You know who else has eyes bigger than their writs? Bugs Bunny. Real rabbits don't even have wrists!
The first link is disappointing: I thought it would be about duck penises.
Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grind-stone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, permanently erect, covetous, old sinner!
On th Disney, I recall taking my daughter to Pocahontas and realizing it was best classified it was some weird kind of porn for children. Hurtful and harmful stuff.
And then Blowcahontas was actual adult porn.
4: Not having seen it and being completely earnest, what makes it particularly bad?
My whole eyeball might be bigger than my wrist, but I'm not going to check.
Got excited; didn't close tag.
That's my excuse for typos.
Can someone do a mashup of the "squeezing" passages from A Christmas Carol and Moby-Dick?
7: Not sure it was *particularly* bad compared to other "dead Moms are the best" Disney animations, but it just struck me at the time as wildly inappropriate on several different levels.
We watched Tangled last night and the exaggerated waifishness gave me the creeps. I don't think prior princesses had clavicles that were quite as pronounced and heaving as Rapunzel's.
The first link is disappointing: I thought it would be about duck penises.
Charlie Stross has you covered.
"Dead moms are the best" would be a pretty good name for a band. Or the first volume in a new YA series about a tediously diverse group of kissing-but-nothing-further-aged characters struggling against ... The Administration.
1) The attempt at or preparation for 3-D makes all the Disney/Pixar stuff look horrible to me. There is also some reach for "realism" which doesn't help. Uncanny valley stuff.
2) Yes, manga/anime character designs often have huge eyes, no nose, and almost no mouth, females worse than males. Noses and mouths are harder to draw. Emotion isn't really expressed in the eyes, but all the muscles and features that surround the eyes. Eyebrows and forehead especially.
Google "Clannad After Story Images" for an extreme, and offensive to some, example. Studio, Kyoto Animation, is infamous for its waifs.
The difference is that anime eyes are all iris and pupil, with "highlights" light spots and streaks to help show where the eyes are looking, for instance. The dark eyes draw attention to the eyebrows etc that express the emotion.
Now look again at the "Frozen" images. They are showing way too much white in that woman's eyes, besides the fact that the reach for depth makes them bulge and the cheeks monstrous.
Incidentally, showing the white of the eyes is a) supposedly erotic, or b) shows shock or fear.
I do sort of wonder how weird a cartoon would look that didn't exaggerate gender differences -- that either didn't significantly distort average proportions, or did it similarly for both sexes. Would it look bizarre, or would it be not particularly noticeable?
Looking again through the Clannad After Story images and caps, and it is considered a "moe" classic and extreme:
1) I notice that the dude's eyes are somewhat smaller, but part of that is his reserve and distance. Compressed eyes = reserve, open eyes = innocence and openness. Yeah, it's gendered. But after he has achieved happiness etc bleh meh ugh...his eyes get bigger and more relaxed.
(Look for caps with the kid, especially mom pop and kid. They would be 25-30 in those.)
2) Body proportions, male and female, are about equal, very much on the slim side, but not disproportionate to each other. This is my experience in anime, unless there is a reason to have an overbuilt guy.
3) Anime, like most Asian media, uses somewhat less cuts and editing, and a greater distance from the camera. At medium distance and normal eyes, it can be very hard to show where the eyes are looking. "Hollywood style" gets over that with closeups and lots of cuts.
That was me -- don't know where my name went.
Have I ever discussed Dinky Dad Syndrome in recent Disney movies? Hapless very short roly-poly fathers with much taller willowy daughters?
http://fi-donc.nl/collectibles/wdcc/2004royal-aladdin.jpg
http://www.polyvore.com/cgi/img-thing?.out=jpg&size=l&tid=3482513
18: Image Google almost any anime series. I can give titles, and exceptions. But honestly, I am having trouble, because a) too much of what I watch has too few males, and b) a whole lot of anime is written around middle-school and high-school, precisely to escape heavy gender problems through a relatively androgynous period and cast. And for other reasons, like lots of free time and few responsibilities.
Finishing a book "How to draw Manga" or sumpin like it, to learn how it's done
Recommendations:Lead male, smaller than normal, slimmer, not muscled, androgynous features and hair. 1st sidekick, slightly more muscled (soccer jock). 2nd sidekick slimmer and taller than lead, more androgynous (the brain). 3rd sidekick little brother. 4th sidekick = Hulk.
Not Miyazaki, cause all think him some kind of feminist god. He's not.
Yeah, I know the anime look -- while I'm not a big fan, I grew up watching Battle of the Planets, and the kids were really into Naruto for awhile, and you're right that there are at least some male characters drawn with the exaggerated delicacy that gets saved for female characters in western animation. But as you say, averaged out across the male archetypes, you still get fairly exaggerated gender dimorphism.
Mostly, I guess I was wondering what Disney style animation would look like if you held everything else constant but took out the exaggerated gender distinctions.
Mostly, I guess I was wondering what Disney style animation would look like if you held everything else constant but took out the exaggerated gender distinctions.
Wouldn't it just look like real life? Is anything else in Disney animation as exaggerated as the gender distinctions? I can't think of anything, but I haven't seen one of those movies in a long time.
Wouldn't it just look like real life?
I don't know what to make of this. What kind of cartoony world do you live in?
The talking candlesticks I encounter in real life are nothing like the one from Beauty and the Beast.
Glad I'm not the only one who started drinking at noon.
I've seen dogs eat spaghetti in real life: Disney may have exaggerated for effect there too.
That is no kind of realistic depiction of a duck boner.
Well, okay, not like actual real life. But I don't see why having people with normal proportions would make it look weirder rather than less weird.
30: Well, maybe, because we're used to Disney cartoons looking the way that they do.
For example, if you took a typical Mickey Mouse cartoon and changed it so that Mickey dressed and moved like a real mouse, I'm thinking the result would be a cartoon that while more realistic would also strike most people as being weirder.
Fair enough. I was thinking of the feature films where the characters are mostly people.
I dislike that "Sociological Images" blog, because it is stupid. It is the same fool who was going on about Richard Scarry.
Mostly, I guess I was wondering what Disney style animation would look like if you held everything else constant but took out the exaggerated gender distinctions
I guess it's really a bunch of fools, not just a single one.
Tweety on Scrooge's raging boner
Let me make explicit this hot Disney on Warner Brothers action.
I feel like the phrase "raging boner" perpetuates negative stereotypes of angry men. That boner isn't angry--its happy! Its just ready to burst with joy!
Ripping on the Sociological Images blog is akin to ripping on microaggressions. They do sometimes exaggerate, but the basic cause is good.
The second sentence was not supposed to be building on the first sentence.
Is this the laughter thread?
20 Dumbest things of 2013. Of course it's mean to laugh.
I admit that "How far a drive is it from Miami to Florida?" made me chuckle.
Agree with 37. Blume must have been very surprised.
There's something frustratingly decontextualising about just showing unrealistic Disney princesses. All of western art forever has depicted both men and women in stereotyped and unrealistic ways. How does Disney fit inside that pattern? It just seems like an easy "Disney are evil" which is admittedly true but maybe a bit dull.
After looking and seeing what Disney has done to Andersen's The Snow Queen the least of their crimes is sexual dimorphism.
This ideology is really some sick evil shit being passed onto children as benevolence.
Zombie Bettelheim, eat all their fucking brains.
(There have been lots of versions, and the anime version was directed by Dezaki Ozamu himself in 2006, but is not considered in his best work. Though it has its defenders.)
Or I could be wrong
Them one of my favorite review sites, gives the Dezaki 5 of 5 stars.
In 1943, Disney had made Bambi, and at least could look at TSN, and decide it was too dark for them to do it justice. By 2013, America no longer gave a flying fuck about art or integrity, and understands that all previous cultures everywhere and everywhen were so much less enlightened and evil than ourselves.
and understands that all previous cultures everywhere and everywhen were so much less enlightened and evil than ourselves.
Did you mean to say that we believe that previous cultures were both less enlightened and less evil than us? Because that would be an interesting thought.
So we got two peasant kids, and Gerda traipses hill an dale, trial and trib, to save her her male neighbour from the incomprehensible but definitely not benevolent Snow Queen...
...changed to two sister princesses, one of which, the heir, runs away is scared of her powers and builds defenses just cause she doesn't want to hurt anyone. And ***spoilers*** through the power of gentle love she learns to trust herself and everything ends happily for everybody, with sparkles, and with punches to jerky guys.
And Marcotte's takeaway from the movie is:"The Goddamn Patriarchy is still oppressing women!!!"
We really are at a level of cultural hegemony and repression that exceeds its parallel forebear in the late Victorian/Edwardian Gilded Age.
How is Princess Tutu different from Disney Princesses?
Princess Tutu is a fucking duck.
Upward mobility versus noblesse oblige.
Bob, you can't really understand Frozen unless you've seen Secret of the Wings.
My wrist is about 1" wide seen edge-on, maybe a little less. I think slightly smaller than my eye. (I wear kids' watches and men's gloves. Sometimes.)
"Antiques Roadshow" has somebody showing Mary Lincoln's commitment papers. I wonder if they ever heard of HIPPA.
Not sure what the Longstockings have to do with the Lincolns.
The issue of large eyes in animation was dealt with definitively in Stephen Jay Gould's discussion of the evolution of Mickey Mouse. (Link is to a pdf, but it doesn't take long to load.)
It seems that life on the veldt predisposed humans to feel affection toward creatures with large eyes and other juvenile characteristics.
Back from almost six hours in the ER with the baby (febrile seizure, just a virus otherwise and not necessarily pre-asthma symptoms as originally feared) and I'm totally looking forward to a month where none of my comments involve being in an ER.
Thinking about the baby reminded me that beyond big eyes (and all my girls have those) there's the eyelash factor. I'd always laughed at those mascara ads with long, lush defined swirls of lash until the first time I dumped water over Selah's head in the bath and saw them pop up there. She got so much attention for being adorable tonight, and the fancy eyelashes and ringlets probably kick it up a notch. (I think Mara was four when she started asking at the zoo which animals would have eyelashes because she thought that was how to tell if they were female. Fucking cartoons!)
Bleah! Poor both of you. Hope you're both recovering.
The baby seems to be out cold at last, which was not the case last night. I've been upgraded from sleeping on the couch in the girls' room so I can be near the baby to sleeping in Mara's bed while she's elsewhere so I can be near the baby. I am going to finish what I'm doing and then get some sleep myself. She was really fantastic for being a tiny sick person stuck in a tiny room for all that time, though we occasionally took walks to the bathroom. ("Diaper" is a new word she can say this week, and a useful one! Though some other facebook mom just claimed her 16-month-old said "I love you," so maybe I shouldn't be proud. I'm sure Selah has better eyelashes, though, and pretty is what counts.)
Also, to 51, can we be sure Bob hasn't seen Secret of the Wings? Maybe all this anime stuff is just a cover for watching Tinker Bell movies. (And seriously, the spoiler about what had happened to one of the characters in that movie was so mind-blowingly obvious even for a Tinker Bell movie that I almost couldn't watch. Hmm, but the boys are mostly small-wristed and not super macho, right?)
54: No, it wasn't, although drawing affection thru childlike qualities is part of what's going on, it is only part.
Google images of Betty Boop: the large eyes with lots of white are a lot of help in determining where she is looking. Check out the human actress portraying her at the Wiki page. Much more difficult to read.
While you are at Wiki, check out Astro Boy, circa 1952.
Betty Boop, very white eyes with tiny pupils, which is also true of Mickey and Daffy.
Astro Boy, huge eyes, black with iris and pupil.
Nah, I take it back, Gould's full of shit. It is only interesting that the current hegemony finds his argument so appealing.
Google and examine the Sistine Chapel Ceiling for a little while. Everybody on it is is looking at something, but we can't see what they are looking at unless we are at some distance from them, and Michelangelo twists their entire bodies and heads, sometimes in disturbing contortions, in order to get the effect.
The moving image, and perhaps almost all visual representation, is about showing us where to look. Next time you watch moving images, check out how much time is spent in a looker-observed object movement.
Betty Boop's and Daffy Duck's pupils are never in the center of the eye.
The technology of modern visual representation is to get us emotionally involved by showing more face while still keeping the dynamics of observer to observed. As I said, that is done often with the cut, face looking up followed by shot of bird in sky.
I think what most of us find interesting about people is what they are looking at or like to look at.
But the single best argument against Gould is the really big head with really big eyes...that is the close-up.
But wait, you say, unfair, Gould had his calipers and it was about disproportionately-sized heads and eyes in full body and half body shorts.
But I say it is wrong to limit the argument when by including the close-up, the face filling the entire screen, we can generalize to something like bigger faces closer help increase immediate emotional involvement and empathy, and then use it to explain the ever shorter camera lensing, especially on TV.
But...the anime community repeats Gould's argument.
Google up some "chibi" images.
But chibi and related effects (and there are a lot in Princess Tutu) are most often used with very specific purposes, to animate a display of immediate extreme uncontrolled displays of emotion or sustained emotionalism or lability. Almost always to humorous and critical effect.
IOW, the ultimate take-away from all this is an equation of "strong emotional display/response = infantile and contemptible (though sometimes cute and funny)"
A valorization of control and "cool."
Now working on retelling of A Christmas Carol that makes it absolutely clear that Scrooge is the tragic hero and the Spirits the villains.
"But we're not interested in money," replied the Spirit of Christmas Present. "Our interest is in control. And you cannot be permitted not to enjoy Christmas, Mr Scrooge. We require you to mourn when we bid you mourn, to suffer when we bid you suffer, and to laugh when we bid you laugh. A horse that will not eat its sugar is just as dangerous a challenge to the trainer as a horse that refuses to feel the pain of the goad."
Similar to how Dr. Doolittle *made* the animals talk.
Similar to how Dr. Doolittle *made* the animals talk.
