of a park or a neighborhood or a forest, and Totoro exists in this mode. The film is made up of travel and transit and exploration, set against lush, evocative landscapes that seem to extend far beyond the frame. We enter the film driving along a dirt road past houses and rice paddies; we follow Mei as she clambers through a thicket and into the forest; we walk home from school with the girls, ducking into a shrine to take shelter from the rain; we run past endless green fields with Satsuki as she searches for Mei. The psychic center of Totoro’s world is an impossibly giant camphor tree covered in moss. The girls climb over it, bow to it as a forest-guardian, and at one point fly high above it, with the help of Totoro. Much like Totoro himself, the tree is enormous and initially intimidating, but ultimately a source of shelter and inspiration.”

“My Neighbor Totoro has a story, but it’s the kind of story that a child might make up, or that a parent might tell as a bedtime story, prodded along by the refrain, “And then what happened?” This kind of whimsicality is actually baked into Miyazaki’s process: he begins animating his films before they’re fully written. Totoro has chase scenes and fantastical creatures, but these are flights of fancy rooted in a familiar world. A big part of being a kid is watching and waiting, and Miyazaki understands this. When Mei catches a glimpse of a small Totoro running under her house, she crouches down and stares into the gap, waiting. Miyazaki holds on this image: we wait with her. Magical things happen, but most of life happens in between those things—and there is a kind of gentle magic, for a child, in seeing those in-betweens brought to life truthfully on screen.”

A.O. Scott and Lauren Wilford on “My Neighbor Totoro”, 2017.  

[aeronik]

There he go. Off to the shops to buy some cigs.

I spent way too long on this.

[aeronik]

I’ve seen some buzz about the Nimona animated series which could be very cool. The early images I’ve seen feel a bit like they’ve sanded off some of the interesting edges the comic had and it put me in the mood to try a ‘3D animation’ treatment closer to the original. I think it would be fun to develop

[aeronik]

Catfolk archer on the hunt.

[aeronik]

Some character pics for a friend’s Cthulu campaign

[aeronik]

Had the rendering bug today, so picked up a drawthisinyour style from twitter and gave it a bit of a vinyl figure treatment.

[aeronik]

I hear the links don’t work in the tumblr app so here’s the text:

https://twitter.com/Aeronik

https://www.instagram.com/aerobotnik/

Do you have any social media that your on so we can follow you after the 17th? Or maybe a Gmail would work?

yeah, the way tumblr management seems intent on wrecking many of the communities here might be the prompt I need to finally get my twitter and instagram going.

[aeronik]

Will you put your past commissions and stuff on Instagram? It’s easy to look for reference since you can make folders.

Oh yeah, gonna fill that right up with all my old junk

[aeronik]

Do you have any social media that your on so we can follow you after the 17th? Or maybe a Gmail would work?

yeah, the way tumblr management seems intent on wrecking many of the communities here might be the prompt I need to finally get my twitter and instagram going.

[aeronik]

A once human cleric of Icabulos the pestilent.

[aeronik]

Ripley from Aliens in a disney infinity style. I’ve spent a month or so trying to get a handle on Zbrush (an excellent piece of software designed by a strange alien intelligence) and decided to tackle something fairly stylized and clean as a first serious project. The infinity figures have some great art direction and seemed like a good style to use as a guide. No one kicks ass like Ripley so she was the obvious choice of subject. As it progressed I felt the need to have a physical version too, so I got myself an Anycubic Photon resin printer and brought Ripley forth from the slime. I’m happy with the results but learned a lot about the process so I’ll likely do another pass to try for better detail and fit.

[aeronik]

Oni brawler, looking for trouble.

[aeronik]

lots of sketching this weekend

Ung is fan art of a friend’s character. Check out the original and more awesome art here.

[aeronik]

I’m playing through Dark Souls Remastered and it’s very good. This is my character Pickles after defeating Kalameet - though with the help of excellent sunbro P.R.I.M.E. (I let Pickles down as I have the heart of a filthy casul)

[aeronik]

Don’t disturb the kenku druid at night.

There is a version with a camera move, but tumblr didn’t like it.

[aeronik]

Kobold necromancer and weasel familiar - or is it the other way round? 

Weasel says yes.

[aeronik]

Aasimar barbarian. He’s seen better days... and may yet again.