Old Pixar vs New Pixar

As I’ve been reading and writing more over time, I’ve found it necessary to communicate increasingly specific and abstract concepts and emotions— sort of like a painter finding a need to use increasingly more specific colors. (Does that happen? Not much of a painter.) In this case, there’s something about this new crop of distasteful children’s films— not all of them Pixar, I’ll grant you (that ‘Encanto’ movie, which numerous Colombians on twitter hilariously mocked for not featuring, like, tons of roving drug cartels, also fits in the ‘ugly magic kid’ genre— obviously named so largely just for the art style) which the emotions of disinterest and disgust don’t really do justice. It’s the exact opposite of being ‘moved’— the negative. Maybe it has nothing to do with a lack of creativity, or capitalism, or whatever, and all the new movies are totally great, and I’m just fucking old. I haven’t seen them! But in my purely superficial, cynical, lazy, paid-to-be-negative-about-banal-shit-online opinion, I see them, and some creative, whimsy-filled emotional organ inside me just goes flaccid, or maybe crawls back up inside itself.

This is a roundabout way of saying; the visual metaphor or tears literally moving in reverse and retracting themselves back up into their eyeballs is both descriptive, and weirdly funny (I hope).

Am I crazy to think that the movies are more interesting when they focused on more abstracted beings and their somewhat more metaphorical foibles, rather than the same direct-to-real-life struggles than any child or young adult will inevitably face, magic or not? I guess if you view them from a purely utilitarian sense, as emotional teaching tools or helpful parables for a child’s development, the ‘ugly magic kid’ model is superior than the former, but… fuck you! I’m an adult, and a dickhead, at that!

While searching for the scorpion and the frog, I was surprised to find how many adaptions already seem aimed at children. Thanks for undercutting my joke, asshats. I mean christ, look at some of these!

(This one is the best)

Nothing says “for kids” like a murder-suicide.

My old roommate loved referencing this parable. I recall he described the Anthony Weiner scandal as “a real scorpion-frog situation”. I guess in this metaphor the stinger is his cock?