Wow everyone is going through it. Hold my hand
If you asked the people of Ur which of their countrymen would be remembered and often referenced by the world 4000 years later, I bet not one said "That shady merchant, Ea-nāṣir."
大洋さんから届いた絵 #231
松本大洋さんから、ひと言。
「湯浅政明監督アニメ『犬王』の
Blu-ray・DVDが発売になりました〜！
可愛い箱入りの限定版には、
古川日出男さんの詩と僕の絵に
津田健次郎さんが声をつけて下さった
『犬王お伽草子』など盛りだくさんの
特典映像も入っています。」
i know this is just one post on tumblr but i am BEGGING people who can to be loud about strange world.
it is so fucking unfair for disney to not properly promote this movie at all and for it to bomb so badly in theaters like it’s doing just because it actually had genuinely good poc and queer rep! i am SEETHING about how they intentionally set it up to fail and i can’t imagine how the people who worked on the movie feel!
please be loud about it! please go see it if you can, tell your friends to see it, post about it on social media, get it trending, get as many people to see it as possible!
let the idiots at the top know we WANT better representation in movies!
it's transparently obvious that they did zero promotion on this movie. my entire twitter timeline was people going "I've never heard of this until today?" plus a movie theater employee confirming they never saw any attempt to promote the movie:
After drowning in Encanto and Turning Red and Lightyear promos, and getting a decent amount of Raya promos - all films with prominent characters of color, including black women in Lightyear's case - it kind of seems like a specific slight to the one movie featuring an unmissable black/white interracial marriage and a biracial queer lead who, spoilers! actually gets an (also interracial!) romance on-screen.
I'm sure tumblr will be quick to attribute Disney's mistreatment of the film to the cute teen m/m subplot, but don't sleep on the interracial relationship aspect - it's not a fluke that the Respect for Marriage Act had to insist on protections for both same-sex marriage and interracial marriage. It's both! It's both.
Even looking to Disney's most famous interracial relationship that features a black person - namely Tiana and Naveen - they followed the same pattern as the movie Hitch famously did, by making the black character's love interest neither black nor white - black/black is seen as making the whole movie a "black movie," i.e. alienating white audiences, while black/white would be even more of a source of controversy than a black princess alone had been.
Now here we are, over a decade later, and Disney's still scared to promote a movie where one protagonist is in a black/white marriage and the other protagonist is that guy's biracial kid.
Radio ads, huh? You know... the one type of ad where you can't see what the characters look like.
The only place I’ve seen trailers for this was Youtube- a place where there’s still a “skip ads” button that I assume most people use- and those trailers very much did not give any information about the movie, when I actually let the ad play through. They seemed like just... clips of funny quips with no hint of what the plot was beyond what can be gleaned from the title, and not even a hint about who or what the characters’ relationships are or... any of the things that might tell me why I would want to watch the movie. I think I might’ve seen ONE trailer, months ago, that actually explained anything about the story at all?? And I watch a lot of stuff on Youtube, and get a lot of Disney ads on Youtube, and still only saw a very few ads for the movie. I saw ads for Lightyear approximately every three videos and yet have only seen ads for Strange Worlds... a dozen times since I saw the first one, which was the longer trailer that I only remembered seeing once I heard the movie was doing badly- I hadn’t seen the trailer enough times for it to be memorable, or to associate it with being the same movie as the weird clip show trailers I’d seen recently.
Essentially, even in the places they did actually promote the film visually, they did so very poorly, and they seem to have only promoted it visually in a place almost no one would actually watch the ad.
it’s almost that time of the year again, so you know what that means
You know, that’s fair
[id 1: a screenshot of the folgers incest commercial
id 2: the tumblr “This reblog was flagged as explicit” banner
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prayer circle for the person using a screen reader and has to hear the words “folgers incest commercial” out loud
I don’t know if I can contain my “The Muppet Christmas Carol has better costume design than most Oscar-nominated period dramas” rant until after Thanksgiving you guys, I have…so many Thoughts
Ok, buckle up kids.
Basically they did not have to go as hard as they did here. A Christmas Carol covers 60 years of fashion through flashbacks and they still manage to do nearly everything right.
I’m mainly going to be talking about the human actors here because it’s harder to judge Muppet costumes proportionally, but those costumes are still on point 90% of the time.
First off, A Christmas Carol was published in 1843, and anyone who knows me knows I love the absolute train wreck that was mid-19th century men’s fashion. Do you like plaid? GOOD, BECAUSE IT’S ALL PLAID. Mixed with whatever else your little Victorian heart desires, color schemes be damned. Go wild.
This of course means I absolutely love Fred.
This outfit is hideous and it is also 1000% on point.
We also get to see him in a different outfit the next day, along with his wife and some friends.
First off, MORE PLAID, good for you. Second, I can literally find near-identical images of both these ladies’ dresses just by googling “1843 fashion plate”, I shit you not. To the damned year.
A good part of the story involves travelling through Scrooge’s life, so we get to see the costumes varying wildly over the course of several scenes. This was a time when styles were changing rapidly, and you had to keep up if you wanted to be fashionable and keep up appearances. Fashion changed so fast that you can often pinpoint an outfit to within a year or two like the ones above.
First, we go to Scrooge’s childhood school. Given the timeline that’s normally put forward Michael Caine is definitely not old enough to play Scrooge, but ignore that for now. Let’s say if Scrooge is 75ish in 1843, it’s about 1783 when we see him leaving school and going off to be an apprentice. We actually see a few years of Little Scrooge fashion, but it’s fairly standard stuff. Scrooge doesn’t have a super childhood and his clothing is pretty plain, but it’s totally on par for the time. Why this haircut though? It makes me sad.
Then we jump ahead a few years and it’s about 1789. The whole group is attending the Fozziwig Christmas party and have gotten tarted up like they’re about the storm the Bastille, including Gonzo and Rizzo.
Again, they look absolutely ridiculous and it is absolutely accurate.
Now, this is super ostentatious and a lot of people would have considered it way too French for their taste in this time period. But it definitely did happen (I’ve seen stripey bubblegum pink menswear in person) and like. It’s the Muppets. So, Rule of Funny.
Scrooge and Belle are dressed way closer to average Londoners of the time, and it’s worth noting that both are supposed to be somewhat poor. Fozzy pays everyone well but Lil’ Scrooge is still a skinflint and Belle is just getting by. They’re both looking darn good but their clothes are much more understated than everyone else’s and maybe even on the verge of out of style.
Even their hair is pretty good. Including his. Also, holy shit does this guy look like he could be a young Michael Caine. Like, he doesn’t actually look how Michael Caine looked when he was that age, but if I didn’t know that I would totally buy it. Wow.
Then we jump ahead another ten to twelve years or so. This is the period I know the least about, especially when it comes to outerwear, so Jane Austen stans please comment. I don’t think it looks too bad though.
Here’s a couple of fashion plates from 1801 and 1803 for comparison.
I’d also like to point out that there is a wide variety of costumes based on social class that we get to see in the 1843 “present” that you wouldn’t really notice. So while the Scrooge family that’s doing alright for itself is wearing the latest looks, the rest of the town is not. A few of the women in the crowd dancing around Scrooge during “It Feels Like Christmas” are wearing dresses a couple of years out of date. Not too far, but you can see some looks from the tail end of the 1830s before women started shrink-wrapping their sleeves onto their arms.
You can see something similar to these outfits from 1839 in the crowd.
Contrast this with Mrs. Cratchit, who is living in poverty and has put on her absolute best dress for Christmas; it’s silk but it’s ten years out of style.
This would have been the height of fashion in the early-mid 1830s.
And that’s important for making a world look real. Fashion was super important back then, but even so average people weren’t necessarily chucking their clothing out every year to keep up with the latest fashions unless they could really afford to. You would get there eventually, but you don’t want everyone in your universe, rich and poor, to look like they just stepped out of the latest fashion magazine.
It’s absolutely astonishing to me that they put so much effort into this. I don’t tend to go down the rabbit hole of nitpicking historical costumes in movies as much as some, but when a movie that you never expected does it very right it just throws me for a loop.
Was everything perfect? No, I don’t think any movie is. But this is the damn Muppets. They were under no obligation to do this. Add to that the fact that it’s one of the more accurate renditions of the story, to the point of including a ton of the original dialogue, both through the characters and through the narration, and they just created a masterpiece.