I published my own theory about the end of KH3 before I played Re:Mind. I’m going back now to some of the worlds to take screenshots for #PS4Share. I really love the posters in Twilight Town and Scala ad Caelum. The latter is maybe one of the loneliest worlds in the entire series. The honor of that distinction used to belong to Traverse Town in KH. Traverse Town always felt like a dark ride, movie set, or the city inside of the SDF-1.
(1) Kingdom Hearts May Have Just Uncovered the Mystery Around The Darkness (GAMERANT)
(1a) Yelling About Kingdom Hearts 3 Re:mind (YouTube)
(2) Kingdom Hearts 3 ReMind – Data Young Xehanort No Damage (Critical Mode) (YouTube)
(3) Screenshot from Eden of the East. The detail is amazing (like the posters in Twilight Town and Scala ad Caelum)
(3a) Scala ad Caelum
(4) Speaking of detail…The Art of Cuphead is sitting on my desk.
The scan is from The Art of the Japanese Baseball Card by John Gall and Gary Engel.
Category Archives: Animation
Christmas 2018 Sabbatical (Principle of Connectivity)
This placeholder is a tradition now. It’s a space to capture all the randomness linked to my couple weeks of downtime. I’ll try to organize it near the end of my break.
Here’s a fun fact…my first post was on August 21, 2003 on Blogger. I’ve been posting for 15 years and 4 months (or 5,601 days / 800 weeks and 1 day).
Scan is from The Art of Miyazaki’s Spirited Away
(1) A couple of musical preludes:
(1a) Somewhere Only We Know / Kacey Musgraves (YouTube)
(1b) Nothing Else / Angus & Julia Stone (YouTube)
Something from the 30s and something from the 80s:
(1c) And The Angels Sing / Benny Goodman & Martha Tilton (YouTube)
(1d) Somebody’s Baby / Jackson Browne (YouTube)
(2) Flipping through The Art of Miyazaki’s Spirited Away and just realized how reverently he and Makoto Shinkai depict train stations. In Spirited Away it’s the entrance to the other world and in 5 Centimeters per Second it’s the scene of Takaki and Akari’s reunion.
(2a) Spirited Away 1
(2b) Spirited Away 2
(2c) Spirited Away 3
(3) Another musically inspired quote from Haruki Murakami:
“Thelonious Monk did not get those unusual chords as a result of logic or theory. He opened his eyes wide, and scooped those chords out from the darkness of his consciousness. What is important is not creating something out of nothing. What my friends need to do is discover the right thing from what is already there.”
(4) More from Murakami…
“The bell was never mine alone. It belongs to the place, to be shared by everyone.”
“Every so often, I found myself wondering about the plastic penguin. I had given it to the faceless man as payment for ferrying me across the river. There had been no alternative, given the swiftness of the current. I could only pray that little penguin was watching over Mariye from somewhere
—probably as it shuttled back and forth between presence and absence.”
Blogging
(5) I get this question quite often. Here are my top five indispensable blogging tools:
(5a) WordPress, (5b) Flickr, (5c) Directnic, (5d) TextPad, and (5e) Libib
Hockey
(6) Carolina Hurricanes left hockey fans conflicted with throwback Hartford Whalers night (CBS Sports)
I was just in Raleigh for a couple of days and saw the Hurricanes play the Arizona Coyotes.
(6a) Islanders score five unanswered goals, top Senators (YouTube)
(6b) Islanders ride Barzal hat trick to John Tavares smackdown (NY Post)
(6c) Scott Eansor’s hustle and determination led to a shorthanded… (Twitter)
I attended four hockey games over my sabbatical and my record was 4-0-0. The Bridgeport Sound Tigers defeated Springfield 5-3 on December 15th and Hartford 3-2 on December 27th. The Hartford Whalers (Hurricanes) defeated the Arizona Coyotes 3-0 on December 16th and the New York Islanders the Ottawa Senators 6-3 on December 28th.
Politics & Culture
(7) As the Old Faiths Collapse, the Greens, Social Justice Warriors, and Techno-Futurists Aim to Fill the Void (Daily Beast)
I saw this on Twitter but Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit) also linked to it as well.
(7a) Sweet Shutdown, Roll On (American Greatness)
“On the Left, the unattainably perfect (which is what Marxism is, in both its economic and cultural manifestations) must always be the mortal enemy of the good, and especially the good enough. The Left makes no allowances for human fallibility or imperfections; it attributes every failure to willful malfeasance, animated by “racism” or some other malevolence.”
(7b) How prophetic was C.S. Lewis? The Abolition of Man is mentioned in Sweet Shutdown, Roll On. I’ve quoted that book many times in previous posts, but perhaps nothing as much as: “But the man-moulders of the new age will be armed with the powers of an omnicompetent state and an irresistible scientific technique: we shall get at last a race of conditioners who really can cut out all posterity in what shape they please.”
Peter Kreeft is more succinct in C.S. Lewis for the Third Millennium:
“Our civilization’s educational elite, our opinion-molders (who have become much more powerful and much more philosophically radical since Lewis’ day in each of the three main mind-molding establishments: education, entertainment, and journalism) are producing a new species of man: ‘men without chests’, or hearts or consciences – i.e., ears to hear the Tao. In other words, our ‘experts’ are producing men and woman like themselves. They are reproducing not biologically but culturally, by a kind of cultural cloning.”
Mass Transit
(8) Absolutely Everything You Need To Know to Survive the L Train Shutdown (THRILLIST)
Weekend 432.1 (Lagoon Amusement Park)
(1) A couple of quotes from They Drew As They Pleased: The Hidden Art of Disney’s Musical Years (The 1940s – Part One) by Didier Ghez:
“While at Disney, she [Retta Scott] used to walk to work from time to time. Walt would sometimes see her and give her a ride the rest of the way to the Studio. Many years later she would confide that she saw Walt as a second father. That second father would chide her at times, like when her saw her feed the cats at the Burbank Studio. As a good Midwesterner, Walt feared that the well-fed felines would become less-effective as rodent deterrents.”
“In the late 1950s, David [Hall] established an indirect connection with Disney when he was hired by the former first vice president of Disneyland, C.V. Wood, to help design Freedomland, a theme park that opened in New York the following year.”
I’m coming back to the subject of C.V. Wood in another post. I’m also just reading about the extraordinary connection between Retta Scott and Nolan Bushnell.
Weekend 397.1
“This fantastic film…is like nothing that Mr. Disney has ever done before, although it glitters with reminiscent snatches from several of his previous cartoon films…Rather, it is a brilliant hodgepodge of Mr. Disney’s illustrative art – a literal spinwheel of image, color and music which tumbles at you with explosive surprise.” – Bosley Crowther, “THE SCREEN IN REVIEW; Make Mine Music! Animated Cartoon by Walt Disney, in Which Casey Once More Swings Bat, Arrives at Globe,” New York Times, April 22, 1946
Weekend 394.0
(1) Fall in Love With the World’s First Animated Dinosaur (Atlas Obscura)
(2) Oregon Legislature passes $15 bike tax (Bicycle Retailer)
(3) US State imposes “sin” tax of $15 on new bicycles (BikeBiz)
(4) Penn Station’s service changes and track work, explained (Curbed)
(5) The Blue-State Meltdown and the Collapse of the Chicago Model (American Enterprise Institute)
(6) Government debt: $500,000 per day problem (The Royal Gazette)
Weekend 379.0 (Ice is forming on the tips of my wings…)
(1) Stunning Photos of Trains Roaring Through Picturesque Landscapes (My Modern Met)
Some of these photographs remind me of the Yellow Train by Francois Roca.
(1a) Flashback: Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival
(2) Brightline Brings High-Speed Trains To Florida: The 125-mph Brightline trains will be the first privately run passenger service to debut in over 100 years (The Drive)
Channeling Henry Flagler?
*Scan is from The Art of Makoto Shinkai
Weekend 378.1 (East of the Sun, West of the Moon: Old Tales from the North)
Color studies for the Waltz of the Flowers. The study was done by Sylvia Holland.
“Sylvia was a jack-of-all-trades who could tackle any assignment with ease. During her time at Disney, she handled story direction, story research, script writing, art direction, scene timing, and more. Her artistic style ranged from the realistic to the ethereal and from the cartoony story ideas to majestic designs.”
On January 7th [377.0] I posted some concept art from Kay Nielsen. The piece was for a proposed Studio version of The Little Mermaid by Hans Christian Andersen.
The project was cancelled but the Studio used the concept art as inspiration for the movie more than forty years later. Here’s Didier Ghey in The Hidden Art of Disney’s Musical Years:
“Close to thirty-years later, directors John Musker and Ron Clements convinced Disney management to green-light an animated version of The Little Mermaid (1989). At that point, recalled Musker, ‘[Story artist Vance Gerry] brought to our attention the legendary illustrator Kay Nielsen and the drawings he did [in 1941] for a proposed animated version if Andersen’s fairy tale that were gathering dust in the Archives. Without Vance, we would have never known those fantastic drawing existed, drawings which helped inspire the handling of the storm sequence among other things.'”
The second DVD of the special edition of The Little Mermaid reveals the influence Kay’s concept art had on the future masterpiece. It’s a nice tribute to Nielsen, who joined the Studio in 1939 (an ominous year oft-referenced at Limestone), and who was beset by adversity during his short stints at the Studio (and in the United States). It’s also worth mentioning that he worked on my favorite sequences of Fantasia— Ave Maria and Night on Bald Mountain. Coincidentally, Fantasia remains one of my favorite movies [364.1].
Whenever I read a book (or article) on Disney I always cross reference Neal Gabler’s excellent and definitive tome on Walt, and while there was no reference to Kay, there was to Hans Christian Andersen in a very poignant passage. Here, on the occasion of Walt’s passing, is Gabler:
“It was here, guarded by a hedge of orange olivias and red azaleas, and hidden behind a holly tree and behind a white statue of Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid gazing contemplatively at invisible water, that Walt Disney seemed to have fulfilled his family’s destiny. He had escaped. And it was here that he fulfilled his own destiny, too, for which he had striven so mightily and restlessly all his life. He has passed beyond the afflictions of this world. Walt Disney had a last attained perfection.”
Scan and quote is from The Hidden Art of Disney’s Musical Years by Didier Ghey.