#I respect animators so much

[starberry-cupcake]

not to talk about flow again, but the thing is, a lot of people talk about independent film making and its importance etc, but it's hard to get more independent than flow this year

not only because it was made with a free and open source software anyone can use, not only because it beat competitors from major studios with an average of 3% of the budget they had, not only because it represented a country that had never won an oscar before, not only because it didn't have any star power involved, not only because it didn't come from a filmmaker with past history, not only because it was made by a small team...

but also because it's an animated movie

animators often get the short end of the stick in the entertainment industry and, for the past years, it was starting to look as if the only way to make an animated project happen was to sell your soul to a major studio and see your work transformed into what they need and how they want it marketed

especially for movies from outside the US, from non-English speaking countries, where insanely talented animators tend to be used as freelance cheap labor for major US studios or have to adapt as much as possible to fit into their market in order to find work

passion projects for animation seemed to only be reserved to the shorts category, or needed to be as high brow as humanly possible to be perceived as "high art" to be valued and, even in the spaces of the industry dedicated to the genre, the way in which awards are distributed are a poor reflection of the vast work animators do

it's major for this film to win awards, let alone the oscar, an award which is notably judged badly for animation and often prefers the marketable easy way out of voting rather than genuine interest

this movie used a resource that is open to anyone and, with good storytelling, made an oscar winning film

in a world in which art is constantly being attacked by capitalist greed, I'm happy that a movie with heart and little resources could do something like this, whether or not people care about the oscars anymore

[blitzy-blitzwing]

Animation practice. :V

[mizzyislost]

youre interrupting them

[keferon]

May I ask what were the best transformers media you ever saw/read?

Well Transformers Prime, Transformers 1986 and IDW comics are having the first place that’s for sure

And then the second place is kind of shared by Fall of Cybertron, Exodus, Prime wars trilogy, Robots in disguise(2001) and Transformers One.

The third place goes to G1, Animated, Earthspark, Armada, War for Cybertron Netflix series, Aligned Robots in disguise, Bumblebee, Rise of the Beasts and Cyberverse because I only liked some little parts of them.

And then I also saw some of the Bay movies, Victory and Headmasters and didn’t like them at all.

Separate first place for J-Decker. It is not exactly Transformers but it is a show about giant robots and I loved it

[beeftendergroin]

i love sports (anime)!

[thethoriumreactor]

Tried animating for the first time and obviously it had to be Lucifer’s adorable lil frog blink

I love this little man a very normal and healthy amount

[neroisfishing]

arlecchino meets midra, then becomes father of frenzied flames :)

[kunikiiida-kuuun]

Those who haven't read Dazai's entrance exam LN don't even know that Fukuzawa literally entrusted the exam to Kunikida alone and Kunikida himself approved him and Fukuzawa took his word for it without any questions.

Dazai wouldn't even have been in the agency if it wasn't for Kunikida's trust in Dazai.

[mollysunder]

Some ask why would Singed turn Vander into a werewolf. What purpose does it serve? In my very sinco biased perspective, I'd say not much, it's just poetic irony.

Singed has known Silco for years working together to advance shimmer for very different reasons, and still built something stable and successful. Singed probably took care of Silco's eye and overall health for just as many years and in all that time isn't it likely he looked at the infection's further encroaching damage to Silco's and just thought, "What an animal"?

I don't think there was any rage to it though, I think Singed saw this as an objective assessment of who Vander was. How else can you describe a person that brutalized a person they considered family to Singed? A man that was willing to cross every boundary to save his daughter, the last of his family? A man that took extreme measures to prevent Silco from witnessing his own daughter in pain.

Maybe to Singed, Hound of the Underground seemed like an apt nickname, because only a beast of a man could turn on their family like that. Maybe Warwick's been conditioned to go into a frenzy of violence against those around him when blood is exposed because that's what happened between Vander, Silco, and Felicia. Why give Warwick knives for hands, because Vander's fists cut Silco's eye in the drowning scene.

This is almost exclusively for Singed btw. It's a toss up if Silco ever knew any of this was happening (he'd probably have a breakdown if he did).

[yoiiyoii]

Yoriichi and Kokushibou are such good characters man. Keeps me coming back to Demon Slayer over and over. Just one brother, whose legacy lasted on for centuries, despite death, and another brother who could not leave anything behind.

And all their themes and motifs and parallels with characters like Muichiro and Tanjirou and Sanemi and Genya and Gyomei.... Insane how Gotouge wrote this within a third of a singular arc of KNY and yet encapsulates everything in the entire story all the way from Chapter 1 till the epilogue

[hmsdoodlin]

I have a confession. I’ve never animated before and I’m a stinky phone artist. This is just a silly little experiment.

[chickennuggets08]

Hey yall look-

First crack at an animatic for my mermaid au, this is still definitely a WIP but I wanted to document some progress lol.

It’s still very rough but hopefully it’ll be worth it.

[zecoritheweirdone]

hehehehehhooo,, decided to draw some hermits as the mystery skulls animated gang!! why? uhhh mostly just 'cause.

special thanks to the ibaaf server for helping me pick the roles! gem is vivi,, false is arthur,, pearl is lewis,, and etho is mystery!!

better pic of pearl under the cut, where you can how lazy i am,,ms ksmsksjs

[kryptonbabe]

Digimon Tamers | 1×7 - Guilmon is in Danger!

That's it, keep your hands off these kids, they better stay alive, happy and healthy this whole season otherwise I'm using my sword

[silverwhittlingknife]

hi Silver! o/ because that fanart made me wonder - would you happen to know when/where Dick's stuffed elephant plush Zitka turns up in the comics?

GREETINGS CAM <3333 THAT ART WAS SO CUTE

Yeah, I think your instincts are right - it's a truly adorable bit of transformative fandom, but I'm 95% percent sure it's not comics canon. Barbara has canon plushies, but I don't think anyone else does.

I got kinda invested in the investigation (it's hard to prove a negative!) and I ended up typing out an entire History of Elinore/Zitka, so, uh, if you're curious, meet me below the cut for:

Where does Elinore / Zitka - the animal - appear in comics?

Did Dick ever have a stuffed elephant toy in comics?

Where does Elinore / Zitka appear in comics?

We're gonna go in chronological order!

Dick's circus elephant friend was first created for practical reasons: in Batman 436, Marv Wolfman does a big expanded flashback to Dick's circus backstory as a way to subtly show us Tim before officially introducing him (so that we can have a technically-solvable mystery-of-Tim's-identity in LPoD). In this comic, there's an elephant named Elinore who loves Dick:

Aww. Such a cute elephant!

Batman 436 comes out in August 1989. New Titans 60 comes out a few months later, in November, and guess what? When Dick visits the circus, he is suddenly surprised by an unexpected blast from the past! It turns out that even though it's been years, Elinore still remembers him!

Here's the part where Elinore remembers Dick:

SUCH a cute elephant. I love her.

(Guess who else still remembers Dick even though it was so long ago. Guess which other character is about to be an unexpected blast from the past. Guess which character Elinore is directly paralleling guess guess guess sorry everything is about Dick and Tim in my mind but I can focus I swear)

Four years later, in 1993, Batman: The Animated Series retells Dick's origin story. They like and keep Wolfman's elephant, but they change her name to Zitka:

Wolfman doesn't return to the elephant beyond those two appearances, and a few years down the line, New Titans gets cancelled and Wolfman's not writing Dick anymore anyway. So the animal gets abandoned for a while, until Devin Grayson, a fan of both Wolfman and B:tAS, revives the Wolfman-era Titans team in JLA/Titans and then the ongoing series Titans 1999.

Grayson then brings back the elephant in a flashback to Dick's past in Titans 16 (Jun 2000), where she imports the B:tAS name. Sometimes I'm skeptical of TV-to-comics imports, but honestly, I endorse this one. You lose the alliteration, which is a shame, but IMO Zitka is a better elephant name than Elinore.

Here's Dick with the newly-christened Zitka in Titans 16:

Grayson also briefly references the elephant in Gotham Knights 20 and - in a final angsty callback - in Nightwing 88 (Feb 2004), where Zitka tries futilely to comfort Dick in the midst of his trauma conga line:

... And... honestly, I think that's it for comic appearances? The two Wolfman comics plus the three Grayson comics.

Both Wolfman and Grayson are writing multiple titles - Batman, New Titans, Titans, Gotham Knights, and Nightwing between the two of them, spanning a big chunk of Dick's post-Crisis canon - and both writers use the elephant for heartwarming moments of nostalgia, which means if you're doing a post-Crisis readthrough for Dick, Elinore/Zitka feels memorable. But I don't think she actually shows up that much.

For post-2011, I am not as well-informed - throwing this out to the dash? anyone know? - but I feel like Zitka the heartwarming symbol of Dick's heartwarming circus past is, uh, thematically very at odds with the Court of Owls evil!circus vibes, so my instinct is that this story element was almost certainly dropped in the reboot.

Did Dick ever have a stuffed elephant toy in comics?

In WFA, yes; in main comics continuity, no. Technically, I have not read every comic ever published, so I could be wrong!! But I don't think so.

Below, find my rambling reasoning on the tonal vibes of pre-Crisis, post-Crisis, and post-2011, and why this particular story element doesn't seem right to me for the first two.

Pre-Crisis (...okay, mostly the Silver Age): stuffed animal, yes or no?

tl;dr no, requires too much background knowledge on the part of the reader, plus the elephant wasn't a thing until later

Elinore doesn't get created until post-Crisis, but also just generally, pre-Crisis callbacks are more along the lines of this reference in Batman 129 (published in 1960), where, wow, Batman and Robin are hunting jewel thieves - and it turns out Robin recognized this strongman! BUT HOW?!

The comic goes on to recap Dick's entire origin story in flashback, on the assumption that you may not know it.

(BTW, if you'd like to know more about Haly's Circus throughout the years, nightwingology has a great post here summarizing a lot of fun plotlines and characters!)

Basically: Silver Age comics are very self-consciously episodic and kid-friendly; they're not generally gonna do overly-elaborate callbacks because they don't know what comics their kid readers may have randomly picked up or remember.

By the time of post-Crisis, comic books were being written for an adult audience buying from the direct market, i.e. readers who are collecting whole runs & don't need or want Dick's origin story to be recapped to us in full every time it's referenced. That's why in post-Crisis, we get stuff like "hey, neat, this particular soda brand is getting mentioned in several different books!!" or "in order to understand this story arc, buy SIXTEEN DIFFERENT COMICS in FIVE DIFFERENT RUNS and read them ALL ACCORDING TO A NUMBERED ORDER and also you better be following the individual plotlines and recognize these five minor characters who we don't bother to introduce!! Good luck!!" But the elaborate post-Crisis plotlines - and subtler worldbuilding like a stuffed animal callback to Dick's backstory - don't make a lot of story sense UNLESS you're imagining your readers as completionist adult fans.

So IMO a stuffed animal wouldn't be a pre-Crisis thing unless it was The Episodic Story Of the Week, and I don't think a stuffed animal is action-adventure-y enough for the fast-paced storytelling of the Silver Age. (Unless it, like, came to life and tried to eat you or something.)

Post-Crisis: stuffed animals, yes or no?

tl;dr: no, Dick's a manly tough guy, he's not gonna have a stuffed animal, that'd be lame, like something Tim might do

Part of the edgy grimdark adult vibes in 80s/90s comics is that some characters who used to be kinda silly & goofy & lighthearted - like Batman and Robin - get reimagined as Serious and Angsty and Edgy in a Tough Cool Manly Brooding Way. This massively affects characterization for Bruce, Dick, and Bruce and Dick's relationship.

(I obviously love this change & love the tense Bruce-and-Dick interactions, but plenty of fans of the earlier fluffy comics really disliked the edgy retcons of Miller / Wolfman / Starlin / et al.)

The upshot is that post-Crisis is a period when you could have a recurring reference like a stuffed elephant, but you wouldn't have a stuffed elephant, not for Dick. I think a toy like that would be too cutesy / childish / effeminate to give a male character in post-Crisis, unless you were poking fun at him.

Now, you could probably let Tim have a stuffed animal, because Tim is sometimes cool but also sometimes a tryhard loser who is faking being cool and not entirely pulling it off (see e.g. the Robin comic where he practices tough-guy faces in the mirror, or the Teen Titans comic where Conner discovers his cringy Enya CD, or when he's fanboying over Connor and it's awkward, etc etc.). A stuffed animal would be deeply embarrassing, and you'd have to be careful to compensate by having Tim do something cool afterward - but Tim's character concept allows for "he's kind of a loser sometimes."

But Dick isn't!! In post-Crisis, Dick's a tough / impressive / "cool guy" character, the kind of guy anyone would want to be, even in the flashbacks where he's Robin, and even in the stories where he's more lighthearted than angsty. It'd be kinda lame for Dick to have a stuffed elephant, so he wouldn't. I feel like Dick would be more likely to poke fun at it if someone had one, like when he's making fun of Wally for liking the Hardy Boys. Dick could have a Batman action figure, at most, and if he had one he would have it ironically.

Basically: in post-Crisis, a male character hugging a stuffed elephant feels more likely to be a punchline to me, not something poignant. (Even with Tim, Tim could have an embarrassing stuffed animal, but he couldn't hug it when sad - that's too far. Maybe Booster Gold might do this. Probably he wouldn't, but spiritually, he would. Sorry Booster ilu! <3)

Instead, Dick instinctively deals with his inner turmoil like the TORTURED ACTION HERO he is: by punching things and brooding and yelling and joining the mob and sleeping on rooftops and going on obsessive secret missions and acquiring Angsty Stubble!! Just like Batman!

(Technically I don't know if Bruce ever joined the mob but you know he would.)

Anyway as you know this is my favorite continuity and I am poking fun affectionately, but uh, yeah sdfsfdsfs. No stuffed animals.

Post-2011 / Infinite Frontier / Wayne Family Adventures: stuffed animals, yes or no?

tl;dr it's in WFA! Probably not anywhere else, but it could be.

Post-2011 stuff tends to be cutesier overall, most of all in the current Infinite Frontier era. So I don't feel like this would be tonally out-of-line with IF comics. Taylor tends to go for more meme-y references rather than fanfic references, though.

So the obvious best fit is WFA, which is aiming for a rough approximation of Silver Age family-friendly vibes - wholesome, episodic plots, Teaching Good Moral Lessons For The Youth, etc. - plus lots of Easter eggs for fanfic readers and some comic references.

And look, here we are:

Aww.

Whew - that's everything I could find!

Anyway as you can probably tell, I LOVE the elephant, so this was a very entertaining rabbit hole to go down, thank you <3

[blitzbuckz]

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