Our design intern Ann is learning some animation with us, and considering she created AND animated this character of herself, we’d say she’s off to an amazing start! Check out her website and other work here. Go Ann!
The people who work and intern at Thought Café have apparently collected every Chocolate Frog Card, and have skills beyond what should be possible.
Baby’s First OTP Feels: a Tale of Regret
Ahahah oh man an amazing thing that actually happened???
NO Baby girl you are too young for this life and pain.Her mom thinks it’s hilarious and gave me permission to make a comic out of it? It’s awesome that she has all the Disney movies at her house, and they didn’t know about Miyazaki before! Now they do and watch it with her!
I let her watch Totoro weeks after that! She got really into it too!
me
OK, so this is awesome, but it also highlights something really important about different types of narrative. Namely:
Disney princess stories are constructed, from the outset, around the idea that the leads end up together. Even as little kids, we know that Eric and Ariel are Meant To Happen, and so when it eventually does, it feels preordained – but not necessarily earned, because their union was never in doubt.
Miyazaki films, on the other hand, are built along different lines. Even when a particular character relationship forms the basis of the narrative, there are no narrative signposts along the way to indicate that the two characters are meant to end up together, nothing to reassure us that they’ll get a happy ending. So when they do, it doesn’t feel preordained in the way that Disney happy endings do – but it does feel earned, because there was doubt about what would happen.
And that difference, I think, is what this little girl here is responding to. She’s grown up learning the narrative cues that Princess And Prince End Up Together, and so she isn’t really surprised when it happens. But when she watched Ponyo, even though she didn’t know what was going to happen, she still formed an opinion about what she wanted to happen – and so when it did, when Ponyo says she loves Sosuke at the end, her emotional investment in their relationship was much higher, because she’d been feeling uncertain about the outcome.
Which is, in a nutshell, why some romance-oriented stories work for me, and some just don’t. If the love feels preordained, like in Disney, then the obviousness of it often means I immediately lose interest and investment, but if there’s some ambiguity – if I’m made to feel that I can’t preempt the ending just by knowing what kind of story it is – then I’m much more likely to have FEELINGS about it. And I just wish that more people understood the distinction, so that they didn’t lapse into writing the Disney version as a default without really understanding what that means to the larger narrative – not because it’s bad, per se, but because it often seems to be used unconsciously rather than to a specific purpose.
I read it in much the same way, but particularly with how the difference in narrative structure lends itself to developing empathy and emotional intelligence.
Mosogourmet Strawberry Men ~ [x]
omg
OH SWEET BIRD JESUS
There was a question on my pathogenesis final today about an innate immune system effector present in mice and not humans, and I couldn’t remember the answer, so I drew a picture of a mouse and wrote “THANK CHEESES IT’S ONLY WORTH TWO POINTS!”
Emma “drawing of a mouse” Mills, PhD.
This is why we don’t just need diverse books, but we need people to realize that these diverse books are books for everyone. The above is just one of the many examples I can give of the misguided dismissal of my books. The librarian who was surprised how well my “ethnic” book went over with all the students. The father who was surprised that his son loved “your Oriental dragon book” so much that he (the son) insisted on giving it to all his friends for birthday gifts. I could go on and on…
This is exactly why we need diversity! Because so many people don’t know basic facts about other countries and cultures.
I’M SCREAMING THESE ARE ACTUAL ADS IN THE SWEDISH SUBWAY AND THEY ARE EVERYWHERE IS THIS REAL LIFE
it’s weird how yogurt is almost exclusively advertised to women
