Post Any Cartoon Thought On Your Mind
- Thread starter Mike Wheeler
- Start date
Flint Lockwood's character design in the Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs cartoon is like, the duke of cheated angles. The original movie design for the character has a massive nose. But the cartoon doubles down by making the nose bigger.
To do this in a 2D animated show would fully obscure one of Flint's eyes from the show's primary side-on camera angle. So what do you do? Put both eyes on one side of the head. But sometimes Flint does face the screen, and if both his eyes were on one side of his head it would look weird in ways that even Sonic's side mouth doesn't. So okay, if he faces the screen then his eyes are instead placed normally. No one will notice outside of some nerds since he only has to face the screen sometimes and this show is pretty jumpy.
There's a scene where Flint Lockwood flicks back and forth between side-on and head-on because of course there is. The eye position cheat is very visible. I find it fascinating.
To do this in a 2D animated show would fully obscure one of Flint's eyes from the show's primary side-on camera angle. So what do you do? Put both eyes on one side of the head. But sometimes Flint does face the screen, and if both his eyes were on one side of his head it would look weird in ways that even Sonic's side mouth doesn't. So okay, if he faces the screen then his eyes are instead placed normally. No one will notice outside of some nerds since he only has to face the screen sometimes and this show is pretty jumpy.
There's a scene where Flint Lockwood flicks back and forth between side-on and head-on because of course there is. The eye position cheat is very visible. I find it fascinating.
Mega Man: Fully Charged is certainly a show. I should really just write a review. But some things annoy me. I'm going to specifically call out Ice Man here.
Ice Man's whole bit is that he is incapable of understanding metaphorical language. He interprets all statements literally, usually to ends one would consider harmful. For instance, the episode "Nice on Ice" has him hear the declaration "humans and robots should be inseparable", which was said in response to a robot separatist movement. Ice Man thinks this means, "I should freeze mixed pairs of humans and robots into ice cubes so that they can't be separated". Ice Man is also not one to question his own flawed interpretations. My beef with this is that whoever built Ice Man and set him loose upon the world with no restraints was really irresponsible. That's a major AI flaw which puts pretty much everyone at risk of being frozen. Surely he should have a handler like Mega Mini does for Mega Man to prevent mishaps, but of course he doesn't. Actually, we never see Ice Man's creator, because Mega Man: Fully Charged generally forgets that robots have to be built by people. Which is strange because of all the Mega Man series, Mega Man Classic is the one most cognizant of how people build robots and how the life of those creators can affect the robots' positions. Fully Charged, which is based directly on Classic, mostly ignores this, and the show's worldbuilding is worse for it.
Most Robot Masters in Fully Charged have some kind of negative personality trait they embody, which is meant to tie in to Mega Man's powers. See, when Mega Man copies the physical powers of a given Robot Master, he also copies the personality trait of that Robot Master. Which makes for really easy episode scripting of "Mega Man gets an arbitrary negative personality trait and learns to overcome it thanks to his friends". Rinse and repeat eight or so times. Ice Man has one of these episodes: "I.C.E (In Case of Emergency)". I hate it. Ice Man's personality trait is apparently his "literalness", in spite of that not being a personality trait. Other robots have "angry", "bashful", and "arrogant", which are personality traits and lend themselves much more sensibly to plotting. Misinterpreting everything is more of a quirk than anything else, and "I.C.E" struggles to get anything out of it. The jokes don't land, such as one where "Snap out of it!", referring to the Ice Man induced funk, is interpreted as a command for Mega Man to snap his fingers. They also run out of material that fits "literalness", leading to a joke where Mega Man hears a construction worker tell a truck to "back up" and somehow decides the statement is addressed to him. "Back up" means "go backward" so Mega Man is interpreting it correctly just somehow not realizing the instruction is not directed at him. The episode only recovers by pivoting from "literalness" to "lack of independent thought", which is workable but then raises the question of why the episode started with a dysfunctional focal point and keeps it up until the back half.
Ice Man's whole bit is that he is incapable of understanding metaphorical language. He interprets all statements literally, usually to ends one would consider harmful. For instance, the episode "Nice on Ice" has him hear the declaration "humans and robots should be inseparable", which was said in response to a robot separatist movement. Ice Man thinks this means, "I should freeze mixed pairs of humans and robots into ice cubes so that they can't be separated". Ice Man is also not one to question his own flawed interpretations. My beef with this is that whoever built Ice Man and set him loose upon the world with no restraints was really irresponsible. That's a major AI flaw which puts pretty much everyone at risk of being frozen. Surely he should have a handler like Mega Mini does for Mega Man to prevent mishaps, but of course he doesn't. Actually, we never see Ice Man's creator, because Mega Man: Fully Charged generally forgets that robots have to be built by people. Which is strange because of all the Mega Man series, Mega Man Classic is the one most cognizant of how people build robots and how the life of those creators can affect the robots' positions. Fully Charged, which is based directly on Classic, mostly ignores this, and the show's worldbuilding is worse for it.
Most Robot Masters in Fully Charged have some kind of negative personality trait they embody, which is meant to tie in to Mega Man's powers. See, when Mega Man copies the physical powers of a given Robot Master, he also copies the personality trait of that Robot Master. Which makes for really easy episode scripting of "Mega Man gets an arbitrary negative personality trait and learns to overcome it thanks to his friends". Rinse and repeat eight or so times. Ice Man has one of these episodes: "I.C.E (In Case of Emergency)". I hate it. Ice Man's personality trait is apparently his "literalness", in spite of that not being a personality trait. Other robots have "angry", "bashful", and "arrogant", which are personality traits and lend themselves much more sensibly to plotting. Misinterpreting everything is more of a quirk than anything else, and "I.C.E" struggles to get anything out of it. The jokes don't land, such as one where "Snap out of it!", referring to the Ice Man induced funk, is interpreted as a command for Mega Man to snap his fingers. They also run out of material that fits "literalness", leading to a joke where Mega Man hears a construction worker tell a truck to "back up" and somehow decides the statement is addressed to him. "Back up" means "go backward" so Mega Man is interpreting it correctly just somehow not realizing the instruction is not directed at him. The episode only recovers by pivoting from "literalness" to "lack of independent thought", which is workable but then raises the question of why the episode started with a dysfunctional focal point and keeps it up until the back half.