Western Animation - Discuss American, Canadian, and European cartoons here (or just bitch about wokeshit, I guess)

Unpopular as fuck opinion, but I think that viewing white men as the default and everyone else as "others" led to this problem in the first place.
Your opinion is unpopular because its extremely easy to debunk, and we've seen it paroted by unscrouplus actors over and over again to the point where one has to wonder what is in the mind of the person making it.

Yes, I'm sure all the fiction from africa and asia views white men as the default. White men are the default in western fiction because the west is white. Black men are the default in african fiction because africa is black. Asian men are the default in asian fiction because surprise, asia is asian.

For some reason its only whites that have to share, weird isn't it? Nobody ever went to asian or black stories and said "YOU NEED TO INCLUDE MORE WHITES!"

Really gets the noggin joggin how only white people in fiction are a problem but nobody else appears to be. Asian fiction for asians, african fiction for blacks, western fiction for everyone!

As for the "men" part, its because 99.9% of explorers, adventurers, daredevils and risktakers throughout history have been and are men. Fantasy is usually adventure, which usually fits male characters more.

Romance novels (including romance fantasy) and stories mostly star women, but again, nobody ever went to romance writers and tried to tell them that its a big problem that women being the default is a problem there.

Again, really gets the noggin jogging, don't it? White men are the problem, but nobody else is. I wonder what the motivation behind that is.

No. You still have to write good stories, no matter what your protagonist looks like. On the other hand, people bitching about women and nonwhites being in fantasy settings and that their existences should be "justified" is retarded. The world has billions of women and nonwhites so who really gives a shit if Magical Space Kingdom #7 has them. (Historical and cultural fiction is obviously different)
This comment is hillarious.

Your answer to "Why have writers stopped giving a shit?" is "Who gives a shit?" amazing, great job bro, you solved it!

No. It absolutely needs to be justified. Everything in a story ideally needs to be justified. You can have a good story without justifying everything, but the more glaring contradictions you fail to reasonably explain the worse the story gets, and no story was ever made worse by adding more internal consistency to it instead of taking it away.

"No matter what your protagonist looks like", this is also retarded and gives away that you have no idea what makes a good or a bad story.

Your protagonist is part of the world they live in. If your protagonist is interchangable, then they're badly writen because that means they aren't informed by the world and they don't inform the world around them, inherently making the story shittier.

Lord of the rings is still studied nearly a century after it was writen because its one of the most coherent and consistent worlds ever put to pen and paper. Everything in it has an explenation and if you find an element intresting, there's several tomes worth of lore for you to delve into. The material rewards you for engaging with it instead of punishing you.

When the elements in a story work toogether, the story is stronger for it. When the elements are like pieces from a completely different puzzle, the story suffers.

At the end of the day, the default state of humanity is homogeneity (And no, trade ports did not look like downtown new york, 99.9% of people died near where they lived, the concept of mass migration is a very recent phenomenon and if you think people are racist today I got a big surprise for you) and the default risk takers are men by nature.

These are facts of life, not things the KKK came up with, if your story breaks away from them, you need to have an actual reason or explenation for it, or your story is objectively worse because then there's a gaping hole in your world.

You know why the women in alien and terminator work whereas most modern fantasy fails?

Because alien's themes are a perversion of motherhood and pregnancy which is more pertinent to a female protagonist as a direct opposite to the alien, and because terminator is about protecting your offspring, and "mother bear" is an expression for a reason.

When you offer an actual reason as to why things are the way they are the stories become solid and reward you for thinking about them instead of punishing you for doing so.

"Men with tits" aren't good protagonists. The protagonists in these movies aren't women because someone rolled a die, they're women because its thematically coherent and works with the narrative and you could not have replaced them with a man. Having half your police force, or half your military or half your fighters be women requires an ironclad explenation if you aspire for your story to be anything other than comedy or a popcorn flick because the consequences of that descision have knockon effects for your world.

Having a turbo warmongering militaristic expansionist empire where 50% of the warriors in the frontlines are women would make one wonder how they haven't died out from lack of farmers and soldiers.

But Nah, bro white people and especially men are evil, just put more women and darkies in it, trust me, it'll work this time, the next lord of the rings is right around the corner.

(Historical and cultural fiction is obviously different)

90% of settings who shoehorn women and nonwhites do it in medieval european fantasy settings. Nobody has done a medieval zulu fantasy where 50% of the poputation is whites.
 
Ruby Gillman: Teenage Kraken.
The black guy looks more like Squidward then the kraken does.
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I feel like everyone behind HTTYD was in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation because they made the mistake of interacting with the fandom. Before the third movie came out, everyone was dreading the ending because everyone knew that Hiccup and Toothless would have to separate. But there were fans who didn't want them to be separated at all, think some even threatened harm whether to themselves (lulz) or to the director (not lulz) should that have happened. So I think this was DreamWorks wanting to have their cake and eat it too and play up to the audience's (fanbase's) emotions to get the ugly crying that they wanted while still having a feel-good happy ending. (Though if you ask me, they should've saved this for later instead of having it as a tacked-on epilogue for the movie, but I get why they did it.

I think HTTYD works as a trilogy with the supplemental material being generally pretty good (Riders of Berk really-and-truly was good), but that first film is super special. Bless Dean DeBlois for sticking with the series all the way through, yet Chris Sanders should've just remained with him.
That's the issue though, they didn't have to seperate. Nothing about the previous series or movies points toward or makes sense to end in seperation.

They put themselves in a bind because they suffered from gross incompetence regardless of the fandom. There is a steady decline in writting quality starting from the second movie that culminates in the third movie having more plotholes than swiss cheese and mangling the characters and world worse than game of thrones did.

Like I said, the problem is that the director wanted to duct tape the ending from a completely seperate franchise onto his without taking into consideration whether or not they were compatible to one another.

It works as a trilogy in the same way game of thrones works as a series.

I agree that the first movie, the christmas special and the first series are true kino, the second movie is mediocre at best and if the third movie was lost to history it would arguably improve the franchise as a whole because it only exists to tear the other movies and series down for a cheap emotional hit.

In this way its worse than game of thrones because that was an accident, while this was on purpose.
 
Speaking of which, here's another indie pilot made by a storyboard artist for Disney TVA
This looks like a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles parody about April going off on her owm you would see WITHIN a cartoon, that the cartoon characters would think is cringe...

Human teen girl with 4 male reptile friends who eat pizza donuts and beat up bad guys with Asian Martial arts, except it tries way to hard to be funny and hip to a nauseating degree.
It doesn't seem like a smart 'subversion' of the tmnt either, especially not in a way that's worth an entire show.

Even without being a blatant TMNT knockoff, there's nothing here that makes it actually a fun show for kids with the main character being this whiny and boring.
Teen girl staring longingly at normal people is not something that interests kids, especially when she herself isn't even a magical girl or something.

And the pilot is also bad because it doesn't show how she will find female friends or how bad she will be at it or how much she will interact with the gators from the title after leaving.
That's like a Fairly Odd Parents pilot that ends the second after Timmy gets his Fairy God Parents and you don't actually get to see them at work, we don't even get to see the main premise???
Should've just started with the first failed attempt at friendship, instead of her painting her nails (especially when they flashback to it like a minute later...), and THEN show the backstory leading up to it starting with her being late to the heist.

It just seems like extremely boring 'drama', when it isn't really dramatic, the action is lame, it's not funny, and the premise is very boring.
It's definitely not like American Dragon, Kim Possible, My Life as a Teenage Robot and other cartoons where comedy, drama and action were blended quite well, but it even seems lame compared to cartoons like Braceface and Proud Family that were just about teen girls going to school...
 
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And even modern day adult animation is mostly shit having to have the same mundane shit as Simpsons, Family Guy, Futurama, American Dad, South Park, Robot Chicken or Rick & Morty.

Oh, and react me with a :disagree: all you want, but even modern anime is also shit.

EDIT: Yep, I knew people were going to react to this post negatively, but I've said my piece. Animation is never for everyone and this includes anime as well, whether you agree or disagree.
 
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One show that was very underrated and has largely been forgotten about was Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot. It was based on a single-issue comic by Frank Miller and Jeff Darrow, so the show expanded upon it a lot in terms of world-building. The show debuted in the late-90's and very early-2000's.

Anyway, the show is about a US military mech called "Big Guy" which is piloted by a human pilot, and "Rusty" an experimental AI robot in the form of a preteen boy. They go about their adventures thwarting various bad guys and monsters, while facing challenges inside the military. This ranges from orders handed down from on high from a douchey military contractor marketer called Donovan and his pet talking monkey, to espionage attempts from the Legion Ex Machina, a mysterious group of androids that are trying to overthrow humanity in favor of rule by machines.

The show's plotlines are very well-written, and it is amazing at what it was able to get away with in terms of violence for a children's show. The animation is also great, and all of the technology has a sort of retro-1950's sci-fi pulp style. Unfortunately, the show only lasted for two seasons and then it faded away into obscurity.

 
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Other stop motion flicks like "Isle of Dogs"
god that movie was so good until the retard with the afro got a spotlight for no good reason

-snip relating to the protagonist race argument-
I agree with you dude but calm down a bit
This shit is indeed stupid and your points are in fact correct but yelling them at the opposition isn't going to convince them of that and complaining about how white men are the only ones being targeted doesn't belong in an otherwise well-constructed rebuttal
 
One show that was very underrated and has largely been forgotten about was Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot. It was based on a single-issue comic by Frank Miller and Jeff Darrow, so the show expanded upon it a lot in terms of world-building. The show debuted in the late-90's and very early-2000's.

Anyway, the show is about a US military mech called "Big Guy" which is piloted by a human pilot, and "Rusty" an experimental AI robot in the form of a preteen boy. They go about their adventures thwarting various bad guys and monsters, while facing challenges inside the military. This ranges from orders handed down from on high from a douchey military contractor marketer called Donovan and his pet talking monkey, to espionage attempts from the Legion Ex Machina, a mysterious group of androids that are trying to overthrow humanity in favor of rule by machines.

The show's plotlines are very well-written, and it is amazing at what it was able to get away with in terms of violence for a children's show. The animation is also great, and all of the technology has a sort of retro-1950's sci-fi pulp style. Unfortunately, the show only lasted for two seasons and then it faded away into obscurity.

That was pretty cool.

Not my kind of show but that was good.
 
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I agree with you dude but calm down a bit
This shit is indeed stupid and your points are in fact correct but yelling them at the opposition isn't going to convince them of that and
I don't get what part of my comment comes across as I'm yelling. Sure its long, but that's about it.

complaining about how white men are the only ones being targeted doesn't belong in an otherwise well-constructed rebuttal
He straight up says that the problem is that western fantasy viewed "white men" as the default at the very start of his comment.
 
One show that was very underrated and has largely been forgotten about was Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot. It was based on a single-issue comic by Frank Miller and Jeff Darrow, so the show expanded upon it a lot in terms of world-building. The show debuted in the late-90's and very early-2000's.

Anyway, the show is about a US military mech called "Big Guy" which is piloted by a human pilot, and "Rusty" an experimental AI robot in the form of a preteen boy. They go about their adventures thwarting various bad guys and monsters, while facing challenges inside the military. This ranges from orders handed down from on high from a douchey military contractor marketer called Donovan and his pet talking monkey, to espionage attempts from the Legion Ex Machina, a mysterious group of androids that are trying to overthrow humanity in favor of rule by machines.

The show's plotlines are very well-written, and it is amazing at what it was able to get away with in terms of violence for a children's show. The animation is also great, and all of the technology has a sort of retro-1950's sci-fi pulp style. Unfortunately, the show only lasted for two seasons and then it faded away into obscurity.

I remember this show. It even had a running plotline where the humans had to pretend that Big Guy was another sentient robot since Rusty was not that advanced if he knew the truth, he would basically have a mental breakdown.
 
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I remember this show. It even had a running plotline where the humans had to pretend that Big Guy was another sentient robot him since Rusty was not that advanced if he knew the truth, he would basically have a mental breakdown.
The US military was also embarassed over the fact that their first attempt at creating a true AI was a failure, so that is why the kept the fact that the Big Guy was just a glorified mech with a pilot hidden from the public at large.
 
>creatives can make their characters look however they want and the purpose of stories are to be interesting and well written
>some American writers will make their stories racially diverse to reflect the area they were raised in (i.e NY or LA or whatever)
>writers who live in more homogenous countries like Japan, Russia, or Nigeria will not feel obligated to due so because of said homogeny
>people are individuals and can have any personality and varied outlooks on life and the characters people write should reflect this
>"this oppression of the white man will not stand!"

Okay
"Men with tits" aren't good protagonists. The protagonists in these movies aren't women because someone rolled a die, they're women because its thematically coherent and works with the narrative and you could not have replaced them with a man. Having half your police force, or half your military or half your fighters be women requires an ironclad explenation if you aspire for your story to be anything other than comedy or a popcorn flick because the consequences of that descision have knockon effects for your world.

Having a turbo warmongering militaristic expansionist empire where 50% of the warriors in the frontlines are women would make one wonder how they haven't died out from lack of farmers and soldiers.
We have female cops and female soldiers in real life so why can't they be in fiction? There are logical reasons for why women aren't on the front lines. Men are stronger than women, obviously and are needed to maintain the homefront, but women would excel in stealth offensive roles like assassins or snipers.
I never understood the "men with tits" thing. Unless she's a troon, then she is a woman. She may be brash, arrogant, aggressive and have short hair, but she is still a woman.
 
I never understood the "men with tits" thing. Unless she's a troon, then she is a woman. She may be brash, arrogant, aggressive and have short hair, but she is still a woman.
I think the issue @Oilspill Battery is hitting upon is that there's literally NO traits of femininity in these women. Being brash, arrogant, aggressive, and having dyke-hair is all they have because they're STRONK and INDEPENDUNT. Hence, they're just men in tits.
 
The black guy looks more like Squidward then the kraken does.View attachment 5058340
OK NOW I'm starting to see what you guys are getting by not giving the DreamWorks kraken movie any hope. I've mostly avoided details about the movie baring the Troon va but....yeahhhh this looks like Two steps way back after the dazzling wonder that was puss in boots last wish.

Like the troon flag in spider verse 2. This is the story of one stepforward Two steps back. You think western animation will pick up amd be good again it goes and releases crap like this
 
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