*something clever*

happy 20 year anniversary of Neil banging out the tunes!

though every rat is special, it's a wonderful and unusual thing for their accomplishments to be remembered and cherished by so many people so many years later. we're all so fortunate to know about the rat who banged out the tunes!

thank you to all the people who sent me reference photos of their beloved rats for this piece!!! credits under the cut!

Like, I think "Finding Nemo" is a great film. And people will say, "It's not JUST a film about cartoon fish! It's also about parent-child relationships and suffocating overprotectiveness and learning to let your child be independent!" Which is true. I think that's a very true statement. That IS the emotional core of the movie.

But I also think "Finding Nemo" is great and works as a film because it also respects and explores the setting in a straightforward way. It's also a movie about how genuinely scary it would be to be a small fish in a big, wonderous, terrifying ocean. It's asking, "What would it be like to be a fish going through this experience?"

The original world of "Toy Story" is compelling and delightfully disturbing, because it's asking, "What would it be like to be a toy?" And "A Bug's Life" is similarly asking, "What might it be like to be a bug?" And "Monsters Inc." is asking, "Why might monsters scare children at night?" All of these movies have strong emotional cores and allegories and all that jazz, but they're also engaging with these speculative prompts in a forthright way.

I'm reminded of a joke post that I saw about "The Hobbit" in which Bilbo says, "Ohhh, I get it! The dragon is a metaphor for greed!" And Thorin replies, "Bilbo, it's a real dragon and it's in my house." Like, there IS a lot about Smaug that's neat thematically, for sure, but also... for the fantasy setting to work, you do have to keep in mind the dangerous, logistical realities of a big, fire-breathing, man-eating lizard, which Tolkien obviously very much does.

Like, I saw "Elemental" and I kind of thought... the movie was maybe too caught up in being a metaphor for interracial relationships, possibly at the expense of the speculative worldbuilding. I don't think the movie engaged enough with the fact that marginalized fire-person Ember lives in a city full of water features that could apparently injure or even kill her. I think that the movie pulled a lot of its punches in regards to structural racism.

I thought that "Onward" was particularly disinterested in its own setting and the logic of it. Most of the fantasy elements were gags. It's a "normal" generic modern setting with speculative elements pasted on top, rather than a new world with the speculative elements integrated in unique ways that changed the way that people did things, you know? A society disregarding clearly very powerful magic (and all magical history) in favour of mildly more convenient lightbulbs doesn't actually make sense in-universe. It's, idk, the story forcibly simplifying itself just to call modern society lazy and incurious, which isn't an interesting statement.

I don't remember "Luca" and "Soul" very well, so I won't really comment on them here. I liked "Turning Red" well enough and I think its specific Chinese-Canadian setting worked fine for it. And I think "Inside Out" generally works as well, because it's specifically about how messy it inwardly feels to be even a "normal" preteen / teenage girl; a lot is smoothed over by it all being inside Riley's head. "Lightyear" was... I don't know how to get started on that mess, so I will not start.

you punch nazis!

It's not the story we want from our distant past, that even during the end of the last Ice Age, when the obstacles to survival were many and great, the greatest hazard might already be: other people.

But scientists also found something else.

There's another person' blood across Ötzi's shoulders. Someone was leaning on him, and he was partly carrying that person, for some distance on the day or day before he died.

So as well as the presence of a killer— a rival, a fighter, a goat rustler or a hunter-gatherer resisting the invasion of stranger herders from the east — there is the presence of a comrade.

Kin, friend or (likely) both.

Maybe it was the person who'd made the tattoos that mark Ötzi's arthritic joints, for magic or acupressure or herbal treatment.

Maybe it was a loved one Ötzi was willing to die for, or who died for him.

His ending was painful, but he spent part of his final days in fellowship.