Elves and Beasts and Lightsabers

In my opinion, Infinity Train is one of the best cartoons of the modern age.   Infinity Train is the long-awaited 2019 Cartoon Network series. The series started in 2019 and has three seasons. It was originally a short, but it was popular enough to be greenlit and made into a miniseries. The first season of Infinity Train follows Tulip, a young aspiring game programmer, her mercurial robotic sidekick, 1-1, and a talking Corgi, as she tries to navigate through this seemingly infinite train, each carriage carrying a different world with a puzzle to solve, and to get back home. She must also find out why there is a mysterious glowing number on her hand. After the original short, the show gained a fandom. An audience was drawn to the character potential and creative settings that the premise allows. The premise allows for a lot of magical and creative worlds for Tulip and her friends to venture and explore. It’s rife with potential, especially in regards to the mystery aspect of why Tu...

  The Owl House is an exceptionally fun and enjoyable show on Disney. This show follows Luz, an energetic fan of fantasy and magic genres, who is transported to another world. She finds herself, in the Boiling Isles, a dream come true despite the Isles’s horrors. She befriends the rebellious Witch Eda and her demon roommate King, and begins being trained as a witch by Eda. She meets some more people and goes to a magical school to further her learning. Hijinks occur. The show was created by Dana Terrace. Alex Hirsch works on the show, creator of and voice-actor for the acclaimed Gravity Falls Disney cartoon. It has similarities to that show, included feeling designed a bit for an older audience. It’s fair to say that the Owl House is a spiritual successor to Gravity Falls: an offbeat environment, and wacky characters juxtaposed against occasionally h o r r i f y i n g material. If one can get past the scary imagery in Gravity Falls and now the Owl House, they will be rewarded with ...

God I love this movie. I was just rewatching the movie and a wave of nostalgia flooded back and I remembered just how great it was. Going with bullet-points, because the points are too different from each other; miscellaneous thoughts. So many awesome moments! So many charming moments! So many funny moments! As many people say, the film is masterful in establishing the character of the robots without much dialogue. There’s so emotion in their expressions and movements. But also, the captain provides a good human contrast to our robot protagonists.   The malfunctioning robots that WALL-E first saves, and then return in the climax, are really fun (I had toys of most of them too, so I have an additional connection). There’s the perfume droid, the out-of-control massage droid, the fatal defibrillator droid, etc. And MO is just completely hilarious, probably the funniest character in the whole movie. I just love that this droid is so completely dedicated that it foll...

H.G. Wells 1897 science-fiction classic War of the Worlds has been adapted countless times. Most notable are the 1953 film, Spielberg’s 2005 version, Orson Welles’s 1938 radio play, and the latest stellar BBC rendition. It's about humanity being attacked by aliens; the archetypal story of the alien invasion plot so present and popular in modern media and science-fiction. It’s the first of its kind. Interestingly, every adaptation follows a different cast of characters; only the alien invasion and parts of the plot stay relatively consistent. The setting also changes, typically to be more relevant to contemporary life. Instead of Victorian England, it’s 1953 California or Edwardian England, for example. This is an unusual way to handle adaptations.  The story concludes with a twist, this being that, for all of their might and technological superiority, they are defeated at the film's end by Earth bacteria. The book is said to be somewhat of an allegory, with the stories...

The 2008 Star Wars: The Clone Wars Cartoon Network is an animated chapter of the Star Wars saga that has acquired a dedicated fanbase, and for good reason. The show is made with passion, and many elements are better done in the series than in the prequel trilogy themselves. The animated series has six seasons, with a seventh coming soon. It takes place in-between episodes 2-3, set around the Clone Wars, a rarely-seen event of the series that nonetheless has a huge impact, in the context of the Star Wars universe itself. What happens in the Clone Wars defines the political lore of the series. One benefit of being a show versus a movie means that there is an ensemble cast rather than a couple fixed protagonists. Some episodes can focus on Anakin and Ahsoka, others on Obi-Wan, others on other Jedi, others on troops, and others on politics. Because of this shifting perspective, the show can feel like an anthology. This keeps the show fresh, and it's interesting to see the different...

SAO or Sword Art Online is a popular and relatively well-known anime/light novel series. It's also terrible, as many people conclude. This conclusion is not misguided, given the series's paper-thin characterization, drunken plot where things just happen for the story, copious use of deus ex machina, and complete failure to achieve the potential of the concept. The series is about our insipid 'hero' Kirito, who is one of the ten-thousand players for a revolutionary virtual-reality gaming experience. But on the first day of gaming, they are trapped within the game by the creator for mysterious reasons. They must beat the game or die, as their real bodies (in hospital beds) wither in the real world each day they stay. It's a fantastic juxtaposition, the fantasy genre reimagined, and combined with sci-fi. A fantastical land that's actually digital, about the danger of the new age. It’s almost a cautionary tale of insidious agendas placed over unfathomably sophis...

Ask anyone what the scariest animated film they've seen is and they'll probably respond with Coraline. With good reason. Coraline is a 2002 novel written by Neil Gaiman, adapted into the 2009 animated film directed by Henry Selick. It's about a girl who recently moved into a new home, with busy parents, who finds a portal into another seemingly-perfect version of her world and family. But paradise has skeletons. He wrote this story initially for one daughter, but then finished it for another. Both the book and movie are great and there's a lot to talk about (which I think is important when talking about quality of media). Coraline is a juxtaposition of fears; of the supernatural and of the more realistic, earthly case of predators. These two (in some way, opposite (in that one is natural and the other is supernatural, both serving as two distinct parts of a whole)) components fuse together to create that anxious unease that doesn't go away, even when the film e...