A little depressed after the holiday season, or at least after that last over-analyzation? Well, My Super-Charged Life has the cure for the red-and-green blues, courtesy of Disney’s underperforming animated feature, Bolt.
For instance: after spending over 11 hours around your family members, do you feel like committing something ending in -cide? Here’s the fourth lesson from Disney movie Bolt to improve your life:
4. We need our friends and loved ones even if they are a ragtag bunch
In the movie, BOLT made friends with an alley cat named Mittens and a hilarious hamster named Rhino. They both were unlikely allies, but they helped BOLT achieve his goals.
In the same way, we need others to help us along our way toward success. Yes, our group may look a little different than what we imagined, but that doesn’t matter. We all have our baggage that we bring into relationships.
The key is to recognize and value the relationships we have. These people have committed themselves to being our friends and loved ones. I have had to fallback on my family and friends more than once so, I can testify that good relationships are essential.
Sounds like good New Year’s Resolution fodder to me.
Improve Your Life: Things I Love From The Disney Movie BOLT
> Catena Ex Situ
As I type, I’m glancing at some grotesque thing on ABC, about the Grinch and Christmas, in which humans interact in brotherhood with a variety of monstrous looking other species, and a little girl has a tender relationship with an unsettlingly hideous but sensitive and kind-hearted being called the Grinch, and everyone loves each other. This is not our society celebrating the beautiful holiday of Christmas. This is the Liberal Controllers of our society carefully teaching children an unnatural and dangerous lie that they would never believe unless they were carefully taught. How many whites will militate against vitally necessary immigration restrictions in the decades to come, how many young white females will be raped and murdered by nonwhites in the decades to come, because of the message of trusting and loving racial aliens that programs like this implant in them?
As an holiday bonus, one can click the link below to read an additional Who-sized comment about the Shrek movies.
Undercover Black Man: Lawrence Auster has a Question
> Catena Ex Situ
Again, the staff here can’t be accused of non cogitatio ex arcae. A great over-analyzation is a great over-analyzation, no matter what the subject matter or prevailing zeitgeist. So, when we boinged across this really fine ars ludorum analyzation of the sexagenarian board game Candy Land, we were compelled to share:
To begin with, let us view Candy Land as a mathematical entity. It is very nearly a Markov chain, a stochastic process in which, given the current state, future states are independent of past states. (It would be a pure Markov chain if the deck were shuffled after each play; instead, it is a crippled Markov chain coupled to a push-pop stack.) As such, it is a metaphorical representation of the fundamental ideology of the United States; the past is no constraint on the future, and each individual should strive resolutely for personal advance despite whatever the past may hold. The child born in a log cabin may achieve the presidency, an immigrant boy who grows up in the slums of Brooklyn may become a real-estate magnate, an Ivy-educated scion of wealth may wind up on a bread line, and a double green will speed you to the fore. Though there are winners and losers, initial conditions are no determinant of outcome in the freedom of America. The subtext, of course, may be that success and failure is entirely random and has nothing to do with individual initiative and hard work, a concept alien to the Platonic ideal of the American dream, but perhaps a more accurate representation of reality than the Horatio Alger myth.
Any analyzation which uses the term “stochastic” gets 2 bonus points. The analyzation itself gets even better, but you’ll have to click on the link to read the rest:
We are thankful here at J. Cart. Overanal.: thankful that a picture is worth a thousand words.
Take, exempli gratia, this still from A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving (1973 C.E.):
Two immediate items of note:
Linus Van Pelt, acting in his customary role as spiritual leader, is sitting at the head of the table.
Franklin, the sole African-American member of the Peanuts ensemble, is sitting all by himself on one side of the table.
Here is a passable video of the sequence, including anightmarish Guaraldi-seasoned tête-à-tête between Snoopy and a beach chair:
The scene in question is, in fact, somewhat questionable itself: the numbers of chairs and servings fluctuate throughout, giving the meal a disorientating Kubrickian quality. This produces in the scene a sense of unease and tension which reflects the viewers’ discomfort at the casual racism on display. Indeed, Franklin is seated in the malicious beach chair, which humiliatingly places him at an eye level below that of the others.
Though this segregation is not limited to racial issues only: Marcie, though eccentric and possessing of an ambiguous sexuality, is caucasian enough to be allowed to remain close to the rest, but is still seated at the end towards the left side of the table. Linus chooses to seat Marcie as far away from himself as possible, separated from the larger group by the dog. Indeed, the beagle is deemed a more fit companion than any heterodox humans. (Though, perhaps Snoopy is allowed to sit with the elite in due respect for his cooking prowess. It is also noted that Snoopy, in an act of defiant compassion, serves Marcie and Franklin first.) Furthermore, to extrapolate, the only characters exempted which could reasonably join the table next are the obsessive-compulsive Schroeder, the filthy Pig Pen, or the unloved and sadistic Lucy, who, if arriving late, would be forced to sit in one of the chairs next to Franklin and Marcie. Thus, the entire left side of the table would be relegated to odd, unhygienic misfits and belligerent, racial outcasts.
The characters are not evil: Peppermint Patty shows genuine remorse for embarrassing and bullying Charlie Brown, and Linus is often a beacon of compassion and temperance. But the point is made: the virus of casual discrimination is insidious and unaware, and can manifest itself at an early age.
Nota bene: this troubling issue uncovered via Super Punch >Catena Ex Situ
Michael Barrier has posted an unpublished appreciation of Carl Barks and his creation, Uncle Scrooge McDuck. For those of you playing at home who are unfamiliar with Carl Barks, his Uncle Scrooge comics were eventual the basis/inspiration for the animated TV show DuckTales. Mr. Barrier goes into some detail about the creation, motivation, and evolution of this now-classic character.
Snippet:
As Barks put it in a 1974 interview, “He had lots of money, but he wasn’t a criminal about it.”Of course, a real billionaire who had made himself rich from Montana copper wouldn’t have plunged into the gold fields alone 16 years later. There may be echoes of Andrew Carnegie in Scrooge’s Scottish surname, but the real Carnegie, unlike the fictional duck, hired other people to do such work for him as soon as he could. What Barks was doing, with his young audience in mind and with remarkable thoroughness and ingenuity, was making the reasons for Scrooge’s attachment to his wealth as concrete as possible. If Scrooge carried gold out of the Klondike himself, then of course he’d care about it.
Many DuckTales episodes were almost verbatim from Barks’ comics, so most of the Uncle Scrooge insights apply to the show, too. That should make those J. Cart. Overanal. purists in the readership rest easier.
Cold on the heels of our last article, another one claiming Bugs Bunny for the Jews. The ancient and semi-Yiddish Forward newspaper printed a column last year discussing the concern:
Can we find the rabbi in the rabbit? As far as I can tell, Bugs never uses a word of Yiddish, but he does have a yidisher kop. He has the gift of gab as well as a fine command of Acme products. Poor Elmer — was there ever a Jew named Elmer? — never stands a chance. Of course, it is well known that Bugs comes from a long line of tricksters. He is an Eastern Anansi, an American Hershele Ostropoler. He’s even distantly related to Isaac Babel’s Odessa gangster, Benya Krik.
Here’s the first in the previously-alluded-to series of videogame over-analyzations. For those purists out there: fret not. We don’t plan on doing these all that often. Our primary focus is and will always be Cartoon Over-Analyzations.
Unfortunately, the closest any of the staff has gotten to playing BioShock is: about five years ago, one of us got half-way through System Shock 2. Accursed monkeys! Along with rave reviews, BioShock attracted a flurry of discussion pertaining to Objectivist elements subtly and not-so-subtly within. Busy game site Kotaku presented an excellent article in early 2008 which discussed the pertinent themes primarily through interviews with the president of the Ayn Rand Institute, Yaron Brook, and the game’s designer, Ken Levine.
“It seems to me that [Levine has] misrepresented what Ayn Rand believes and her ideals beyond objectivism,” [Brook] said. “He’s setting it up to fail. He believes, based on what I’ve read, that any system that is absolutist is ultimately going to lead to disastrous effect. Any system of black and white, any system of ultimate morality. In many cases that true. But I think what lessens the game is that misinterpretation of objectivism.”
Et cetera. Would you kindly check it out.
No Gods or Kings: Objectivism in BioShock >Catena Ex Situ
Seth McFarlane’s intermittently amusing Family Guy is a bit of a controversy around the offices here. On one hand, it constantly uses repetitious non sequitur shock gags to fool semi-stoned brains into thinking they are watching something funny. On the other hand, it is terribly, lazily animated. A Manichean dilemma!
Via Cartoon Brew, we found this nicely thorough piece by Kyle Evans analyzing the style and content of Family Guy, with extra emphasis towards Mr. McFarlane’s Cavalcade of Comedy’s Super Mario Bros.parody. It’s like Mr. Evans was able to extract a beautiful geode of pure reason from our collective consciousness. (i.e. we agree with everything he says) Here’s a vivisection:
Also exactly the same is the character designs, with Mario looking like a cross between Brian and Peter, while Princess Peach looks like Lois in a pink dress. Apparently Seth never learned to draw from any other perspective than a three quarter front on. This insistence on keeping all characters at this angle creates an offputting effect when you have characters conversing – which is the majority of Seth’s work; endless, mind numbing conversations. Having two characters side by side on a slight angle talking to one another creates this bizarre effect as though they’re staring just past one another - there’s absolutely no sense that these characters are truly engaged in conversation. It doesn’t help that you hardly ever see a non-talking character animated or that these conversations are carried entirely by the moving of the lips.
The full article has diagrams and audio-visual aids. Interesting, even if you disagree.
There’s a delightful article by Adam Gopnik in the latest (September 22, 2008) issue of The New Yorker about some controversies surrounding the Babar series. Here’s a clip:
In the past few decades, a series of critics on the left, most notably the Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman, have indicted Babar in the course of a surprisingly resilient and hydra-headed argument about the uses of imagery and the subtleties of imperialist propaganda. Babar, such interpreters have insisted, is an allegory of French colonization, as seen by the complacent colonizers: the naked African natives, represented by the “good” elephants, are brought to the imperial capital, acculturated, and then sent back to their homeland on a civilizing mission. The elephants that have assimilated to the ways of the metropolis dominate those which have not.
Fascinating. As is the rest of the article, which among other things touches on: a wholly different controversy regarding the fate of Babar’s mother, the occupations of animals, nationalistic representations of order and disorder in children’s literature, and Matisse.
Over at Jim Hill Media, the eponymous webmaster received this e-mail query:
Can you please help me win a bet at work? A co-worker of mine says that WALL-E makes a brief cameo appearance in “Ratatouille.” More importantly, this guy has bet me $100 that I’ll never ever be able to find that robot in this movie. I’ve watch my kid’s “Ratatouille” DVD three times now and haven’t seen hide nor hair of WALL-E yet. So if I offer you a percentage of my winnings, will you please tell me where I can find this robot in the movie?
J.H. has done more than answer this guy’s question: he has written an exhaustive article detailing almost all of the Pixar self-references he could find. Some of them are so hard to spot, you need an expert like Mr. Hill to do the legwork for you. So, click over to brush up on your Pixar minutia and picayune intelligence. It’s how I would impress my co-workers if they would ever talk to me.
A Special “Where’s WALL-E” Edition of Why For? >Catena Ex Situ
