Board 8 > Board 8 Watches and Ranks Animated Movies 4 - The Results Topic 2: Top Five

(+) Yeah! (+)

Well The Girl Without Hands successfully feeds the baby only after she drops the golden hands, right? I think the contrast between her not being able to do it (and how much that upsets her) with the hands, then being able to do it without them, serves to reinforce the idea that the prince while well-meaning doesn't really understand what she needs when he gives her the golden hands, and how learning to get rid of them is part of her character arc about learning to live on her own.

The gardener kills the fawn because the letter he gets from the prince, which the devil replaced, tells him to kill the baby and take his eyes, so he kills the fawn instead so he can keep the eyes in a box and show them to the prince when he returns. It's the same idea as the Snow White scene where the hunter presents the evil queen with a pig's heart instead of Snow White's. It might have been something of a trope in fairy tales of that time. It turns out to be sadly unnecessary, but from the gardener's perspective, at the time he does it, it makes sense to sacrifice the fawn as a way to protect the girl and her son, since the prince won't hunt them down when he comes back if he thinks they're dead.

The Waltz with Bashir dog scene... I think that one was more just intended to add another story about how the war fucked someone up and made them feel guilty, I mean that was probably something the director actually heard in an interview and I felt it did a good job introducing the kind of tone the reminiscences would carry for the rest of the movie. It's still completely fair not to like it because you dislike seeing violence against animals, though I think that on its own wouldn't really work well as a criticism.

One point I'd bring attention to is that not every visual choice a director makes necessarily has to advance the narrative. I think "plot" is over-emphasized in the writeups here too personally. An example of nudity being even more "superfluous" in The Girl Without Hands is that giant naked river lady that lifts the Girl up to eat fruit, there's no reason why she couldn't be wearing an elegant mermaid dress, but if she were, would we have to analyze how her dress advances the plot? The point of the nudity in Waltz with Bashir probably is just because they're in water and it makes the scene feel slightly more jarring by showing something taboo, and that's enough to make it a useful artistic choice even if it doesn't strictly need to be there, but we're probably more likely to analyze why something is included, and get upset about whether it should have been or not, if it challenges social taboos, whether via nudity or farts.

Johnbobb posted...

Compare that to something like The Bad Guys, where the fart jokes aren't a one-off subtle thing, but they visually take up the entire screen for an extended period of time, repeatedly throughout the entire runtime of the film, and it becomes pretty indicative of the movie's sense of humor as a whole, nearly to the same extent that food sex jokes were the basis of Sausage Party's humor

Yeah I think this is something that's important to me, I generally find the handling of all these "taboo subjects" better the less the thing is commented upon, so GWH having nudity that's fairly incidental is better to me than TBG making a whole deal out of Awkwafina trying not to drown in fart gas, which just got tedious, but to further defend it I just feel the fart scenes are the most blatant example of what I didn't like about the movie throughout. There's also a scene where either the Piranha or the Shark, I can't remember which, argues with Moss about whether a rock looks like a butt, and my problem with that scene definitely isn't the mention of butts, I mean I like looking at butts, it's just that they keep going back and forth and back and forth about whether it's a heart or a butt and it just draws out a joke that wasn't very clever in the first place. There's no sense of comic timing, and when you contrast it against something like The Big Bad Fox on the same list, involving the same animals, and also having Bad in the title but having a so much more disciplined mastery of comic timing it just comes off as really lame.

I guess I've been sleeping on this Puss in Boots 2 movie, huh? I'd heard it was good but not like this.

Evillordexdeath posted...

Well The Girl Without Hands successfully feeds the baby only after she drops the golden hands, right? I think the contrast between her not being able to do it (and how much that upsets her) with the hands, then being able to do it without them, serves to reinforce the idea that the prince while well-meaning doesn't really understand what she needs when he gives her the golden hands, and how learning to get rid of them is part of her character arc about learning to live on her own.

I don't understand how having golden hands and not having them makes it any difference on holding the baby. Either way it's going to be difficult and if she literally just tried to do it with her hands and arms, she would have likely been successful.

It really just felt like a way to force these scenes into the movie when they didn't need to exist.

I think I was misremembering the specifics and she figures out a sort of sling arrangement to feed the baby with and then drops the gold hands to change his diaper. The idea is the same either way though, at first it seems like she can't breastfeed the baby because of her missing hands but once she leaves the keep and has to survive on her own she figures it out. That could seem like it was pointless but it could also be taken to show her character growth. The problems she has as a result of her missing hands and how she overcomes them (because she always does), is a big part of the film, I enjoyed that aspect throughout but it's fair if you thought it was poorly conveyed.

I think even without that the breast milk scenes have some narrative purpose, since they show her happiness at becoming a mother (the first scene where she's just had the baby and she like sprays some milk out for the hell of it lol) and then her sadness at that getting taken away in the scene where she gets bound up and then watches a wet nurse who is just represented as a rack of breasts. imo that's all the justification it needs, both scenes help communicate what The Girl is feeling at that point.

But I also think even if they did just force in an excuse to show boobies that wouldn't be all that bad, we are genetically coded to find them appealing after all.

Zigzagoon posted...

I didn't mention this in my write up, but Waltz has something similar that Red touched upon. There was a scene at the beginning with him remembering killing a bunch of dogs that really didn't serve any purpose at all. I give this one a bit more of a slide because it ties into trying to recover the lost memories but I still hated that scene.

I interpreted that scene as a metaphor for guilt.

Zigzagoon posted...

It's pretty interesting to see what things stand out to people, cus like. Sometimes there's a movie that has like one fart joke or like one poop joke.

It lasts 10 seconds and then it's done. There's 2 hours of movie to enjoy, but people will single out that one specific moment and say that it ruined the movie for them and that they can't stand the character.

I suppose specific things just ruin things for specific people. Pointless animal abuse and overly excessive bodily functions are things that very much bother me I suppose!

Yeah, I forgot about the fart jokes until I saw the write-ups. They just don't bother me. Same with the shitting and squeezing in Girl Without Hands. The overall stories/characters/style grabbed me, and that's what I value.

What irritates me most is bad pacing, especially when it's on a larger scale. I love tight stories, so when we got to sludgy ones like The House, I found my attention blipping.

Leafeon13N posted...

You know, i try not to be a gross furry in these lists but...i dont think a character has ever made me feel less straight than Death. Like, damn. They knew what they were doing for that one.

Anyway sorry I had to break up everyones serious conversation.

You wanna know what the craziest thing is? His design isn't even sexualized. Like, he's not revealing that much flesh or fur. He's not ridiculously anthropomorphic. He just... oozes charisma in the way he moves, fights, and speaks. I don't know why Death is so appealing, and he's just so cool. There's really no other way to describe it. I would let him claim my last life any day.

Evillordexdeath posted...

There's no sense of comic timing, and when you contrast it against something like The Big Bad Fox on the same list, involving the same animals, and also having Bad in the title but having a so much more disciplined mastery of comic timing it just comes off as really lame.

Oof. Fox's humor didn't register with me at all. The jokes were mind-numbingly tame, and "surprises" like the mama-hens kicking the fox's ass felt cliched. Then you had the "cowardly fox gets intimidated by the nasty wolf" routine, which got old the moment it started.

The only remotely amusing part was some of the banter between the baby chicks and the fox.

Johnbobb posted...

Irl, I love an ugly dog as much as the next person, probably more

But also no dog has an eye that takes up more than half of its entire head and the annoying sidekickisms just never end. At some points it just really became grating the way someone yelling in your ear for an hour straight is going to do

https://i.imgur.com/pYPOKYr.jpeg

I never said Anubis was a dead ringer, but with the big, bulging eyes, underbite, and snaggletooth he would definitely be described as "ugly-cute" in most circles.

Perrito was my second favorite character in PiB. Not even my second favorite original character, my second favorite period, and I even came in with a huge bias because Shrek 2 is my favorite in the quartet (ugh having to acknowledge Shrek the Turd makes me diea little inside) mostly BECAUSE of Puss. I thought he had a great dynamic with literally everyone he interacts with: Kitty, Horner, Goldilocks and the Bear Family Crime Syndicate, and his scene with Puss in the Forest is literally the best in the movie- and there's a lot of great scenes to pick from!

I dunno maybe I'm a bit biased because of my DreamWorks dog looking fur baby, but Perrito is fucking rad. Bite me, Perrito haters!

I'm biased but Perrito is still fantastic in his own right and a lot of other people think so too!

PrinceKaro posted...

Ermine: Oh, except the opening song. I hate that one. Trash opening song.

This is such a bizarre thing to say when The Family Madrigal is objectively a gem compared to the projectile diarrhea that is Fearless Hero from Puss in Boots 2.

Fearless Hero is a bop

No.

No it is not.

Nah, Madrigal is trash.

"THIS FAMILY IS SO AWESOME" *Repeat x10*

Stupid bratty kids being obnoxious the whole song.

Madrigal is solid - good composition, great melodies. It doesn't have quite the cleverness of lyrical construction that LMM usually does, but rhythmically it serves up rather well.

The thing is, Fearless Hero literally is the same thing, word for word, like 20 times. And Antonio Banderas also can't sing.

Fearless Hero not being great kind of works, though. Of course Puss would be egotistical enough to have everyone join in a mediocre song about how amazing he is.

GenesisSaga posted...

You wanna know what the craziest thing is? His design isn't even sexualized. Like, he's not revealing that much flesh or fur. He's not ridiculously anthropomorphic. He just... oozes charisma in the way he moves, fights, and speaks. I don't know why Death is so appealing, and he's just so cool. There's really no other way to describe it. I would let him claim my last life any day.

Feels like Dreamworks was given freedom to give us actual characters unlike say Disney where everything feels like they went through 300 focus groups and homogenized to completely bland.

So we get characters that just ooze cool and appeal like Death.

Xeybozn posted...

Fearless Hero not being great kind of works, though. Of course Puss would be egotistical enough to have everyone join in a mediocre song about how amazing he is.

Yeah i thought this was the point. It was Puss' bravado that made the song. Not the song itself.

And it sets up the whole takedown of his character only moments later. That and the visuals for the whole thing are incredible, many of them going along to the beat of the song as well.

I think somebody forgot to tell Banderas that the song even had a beat

PrinceKaro posted...

roadtrip movies hosted by darkx

I forgot to comment on this but this sounds fun! Did we already get a list? I feel like I vaguely remember someone posting a link to upcoming projects/what movies are on them but I can't remember how to find them.

I'm pumped for the Roadtrip list as well. Link?

I know the list, but I will let the host be the one to officially reveal it when he posts the topic.

PrinceKaro posted...

I know the list, but I will let the host be the one to officially reveal it when he posts the topic.

I don't know if it's on the list, but I already know what I'd rank number one.

Zigzagoon posted...

And it sets up the whole takedown of his character only moments later. That and the visuals for the whole thing are incredible, many of them going along to the beat of the song as well.

Yeah the whole thing is trying to setup that it doesn't matter its not the greatest singer in the world. He is Puss in Boots. In this already fantasy world he is a spectacle. It doesn't matter if he falters a little or is careless or anything, he is Puss in Boots so no matter what he comes up roses. It is setting him up to be larger than life in an already larger than life universe. He has to have no care in life cause it all just works out for him.

Then they appropriately crush his soul and we get a good movie.

Right, but it's a bad song.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/8-gamefaqs-contests/80543105

Ignore that link, the proper topic for next project can be found here:https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/8-gamefaqs-contests/80543380