Tag Archives: nyicff

Humble Adventure: Nahuel and the Magic Book

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This film is from the 2021 virtual New York International Children’s Film Festival.

Nahuel and the Magic Book is a 2020 Chilean-Brazilian co-produced animated film whose down-to-Earth yet wondrous approach to fantasy I really enjoyed. In certain ways, it reminds me of The Lord of the Rings, despite the markedly different setting of a more contemporary real-world setting. 

Nahuel is a young boy afraid of the sea, which causes problems for his fisherman father. Worried that he’ll never be of help to his dad and will always be seen as a screw-up, he desperately wants to overcome his phobia. When he discovers the Levisterio, a magic book said to be the most powerful of all, he steals it in order to use the bravery spell contained within. However, bringing the book out into the open makes it a prime target for an evil sorcerer who has been seeking the tome for a long time.

Likening anything to The Lord of the Rings might seem trite and a little meaningless, but the reason I make the comparison is because of the humble qualities of each story’s protagonist. Frodo is characterized as being no one special, especially not compared to the figures who accompany him on his quest, but it’s that lack of remarkableness that makes him suitable to deliver the One Ring to Mount Doom. Similarly, Nahuel’s ambitions are anything but grand—overcome a fear of the sea and help his father—but that’s also what makes him the right bearer of the Levisterio. Where others would abuse its near-limitless powers, his desires are from a simpler and kinder place. Anybody can imagine themselves as Nahuel, and his story and characterization are no lesser for it. 

I don’t know much about South American folklore and religion other than that magic and witchcraft are such a part of the region that they’re even incorporated into the way Christianity is practiced. From that perspective, the way the magical and fantastical are portrayed in Nahuel and the Magic Book feels very natural and almost effortless—which is usually a sign that a great deal of effort was involved. There is a sense that magic is indeed far removed from Nahuel’s normal life, but is also just there and ever-present if only one looks. 

Although I’m not a kid, I feel that Nahuel and the Magic Book has real potential to resonate with young viewers. That worry of being a disappointment to one’s parents is also a powerful and relatable fear for children as well as adults, and the world it portrays is one where love shines through even when things get dark and scary.

Trials of Identity: Calamity

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This film was part of the 2021 virtual New York International Children’s Film Festival.

Calamity is a 2020 French-Danish animated film that tells the fictionalized childhood story of the real Martha Jane Cannary, showing how she took her first steps toward becoming the renowned Calamity Jane. Having been a fan of director Rémi Chayé’s previous film, Long Way North, I had fairly high expectations that Calamity easily surpasses.

Martha Jane Cannary is traveling with her family as part of a wagon train to Oregon, where they hope to find land and a better life. While not much is expected of her because of her gender, Martha Jane believes she’s capable of doing more. When her father is severely hurt trying to rope a runaway horse, Martha Jane takes it upon herself to learn the skills necessary to keep their wagon going, but her fellow travelers (including her own dad and sisters) don’t take so kindly to her trying to behave like a man. 

I only know the barest details about Calamity Jane (and mostly from a 1990s cartoon), but I know she has a place in the United States’ cultural legacy as a feminist icon: someone who could keep up with the boys and who is as much a legend of the wild west as Billy the Kid or Buffalo Bill. Within the context of the film itself, although I can’t relate to her specific circumstances, Martha Jane’s struggle with the expectations foisted upon her by a society with very rigid gender roles, really hit me deep inside. Martha Jane lives in a world that tries to box her into a certain way of being, a world that would rather keep her tied down even if letting her free would be beneficial. When others see Martha Jane wearing pants, they are shocked and outraged. This might seem like a relic of the past, but that view persisted deep into the 20th century—a reminder that the fight for equality is ongoing. 

The film is visually rich and stunning, giving a sense of the outdoors that is beautiful yet expresses the terror that an unknown trailer to an unseen land can bring about. Everything animates naturally yet not confined by excessive realism, with particularly impressive detail given to the high-paced movement of horses and the mischief of Martha Jane alike. I’m especially fond of Martha Jane’s thick and powerful eyebrows, as they alone seem to stand in defiance of what everyone else tells her is “proper,” and the rest of her character proceeds beautifully from that rebelliousness. 

Sometimes a film with a similarly empowering theme will mean well, but seems to get too caught up in the messaging at the expense of execution. However, Calamity avoids that pitfall in a most impressive fashion. The ups and downs experienced by Martha Jane as she tries to learn and master all the skills that aren’t “supposed” to be hers feels genuine—the right amount of grit combined with a lack of experience and a desire to achieve more. It makes her strides and her challenges all the more poignant, and by the time the film is over, the path she marked for herself feels like it can lead to greatness.

Valuable Lessons Learned: The Legend of Hei

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This is a review of a film in the 2021 New York International Children’s Film Festival. This year’s virtual festival technically ended on the 14th, but there’s still time to buy tickets or an all-access pass—a $100 pass extends the viewing time to March 21st.

I’m by no means an expert on Chinese film, animated or otherwise. However, when I’ve watched animated features from China at the 2021 New York International Children’s Film Festival, I’ve often gotten the sense that they were trying to prove something, e.g. China’s ability to do mainstream animation all self-contained within itself, and not as outsourced work from other countries. It’s a situation where that desire can end up interfering with the pacing of a film, as if creators are producing demo reels disguised as movies. 

The Legend of Hei (2019) largely does not fall into this trap. It’s a visually impressive work whose splendor in the form of large environmental backgrounds and quick-paced supernatural action ultimately does not end up sabotaging its own narrative effectiveness. 

The main character of the story is a young spirit resembling a cat named Hei (or Luo Xiaohei), who winds up away from its home and who ends up getting picked up by another spirit named Storm’s End (Fengxi), who offers Hei a new home. When a human “enforcer” of the Spirit Guild named Infinity (Wuxian) shows up, Hei ends up being taken by Infinity. Forced to travel together with his captor, Hei learns that notions of “good” and “bad” are not as simple as he assumes. For much of the film, it can be kind of hard to tell where exactly everything is going, especially because it’s easy to confuse the many similarly handsome-yet-stoic characters for one another, but it all ends in a satisfying manner.

While watching, I kept thinking, “This really has a Line/Naver Webtoon aesthetic.” It’s a somewhat broad generalization, but the flat colors and rounded designs make for a look that resembles many of the comics on the online platform. Combined with numerous brief appearances by characters who seem like they’re supposed to be recognizable to a knowledgeable audience, and I began to wonder if the film was based on some existing work. I later found out that it was originally a flash animation by Chinese creator MTJJ and, indeed, a later webtoon. The fact that The Legend of Hei has such humble origins lends credence to my feeling that this film had some real passion behind it that keeps it honest.

As mentioned, the fight choreography is downright amazing, and is one of the film’s best features. The action is never confusing or feels bogged down by too much flourish or not enough, and everyone moves with a sense of purpose. Everything flows very well, and if you’re someone who enjoys having lots of battling from beginning to end, it really doesn’t disappoint. More importantly, the fighting also doesn’t come at the expense of the narrative, with the two weaved together well.

The NYICFF’s showing of The Legend of Hei is dubbed in English, and the English names provided above are all used within the film itself, with the exception of Hei. It’s an interesting choice, to give the viewers the understanding that the characters’ names mean something, as media from China and Japan will often do the opposite for English translations—how many people know that “Naruto” means “Maelstrom”? Also worth nothing is that the English cast features many Asian voice actors, an action that flies in the face of the marginalization of Asians in Hollywood and mainstream entertainment media. As for the acting itself, it was overall decent, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that listening to the original Chinese voices would convey noticeably different impressions of the characters despite not being able to hear them until later. When I later looked up the Chinese trailer, it confirmed my suspicion. There’s something about the delivery that makes them almost feel like different people, whether it’s Hei himself sounding more Steven Universe-ish in English than kitten-like, or how the delivery among the more stoic characters seems to convey a greater emotionality in Chinese.

I also found out that there’s a Japanese dub version, and they really pulled out the big guns for that voice cast: Hanazawa Kana, Miyano Mamoru, and Sakurai Takahiro all headline the film in Japan, and I suspect it makes for another interesting and slightly different experience.

While I don’t think The Legend of Hei is the total package, the film has a lot of merits that bring it all together into a satisfying and rewarding experience. It’s the best Chinese animated film I’ve seen yet, and it comes across as a work that, rather than trying to prove the worth of Chinese animation, wants to tell a story all on its own. The Legend of Hei exudes a confidence that avoids the pitfalls of arrogance and desperation, resulting in a strong and accessible work.

No Face!!: My Dad Is a Heel Wrestler

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Attending the New York International Children’s Film Festival has been something of a tradition for myself, and many of my reviews over the years on this blog have come from it. Due to COVID-19, NYICFF 2021 is a virtual festival, with individual tickets and two all-access passes available at extremely reasonable prices. 

As someone who loves cartoons, my usual focus at NYICFF  is on animated features including but not limited to those from Japan. For whatever reason, there’s no anime this year, but we’ve got the next best thing: a live-action film about Japanese pro wrestling. My Dad is a Heel Wrestler stars actual New Japan Pro-Wrestling veteran megastar Tanahashi Hiroshi as a washed-up wrestler named Omura Takashi whose son Shota discovers that Takashi is a “bad guy” called Cockroach Mask. The film was previously temporarily available on NJPW’s own streaming service, but I had missed my chance to see it then, so I’m glad that NYICFF brought me this opportunity.

My Dad Is a Heel Wrestler is based on a Japanese children’s picture book, and by amazing coincidence, I actually happened upon a copy while at Bookoff years ago before the film was announced. Both versions follow the same basic premise described above, but the difference between 32 pages of large text with illustrations and a feature-length movie inevitably means changes and additions. In this case, the film is fleshed out with a greater exploration of both Takashi and Shota’s feelings about Takashi’s role as Cockroach Mask. For Takashi, his passion for wrestling is juxtaposed with the knowledge that his heelish gimmick is the only way he can continue his career. Shota meanwhile has to reconcile his image of his father as a caring man with the scheming and cheating he sees in the ring. 

A larger cast of characters—Takashi’s wife Shiori, Shota’s classmates, Takashi’s fellow wrestlers, and a hardcore fangirl who lives and breathes pro wrestling—also help to establish a greater world. The fangirl, Michiko, speaks to the fact that Japanese wrestling has managed to pull in a serious female following in the past ten years (known affectionately as pujoshi), and her love of Cockroach Mask/Omura is a reflection of Tanahashi’s own popularity among the ladies.

The film does a great job of showing Shota’s complex emotions from his perspective as a small child, and how Takashi struggles with the desire to both be a dad his son can be proud of while doing what he can to extend his career in spite of chronic injuries. Tanahashi playing an older wrestler is naturally in his wheelhouse, so this role isn’t exactly challenging his acting range, but he pulls the character off quite convincingly. 

One of the main messages of the film, as stated by Michiko, is that pro wrestling is about more than winning and losing. Much like that one scene in Wreck-It Ralph, it’s about Shota realizing that just because Takashi is a bad guy “doesn’t mean he’s a bad guy.” Curiously, however, in the world of My Dad Is a Heel Wrestler, the gimmicks are fake but the actual wrestling is real—a kind of semi-kayfabe where wins and losses are legitimate but the wrestlers’ personas themselves are primarily performance. The film uses a lot of other NJPW stars to fill out the ranks, including Okada Kazuchika as the world champion, and the feeling I get is that a film with so many actual wrestlers wants to maintain some semblance of the “realness” of pro wrestling even in a fully acknowledged fictional setting like a movie. Speaking of wrestlers, I was actually most impressed by the acting of Taguchi Ryusuke, who plays Cockroach Mask’s henchman Blue Bottle. Taguchi in recent years has been more of a comedy wrestler in NJPW, and his ability to be serious and silly is a great asset to this film.

While the film uses a lot of wrestling terminology, My Dad Is a Heel Wrestler is a very accessible film that has a lot of interesting things to say about many different topics—from aging, to doing what it takes to keep a dream alive, to how theatricality is in itself a valuable quality that brings people excitement. From beginning to end, it feels like a production where everyone involved both respect the subject matter of pro wrestling and want to tell a heartfelt story to which anyone can relate.

Sun Guts: Ogiue Maniax Status Update for March 2021

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Here we are: roughly a year since coronavirus basically forced the world to change course. I seriously could not have imagined all that has happened since, and it feels like ten years have passed in the span of one. I’m losing my grip on time a bit, but this makes me wonder if doing these monthly blog updates actually helps in some way. I can see the days and weeks go by.

In happier news, the Blocker Corps IV Machine Blaster crowdfund to digitally archive the series was successful! I talked about it in a post to drum up support, and it actually didn’t make it until literally the 11th hour by crossing the finish line with only 11 minutes left in the all-or-nothing campaign. It’s not going to be on anyone’s list of best anime ever, but knowing I helped to keep an anime alive makes me feel good.

After all, I know what it’s like to have the support of others. Thank you to March’s Patreon sponsors:

General:

Ko Ransom

Diogo Prado

Alex

Dsy

Sue Hopkins fans:

Serxeid

Hato Kenjirou fans:

Elizabeth

Yajima Mirei fans:

Machi-Kurada

Blog highlights from February:

God Mars and the Legacy of BL Fan Shipping

A look at the giant robot anime that is foundational to the fujoshi fandom in Japan. Gundam Wing before Gundam Wing, you might say.

That’s Ruff, Buddy—Nichijou: My Ordinary Life

My long overdue review of one of the funniest manga ever.

Otakon Needs Our Help

My favorite anime convention might not survive another year due to the Coronavirus. Consider supporting them!

Hashikko Ensemble

Chapter 37 has the most intense musical performance yet.

Closing

The 2021 New York International Children’s Film Festival starts this Friday! Unlike previous years, it’s a virtual festival this time around, and the $40 two-week all-acesss pass is an incredibly good deal. If you live in the US, it might be worth checking out.

Also, how about that Pyra and Mythra in Smash Bros. Ultimate, huh? I’m thinking about writing something in regards to fanservice in character designs, hopefully providing a nuanced perspective.

Stay safe, get vaccinated. I wish you good health.

Imaginative, Inspiring: Next Door Spy

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This review is part of coverage for the 2018 New York International Children’s Film Festival.

Danish animated film Next Door Spy by director Karla von Bengston is a cute story of growing up and fighting to have the confidence to believe in oneself and one’s passions. Couched in a “kid in new town” setting with a splash of film noir, Next Door Spy is consistently witty and inspiring.

Next Door Spy follows the appropriately named Agatha Christine (AC for short), a girl with a love of mysteries who’s constantly playing detective to her mother’s reluctance. Her family has just recently moved to a new town in Denmark for a fresh start, but while AC sees it as the perfect opportunity to scope out new crimes, her mom (a police officer) just wants AC to be a little more “normal.” When AC learns that a local grocery has been a victim of shoplifting, she gets to work—and her prime suspect is an aloof skater boy.

The film is mostly down to earth, but is inter-spliced with black and white noir renditions of AC acting out her detective dreams. It’s an entertaining juxtaposition particularly because AC’s true love for investigation is on display. Her cherished PI’s hat and coat, along with her various makeshift gadgets, are just the right degree of “obtainable fantasy” that can inspire kids to do more yet still feel like movie magic. The mystery and non-mystery elements weave together cohesively to make all of the characters, even the adults, feel relatable.

Next Door Spy succeeds as a family film because it’s great for adults and older children looking back and younger children looking forward. Just about everyone can benefit from having a bit of AC in them.

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Really Funny, Really Real: The Big Bad Fox and Other Tales

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This review is part of coverage for the 2018 New York International Children’s Film Festival.

As much as fans of animation might sometimes want cartoons to be treated as merely humorous entertainment for children, there’s something downright impressive with a work that works as kids’ comedy and sticks the landing. Benjamin Renner and Patrick Imbert’s The Big Bad Fox and Other Tales succeeds so well that to talk about it as a “funny cartoon” seems inadequate—yet it’s the perfect description.

Broken up into three segments, The Big Bad Fox and Other Tales is an anthology centered around a farm and the Looney Tunes-style animals that inhabit it. The first segment sees a pig, along with his well-meaning but incompetent duck and rabbit friends, try to deliver a human baby to her parents. The second features the ironically titular “big bad fox,” who ends up having to raise the very chicks he’s trying to eat. The third is a Christmas special, where pig, duck, and rabbit try to fill in for Santa Claus and deliver presents to the world. All of them are loosely connected, presented as if all the animals are performing a stage play for the audience for comedic effect.

What makes The Big Bad Fox and Other Tales work so well is that the humor is very much a part of the narrative, giving the jokes a proper sense of continuity. In many other cartoons, humor consists of a series of jokes (sometimes references, sometimes not) that come one right after another. If they’re too reliant on single punchlines or winks and nods, the whole thing starts to feel less like an experience and more a joke-delivery system. But the film sets up, executes, and nails both its major and minor gags, even throwing in some sensibly heart-warming moments in the process. Contributing to the levity of the entire experience is the art style of the film, with varying widths in the line work and a bright palette that looks as much picture-book as it does comic strip.

My favorite segment is The Big Bad Fox, and I assume that the creators thought the same if they decided to feature it in the title. There’s a constant turning of expectations centered around the fox’s relationship to his “children,” and the sight of three adorable little chicks fully believing they’re apex predators never stopped being entertaining. It’s sort of like if the Foghorn Leghorn cartoons featuring the chickenhawk were taken up a notch and then given a bigger heart.

After the film’s screening, the creator Benjamin Renner was interviewed. He described the origins of the film as comics he used to draw for his family as Christmas and birthday presents, often about how the animals lost the “real” presents along the way. While answering the audience’s questions (all from kids), my big takeaway is that Renner provides a strong example of how the ideas and inspirations of one’s childhood can still thrive and inspire in adult, professional life.

Faithfulness Without Adherence: White Fang (2018)

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This review is part of coverage for the 2018 New York International Children’s Film Festival.

The winding story of a wild wolf-dog that endures multiple hardships and discovers civilization, Jack London’s White Fang is a vivid and compelling adventure practically made for film. But adapting London is a challenge in this age, given his starkly racist views—they may not have been prevalent in this particular novel, but they still permeate his legacy. Director Alexandre Espigare’s 2018 White Fang is a visually rich 3DCG-animated feature-length interpretation aims for a spiritually faithful yet more sensitive version of London’s narrative to notable effect.

I want to be clear that I did not go into the film with a clear memory of the novel or any previous adaptations, and at first sought to enjoy it strictly as a children’s animated movie. In that respect, it succeeds. The animation, resembling somewhere between an oil painting and wood carvings, is consistently beautiful. Any visual hiccups are fairly minor and do not detract from the overall presentation. The subject matter is prone to violence, but the violence is given context and is presented respectfully without glorifying carnage.

But when looking back at the original novel and comparing, it’s clear that this film takes great pains to update the narrative to emphasize the positive aspects of cultural exchange without making it a one-way street. White Fang’s time in the wild with its mother shows a strong familial bond that does not fade away as it does in London’s book. Human characters are shown in all lights, but it is largely kindness and good will that stay with White Fang. At the same time, White Fang does not “progress” from “savage” to “civilized,” but harnesses aspects of both his origins in the wild and his experience with other species in order to survive.

Overall, the 2018 White Fang is a smart and respectful update to the original that adapts to the times. It’s more culturally considerate, with a message that soundly goes against the modernist/enlightenment push that can be interpreted from the novel. Yet it’s still a thrilling and moving narrative that embraces the awe and terror of nature and humankind alike, never faltering as a classic story.

Faces and Feet: Lu Over the Wall

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Director and animator Yuasa Masaaki has gone from being the darling of animation connoisseurs to mainstream success story thanks to the success of Devilman Crybaby. In many ways, that series embodies what Yuasa is best known for—experimental animation that moves and undulates with a dream-like quality. His 2017 film (and the subject of this review), Lu Over the Wall, tackles a different yet challenging audience in its own right: children.

Kai is a middle schooler living in Hinashi, a small fishing village known for its sheer lack of sunlight. A DJing hobbyist, his online videos are discovered by two classmates—Kunio and Yuuho—who try to get him to join their band. Uninterested at first, Kai discovers that practicing with them will give him the opportunity to explore the merfolk legends surrounding the town, which results in the three meeting a real live music-loving mermaid named Lu. What ensues is a popping, lyrical exploration of the way dreams and curiosity affect generations of families, as well as the power of discovering when to uphold traditions, and when to move on from them.

There is a very human quality to the movie, especially in the way that Kai’s mood swings are never explicitly explained. When he transitions from deadpan introspection to energetically enthusiastic, is it that the legends he’s been reading about are real? Or is it that Yuuho and Kai are providing him the peer emotional support he never realized he needed? The characters shift and evolve in subtle and realistic ways. Growth doesn’t come as one continuous wave, but in ebbs and flows that only truly stand out when stepping back to view an individual (or a community) as a whole. Perhaps it might be better to compare their development with music—at times fast, at times slow, but with a sense of rhythm that says something is going to happen, and you’d better be ready for it.

As expected, the animation quality itself is big on expressiveness. Characters move and emote constantly, their motions feeling akin to a more subdued and subtle Ping Pong: The Animation. That is, until the dancing starts or the action gets moving. At that point, it veers somewhere between Yuasa as seen in Kaiba and the classic cartoons of Tex Avery. While his non-standard aesthetic might garner worry that it would not fly with kids, this wasn’t the case at all. Laughs and voiced indicators of understanding could be heard throughout the young audience viewing the film. As impressive as the visuals were, they never eclipsed the story nor the theme of small-town dreams.

While it’s easy to assume that his form of twisted and eerie animation could only work on an audience of refined animation experts, Lu Over the Wall shows how Yuasa’s style is more versatile than first impressions give. It’s uplifting, thought-provoking, and still just plain fun.

[NYICFF 2017] Driven by Dreams: Ancien and the Magic Tablet / Napping Princess

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“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

There are few quotes in science fiction more famous than Arthur C. Clarke’s above. While the idea largely has to do with how science fiction extrapolates the possibilities that can be envisioned from scientific development, Kamiyama Kenji’s new animated film, Ancien and the Magic Tablet, plays with the notion in an interesting way, using a blend of dreams and reality to fuse technology and magic together throughout its narrative.

As a warning, while I’ve done my best to avoid spoilers, the fact that this film is full of surprises only five minutes in means I can’t avoid talking about at least a few of the twists.

Ancien and the Magic Tablet begins with the story of a princess of a kingdom, Ancien, who is trapped in a cage above the royal castle. Her kingdom, known as Heartland, is ruled by her wise father, who is responsible for spreading the use of automobiles throughout their land. The reason Ancien is locked away is because she has a mysterious power to bring inanimate objects to life, including dolls and cars, an ability that would turn all of Heartland upside down.

…Except that it’s all a dream and the actual story is about a girl named Morikawa Kokone, a perpetually sleepy Japanese high schooler living in Okuyama Prefecture in the “far flung” future year of 2020—shortly before the Tokyo Olympics. Living with her widowed father, who works as a mechanic and programs self-driving car AI for the elderly residents of their town, Kokone learns that her father (or rather his computer tablet) holds valuable secrets worth a lot to some very important people. Kokone ends up on an adventure to Tokyo to get to the bottom of all this, all while she keeps having dreams about Ancien and Heartland—a world based on stories her father told her as a child—that mysteriously play out in reality as well.

One of the main thrusts of Ancien and the Magic Tablet (known in Japan as Hirune Hime: Shiranai Watashi no Monogatari, or “Napping Princess: The Story of the Unknown Me”) is a treatise on the benefits of self-driving cars. Ancien and her tablet are overt parallels to the AI technology that Kokone’s father possesses, and it’s portrayed largely in terms of its benefits. In regards to this stance, the film impresses me because it doesn’t try to remain neutral or passive in terms of the beliefs it’s trying to convey on such a controversial topic.

Given the writer and director Kamiyama’s previous works (Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, Eden of the East), a certain level of love and faith in technology is expected. While Ancien could do more to address the repercussions self-driving cars could have on the global economy, I don’t hold it against the movie too much because it does emphasize certain benefits that don’t come up as often. For example, it can be argued that self-driving cars aren’t only about taking away control, they can be about ensuring safety because of loss of control or disability. A more nuanced approach would’ve been interesting in its own way, but I can live without it at least for one film.

Going back to Arthur C. Clarke, the dream world of Ancien, particularly the “magic tablet’s” ability to “bring things to life,” are basically a fairy tale metaphor for real-world technology. However, because the events in Ancien’s and Kokone’s sides of the story mirror each other and even seem to influence each other, it’s an ongoing mystery as to how the two narratives are related. Is it somehow possible that Kokone is tapping into an alternate reality? The film keeps you wondering right until the very end, and the ultimate explanation for the relationship between Ancien and Kokone’s worlds is actually very satisfying and makes absolute sense.

Ancien and the Magic Tablet feels like the start of a conversation rather than a definitive conclusion. I hope we continue to see its themes in future animated films.

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