moved;

Cartoon Network - Dimensional Bumper -  Steven Universe: Fusions

I’ve been seeing people make the OR14 => OR15 => OR15A => ORISHA connection and that is correct!

However.

Orisa’s name is more than that. Efi Oladele’s name is Yoruba, so it’s safe to assume that she is also Yoruba. 

In Orisa-Ifá, Yoruba religion, Òrìṣa are spirits that act as reflections of Olodumare, a manifestation of the Supreme God. Òrìṣa are in essence a smaller manifestation of that divinity. Some are malicious, some are benign.

Tamatoa !

light:

glows when they talk, dewy eyes, radiates with a blessing from the sun, calm in the air and goodness in their hearts

ocean: 

bodies full of stories, a will that ebbs and flows, lazy smiles, no real devotion to anything but existence itself, wordless lullabies

earth: 

minds like caverns, hands like stone, to hold or to hurt, heavy irises, earthquake tempers, stubborn desire for constant reconstruction

poison: 

Let me tell you what I know about this after living here for nearly thirty years.

This is a modern European country, the home of hot net startups, of Internet giants and (in some places, some very few places) the fastest broadband on Earth. People here live in this century, HARD.

Yet they get nervous about walking up that one hill close to their home after dark, because, you know… stuff happens there.

I know this because Peter and I live next to One Of Those Hills. There are people in our locality who wouldn’t go up our tiny country road on a dark night for love or money. What they make of us being so close to it for so long without harm coming to us, I have no idea. For all I know, it’s ascribed to us being writers (i.e. sort of bards) or mad folk (also in some kind of positive relationship with the Dangerous Side: don’t forget that the root word of “silly”, which used to be English for “crazy”, is the Old English _saelig_, “holy”…) or otherwise somehow weirdly exempt.

And you know what? I’m never going to ask. Because one does not discuss such things. Lest people from outside get the wrong idea about us, about normal modern Irish people living in normal modern Ireland.

You hear about this in whispers, though, in the pub, late at night, when all the tourists have gone to bed or gone away and no one but the locals are around. That hill. That curve in the road. That cold feeling you get in that one place. There is a deep understanding that there is something here older than us, that doesn’t care about us particularly, that (when we obtrude on it) is as willing to kick us in the slats as to let us pass by unmolested.

So you greet the magpies, singly or otherwise. You let stones in the middle of fields be. You apologize to the hawthorn bush when you’re pruning it. If you see something peculiar that cannot be otherwise explained, you are polite to it and pass onward about your business without further comment. And you don’t go on about it afterwards. Because it’s… unwise. Not that you personally know any examples of people who’ve screwed it up, of course. But you don’t meddle, and you learn when to look the other way, not to see, not to hear. Some things have just been here (for various values of “here” and various values of “been”) a lot longer than you have, and will be here still after you’re gone. That’s the way of it. When you hear the story about the idiots who for a prank chainsawed the centuries-old fairy tree a couple of counties over, you say – if asked by a neighbor – exactly what they’re probably thinking: “Poor fuckers. They’re doomed.” And if asked by anybody else you shake your head and say something anodyne about Kids These Days. (While thinking DOOMED all over again, because there are some particularly self-destructive ways to increase entropy.)

Meanwhile, in Iceland: the county council that carelessly knocked a known elf rock off a hillside when repairing a road has had to go dig the rock up from where it got buried during construction, because that road has had the most impossible damn stuff happen to it since that you ever heard of. Doubtless some nice person (maybe they’ll send out for the Priest of Thor or some such) will come along and do a little propitiatory sacrifice of some kind to the alfar, belatedly begging their pardon for the inconvenience.

They’re building the alfar a new temple, too.

Don’t go near big trees in the night

If you live on a farm, don’t look outside the windows at night

I have broken all these rules.

I’ve seen some shit.

If it sounds like your mom, but you didn’t realize your mom is home…. it’s not your mom. Promise.

One walked onto the porch once. Wasn’t fun. But they’re not super keen on guns. Typically bolt when they see one.

You think it’s the neighbor kids.

It’s not the neighbor kids.

Might sound like coyotes but you never really /see/ the coyotes but then wow that one cow was reaaaaaally fucked up this morning. The next night when you hear another one screaming you just turn the tv up a little more. Maybe fire a gun in the air but you don’t go after it. If it is coyotes then it’s probably a pack and you seriously don’t want to fuck with that and if it’s the other thing you seriously REALLY don’t want to fuck with that.

So in the south, especially near the mountains, you just go straight from your car to inside your house, draw your curtains and watch tv.

If you see lights in the fields just fucking leave it alone.

Eyes forward. Don’t be fucking stupid. Mind your own business. Call your neighbors and tell them to bring the cats in. There’s coyotes out. Some of them know. Most of them don’t.

Other than that everything’s a ghost and they died in the civil war. Literally all of everything else is just the civil war. We used to smell old perfume and pipe tobacco in the weeks leading up to the battle anniversaries.

We had ‘witches’ in the mountains (more like ghost-women who will snatch you up by making you wander in a daze around the forest like the Blair Witch before killing you or letting you back out into society but you’re… different). Or devils in springs or abandoned wells (don’t look too long into one or something will follow you). 

But we also had the cornfield demons. I’ve witnessed this many times. You’ll be in the passenger seat looking out the window and see red glowing eyes in the cornfield. No light shining in that direction. Just two red dots a few inches apart faintly glowing in a pitch black cornfield. They’re not the glow of deer eyes in the headlights. More like the embers of a dying fire. Sometimes, as you drive away, you’ll look out the back window or side mirror and you can see the eyes have moved to the edge of the corn field, still watching you. If you bring it up with the driver, they’ll call you paranoid, but grip the wheel a bit tighter and driver a little faster.

I just…yes. This. All of this. And then some.

You don’t have to understand it. You don’t have to believe in it.

Public land, private land, wild land, in town, in the middle of nowhere. Everywhere. Colorfully adorned trees, everywhere. Because spirits live there. We even have these little houses:

that are built on land we’ve developed, so the spirits have a place to stay. But if the little houses aren’t located in the right part of the land, the spirits get pissed off and people in the house get sick. There not a single home or establishment here that doesn’t have a spirit house somewhere on the property. And every morning, you must offer food and water to it, so the spirits have something to eat and drink. and these houses are never destroyed. When a new/better spirit house is brought over for the property, the old one is brought to the forest, so the spirits there might have a place to stay:

Glen Keane is a former Disney animator, who worked on The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Pocahontas, Tarzan and Tangled. His primary medium is traditional hand-drawn animation - even for the CG film Tangled, traditional animations were made to aid the style and look of the digital animation.

I’m not a fan of the ‘Disney’ art style, but I find Glen Keane’s work an inspiration for animation. None of his Disney characters are ‘cartoony’; i.e. zany / over the top cartoon style, something which I find cringeworthy - and although still characteristically ‘Disney’ they are incredibly lifelike and convincingly real.

Glen Keane focuses heavily on anatomy as an animator, which really shows. Especially Tarzan, who is physical in ever aspect of the character; muscular, always moving, and with the additional challenge of behaving like a great ape.

I think this is the most impressive aspect for me - how every figure or motion looks undeniably living and solid, even though it is made up of a few pencil lines. I also like how rough and sketchy his work is - it is quite reassuring as I personally find it hard to animate clean lines / shapes. 

Infamously this resulted in the clean up artists having quite a task in Beauty and the Beast. However in many ways, less is more, and it is the basic shapes and path of movement that really matters.

In Nephtali, he first-hand observed and drew a real ballerina performing various movements. Although the final animation is quite rough charcoal (there is a lot of line boiling) the constancy of anatomy never fails and the resulting dance is hypnotically realistic.