The Animation Meme

[erikred]

Confession (though not a revelation): even though I liked Anime when I was in high school, and even though I lived in Japan for six years, I generally don't dig Anime. Maybe it's because I long ago left the target demographic, but still.

Whew, that out of the way, here's that Animation meme that's been making the rounds, courtesy of therobbergirl:

Comments

[tagryn]

FYI, in case you haven't heard already:
http://www.slashfilm.com/2010/08/22/miyazaki-planning-sequel-to-porco-rosso/

[erikred]

Had not heard! Will be interesting to see how this goes.

[jonathankorman]

[x] Song of the South (1946)
We're an endangered species, man.

[erikred]

No doubt. You know, my brother had a book of Uncle Remus tales, with Disney characters throughout... and we lived in Virginia and Maryland at the time.

This is going to sound like the worst sort of naïveté, but I only realized a couple of years ago why the tar baby might strike people as racist. And I went to Berkeley, man!

[jonathankorman]

I think I had the same Uncle Remus book; it was part of a Disney collection which I vividly remember containing “The Sorcerer's Apprentice.”

The tar baby is a problem. It's a really useful metaphor, but it's just not OK any more; we need a substitute.

[erikred]

As a child, I never saw the tar baby as being at all representative of a human being; it was a baby, made of tar. Who, I thought, would ever confuse it for anything other than that?

Silly me. I forgot, or had to learn, that once you de-humanize humans, you can then see caricatures of them in the most unlikely places.

Agreed about the useful of the metaphor; agreed about its appropriateness being long past gone. I think we should try introducing the concept of arguing with natto: it's sticky and stinky and hard to get out of.