Dream in the abyssal sea of stars

Still one of the best animations I've ever done. Took just under a week and was equal parts fun and challenging. So here are some process passes! The full version had too many colors so I had to do some compression T0T

in Coco, Hector is a musician and song writer and he writes a song for his daughter. in the song, he asks his daughter to remember him while he's away and reassuring her that he's always with her, even if they're apart. the song is meant to be sang "simply, tenderly", as stated on the music sheet that Hector made. i can't watch the end scene in Coco without crying because the song is just that beautiful [Hector's version]

in the movie, Ernesto de la Cruz kills Hector and steals his songs due to his own greed. he turns the song into an upbeat, flashy performance, the meaning twisted into a romantic love song where Ernesto is saying goodbye to a lover [Ernesto's version]

what started out as a slow, sentimental song about love for a daughter was turned into something that lost complete meaning. now if we compare that to Stevie Wonder's song, Isn't She Lovely, and what Goose did with it, we see that the comparisons are strikingly similar

the funniest part is that this happens in Coco and is obviously meant to be a very very bad thing he did. not just because he stole the song, but also the song's original meaning. which, when you pour your love and soul out into a song, that's a really fucked up thing to do... which is also what Stevie Wonder did, considering he writes most of his own songs

even if you don’t like the show, if you care at all about indie animation, talk about jacknjellify.

talk about the fact it’s run by two asians.

talk about the fact they don’t mistreat people working on the show.

talk about the fact it pioneered an entire genre of indie animation.

talk about the fact that they don’t let horrible people work on their projects.

i’m so serious, stop praising TADC, a show ran by a company that DOES mistreat workers, and HAS let horrible people work on their things.

Dipper can be read either way, and the fact is that the character is written with the intention of being a relatively gender conforming cisgender boy. I encourage you to have your own queer headcanons so long as you respect the trans girls' right to have a contradictory one. There are people in the comments saying "Dipper is accidentally transfem coded" and like... I do not think that he is to the exclusion of other readings. Struggling with masculinity and worrying about being able to perform it is absolutely a thing that men (cis and trans) experience, because masculinity is a construct and real people have incredible depth and individuality.

Ralsei is a character who is being deliberately, implicitly transfem coded, but that has not been made, like, fully explicit. To take this character and go "what if tboy!" generally implies some combination of 1. poor literary analysis, and 2. a desire for this character to not be transfem. The act, in and of itself, of insisting that Ralsei is not transfem while you've played Chapter 5 is materially harmless, but it betrays a perspective on transfemininity that, frankly, i think you need to reconsider.

and uses its creative freedom given to it by funding backing an existing IP (silly video game) in order to explore these themes in a very not-ironic plot and writing style about little space blobs and also STILL has some of the best animated expression work i’ve ever seen.