Update: What to Expect for 2023

 

2022 was a year, that about sums it up. I had quite the fascinating review log for 2022 looking at a controversial animated movie, some live-action movies with animated special effects, some direct-to-video movies, and the first animated feature film from Japan. I can't really say the new releases were spectacular, but with what is expected to come out in 2023, I'm hoping that 2023 will be a much more interesting year than this one.

Which brings me to the updates, and I might as well start with the First Impressions:
You know, I really should have these on a proper schedule, I feel like that would help with traffic to this blog, but at the same time, I do like not having them be mandatory. As usual, I'm going to have these come out sporadically, and I can't guarantee I'll get to everything. I am anticipating doing a First Impression blog on Nimona, since I've been very vocal about what's been happening to that movie, The Super Mario Bros Movie, Elemental and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. Everything else will be a maybe for First Impressions.

As for proper reviews, I'm starting this year off with review number seventy-five. I'm considering one of two movies I've chosen, I'll see which one I'm up for when it comes time to write the reviews. Whatever one I don't choose, I'll do afterwards. I don't have much set in stone for reviews this year, but I do have a couple. I have Alice In Wonderland 1951, Monsters Inc, TRON, Apollo 10½, Wonder Park, and a couple others planned for this year. I'll still be doing two reviews a month, but I'll be aiming for four posts a month minimum.

Which takes me to something else I've been thinking of, you see, as an animation fan, I have a bit of a sourness towards the Disney live-action remakes. However, I've heard that there are some that aren't all bad, and that makes me wonder, how many of them are actually good movies that we just pass up because they are live-action remakes? My bet is not that many of them, but I'm willing to dig in and see what I've missed. I'm planning to do one a month, and I will take my time with it, seriously I'm in no rush to get to Pinocchio 2022.

The full list of movies I'll be talking about on this journey as of right now include:
Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book
101 Dalmatians
Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland
Maleficent
Cinderella
The Jungle Book
Alice Through the Looking Glass
Beauty and the Beast
Kim Possible
Dumbo
Aladdin
The Lion King (Yes, again)
Maleficent: Mistress of Evil
Lady and the Tramp
Mulan
Cruella
Pinocchio
The Little Mermaid
Plus whatever comes out afterwards

I think it will be a... "fun" journey to embark on.

To wrap up, let's talk editorials. I'm going to try and do one a month, but don't hold me to that. I've kind of gotten burnt-out at the end of 2022, so if I just don't feel up for writing, I'm going to have to take priority away from Editorials, unless it's something I really want to talk about. As for TV Impressions, if I have a show I've finished and want to talk about, I'll put that in place of the editorial, but if not, than I'll probably not have an editorial for that month.

The schedule is going to remain the same, review every 1st and 15th. That also leaves the 8th and the 22nd for secondary posts, like Editorials, Disney Live Action Remakes Posts or what have you. This may be the last year I do that schedule, we'll see. I think posting on a more specific day would be better, but right now, I'm gonna stick with reviews every 1st and 15th.

Let's hope this year brings good stuff, and hope I don't work myself to hard. Let's have a good 2023, or at least try to.

Editorial: My Personal Art College Experience

 

As of writing this blog, the day is Thursday, April 28th, 2022. Today I have received my Diploma from my Art College, I have completed the course and now have a piece of paper that says I am done. Some people would be ecstatic about that, they are done with school and ready to go out into the world. I however am relieved. I am finished with school, and more specifically, the awful school I went to.

This is just gonna be a short little blog detailing some of my experiences and strong memories of going to the Victoria College of Art, and hopefully tell you why you shouldn't attend if you're a Capitol City Resident, because let me tell you, I am not happy with the school.

Honestly, the course started out fine, I show up at the building do the work and the day was done. Standard things and whatnot. I had a few problems during this part of my time at the college, but nothing major. Some problems with some teachers, but nothing too bad, then we hit 2020. I remember the day well, I was in my animation class and we got the news that because of the pandemic, school was no longer going to be in person, future classes were postponed, and the planned art show was canceled. One of my friends, whom I met at the college, was looking forward to the art show, and was practically devastated that it was canceled. This is where the problems began for me at the college.

The first big problem was, that for most of us, they were terrible at communication. The one major thing that any school, business or even person in a group needs to do when communicating online is to be responsive. They did tell us when classes were beginning, and the teachers were responsible for sending out links and notifying us when they couldn't attend a class session. However, I've had classmates struggle with getting some clear and precise answers from the staff, such as if they were allowed extra time on an exam, and I had some issues getting some things in a timely manner, like receipts.

My classes were also strange. I signed up for the animation course, so you'd expect me to be given a lot of animation related classes? And I did get a good amount of them, I also got two sculpture classes, "Art Theory", a painting class, and a bunch of Art History classes that had nothing to do with animation. The funny thing is that there was a class for History of Animation, but I didn't get it, and I don't think any of my classmates did. For some reason, it was assumed that the history of architecture and fashion were more important than the history of the thing we were learning to do.

The teachers were mixed, some of them were fine. I had a good relationship with a couple teachers. There was one teacher whom I would be highly complimentary of on a good day, and on a bad day I would be less enthusiastic about, but I think I had more good days with them than not. One teacher gave us a lot of work to do, but they were a decent teacher beyond that. The not so good teachers were another story. One teacher had problems properly communicating what they wanted us to do, most likely because they were old, but it was tough to get a clear answer from him if you were even the slightest bit confused. One teacher, whom I did like, ended up missing a lot of classes, and another teacher was very unconcerned about potentially sensitive topics, like sexuality, torture and child abuse, as in they gave no warnings about these kind of subjects, and didn't even attempt to breeze through them. The worst teacher I had was actually fired by the college, so good on them, but their classes were so dull and slow, and it did not help that during those classes we were in the middle of a terrible heat wave. The worst part about them though was that their use of a certain word, now I don't use bad words on this blog because I want to keep these accessible to most people, so I can not write what word this teacher said on this blog, but it is a word that myself and a friend of mine, both of us being on the autistic spectrum, took umbrage with them using.

I don't want to make it sound like I learned nothing or got no positive experiences from going here, I had some. I did learn some important things, I found a drawing style I was more comfortable with, I learned that I probably did not want to be an animator in the future, and I made some of the best friends I ever had. That being said, college was also a big reason I had to put this blog on the back-burner for 2020 and 2021, as I had to devote time to that rather than watching movies.

There were two major problems I had though, the first being the cost. It was probably cheaper than going to other colleges, but it was still expensive, and quite frankly the quality of the education was not worth the tuition. The big reason for that is that we did not get any group projects. Animation is not a one-man show, it takes multiple people to make an animation. Some animations can be done by one person teams, but those are not as common. Most TV Shows, Movies and short films or music videos are done by teams, and we never learned how to work as a team. We were never given a group project, outside of an Acting class (Which I thoroughly enjoyed actually, probably my favourite class of the bunch), and it was tough because we were expected to complete animations by ourselves. You know how many drawings goes into a minute of animation? Math was never my strongest attribute, so I'll leave the numbers up to you, but I believe our animations were twenty-five frames per second, and there are sixty seconds in a minute. twenty-five frames per second, sixty seconds per minute.

I'm not going to go into my classmates because any issues I had with them were not the college's fault, though I did butt heads with one a bit. Hard to say I'm blameless there really.

Overall, my Art College experience was a disaster, by the end of it, I just wanted it to be over. I'm kinda glad there was no grad ceremony really, I didn't even really like my high school grad ceremony. Sitting in that cramped amphitheatre, sweating bullets just waiting for name to be called, and then waiting for everyone else's name to be called. grad ceremonies are dumb. Otherwise, a fair amount of the teachers weren't great, some of my classes were irrelevant, it was expensive, with poor communication and overall I just don't think it was worth it. All I want to do is just kind of forget about it now, put my diploma in a frame and shove it in my closet. Still, I am thankful for the friends I made while I was there, and here's to hoping for many more years together. Either way, it's finished, over and done with, and I can devote more time to this blog now.

You may have noticed I actually put out two reviews in April, well, expect that to be the norm now, two reviews each month. One on the first, and one on the fifteenth. I'm happy to be back to this really.

Update: Plans for 2022

 

So, new year huh... heh yeah, what a year 2021 was eh?

So uh, I ended up not being able to watch that many new releases last year, I could pin the blame on school or because of my social life, but while both of those are factors, the real key point was a general lack of desire and will to do so. The idea of sitting at my computer watching a movie is not so appealing to me, so the few first impressions that I did end up writing, only two of them I ended up watching on my computer, I have not exactly made my computer set up for comfortably watching a movie. So I ended up not getting around to watching movies like Wish Dragon, Vivo, Luca, The Mitchell's Vs The Machines, the Scooby-Doo courage crossover nor the new Mortal Kombat animated movie. They are all on my watchlist, but we're going to have to be a bit patient with that one.

So, what are my plans for 2022? Well, for starters, I'm going to slowly phase out the one review a month plan. This is because, this is going to be my last year of school! Come this April I will officially be finished with Art College, huzzah! Plus, I have it planned that I will essentially take a vacation after college, pretty much a time to get away from the house and just relax. I will still do movie reviews during my vacation, because I will have a lot of time on my hands. So, I'm thinking that come April, I will try to get two reviews out each month, and I may keep it at that. I'm not one-hundred percent on keeping it at two reviews each month, but as of right now it looks like the most appealing plan.

2022 is gonna be a big year for me, personally. Not only am I finishing Art College, but I'm also going to start planning to move out of my Dad's (Finally), nothing is confirmed in that regard, but I'm hoping I can start moving out by the next year at the latest. If all goes to plan, that will hopefully also give me a lot of spare time to devote to this blog, but we'll get there when we get there.

So, otherwise, what else is gonna change here? Well, I'm also thinking about bringing in reviews of animated Television shows. The DuckTales editorial seemed to do well so I'm toying with the idea of giving other shows the same treatment? Currently I'm working through Gravity Falls, but there may be other show reviews in the future. (this may be the incentive I need to finally finish Steven Universe, Daria and my Red vs Blue rewatch) Again, nothing set in stone, but it's something I've thought of doing.

Primarily though, this is still going to be a movie blog, so other than the increase of reviews later down the line, what will movie reviews look like?

Well, I do want to put more focus on older animated movies, like from the 90s back. That being said, there are a few recent movies that have struck my fancy. As of now, I only have three movies confirmed for this year, DuckTales: The Movie (Which I have already written the review for, expect that in February), My Little Pony: The Movie from 1986 (No expected release, may do that around May but don't hold me to that) and The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water (May save that for Summer). However, I am toying with the idea of reviewing the original King Kong movie.

As for other posts, I'm hoping to do more First Impressions blogs this year. I'm hoping that movie theatres are open to the public again (Plus I'm double vaxxed) so I can easily spend a weekend watching a movie in theatres if I can. Otherwise, they'll mostly stay the same.

As for editorials, I am sitting on some posts, two posts that look back at the first fifty movie reviews, another one about animated shorts and an old one about my favourite Disney songs, but if First Impressions become more regular, I may reserve Editorials for (Shocker) their original purpose, i.e. as a way to add extra thoughts without bogging down a movie review or to talk about certain topics that I want to voice my opinion on. So any editorials about "Entertainment discourse" or "My favourite hybrid movies" will most likely end up being a thing of the past, and I can't say I'll be sorry to see editorials like those go.

That seems to be about it for this update. I'm gonna try and increase my review output, as well as my first impressions output, I'm going to stop shoe-horning editorials onto my blog, and I might start adding TV and Web shows into my review line-up. Alongside my personal life stuff including my Finishing or Art College, and my planning to move, all in all I'm hopeful for 2022. I hope you're all as excited to tackle the year as I am, so I'll see you in February with my review of DuckTales: The Movie - Treasure of the Lost Lamp.

Let's kick this year in the butt!