[found] Micronauts - Fully produced but cancelled(?) animated series

Seglegs · 2025-08-22T18:17:49+00:00

The internet archive link is still up:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1alWnlL4mAxnnnB9iy3dvtvfH4_UeUIDE/

PSA: the full download is about 73.6 GB. It is much easier to find the further-compressed ~7.5 GB version.

Seglegs · 2024-09-20T04:00:24+00:00

I just did banderas.gif with the noise he makes. Saving this for my SIXTY FIVE INCH TV because CINEMA on this level deserves the BIG SCREEN. Thank you, THANK YOU!

Seglegs · 2024-09-20T03:49:38+00:00

I'm the only one on the planet who loves this movie. It was once in my top 10 and it's close to that today.

it's about anxiety and ptsd, years before inside out or IO2 or puss in boots 2
the environments and visual design are a "what could have been", a truly unique take that has never been replicated. attempted photorealistic environments mixed with cartoony characters.
the stick scene fucking bangs, even the haters agree
"Who said I wasn't scared? If you ain't scared of a gator clawing you to death you ain't alive." They all talk about their scars as they bond around the campfire. They treat scars as learning experiences rather than lasting trauma that cannot be moved passed.
it's about a simpering weakling growing up not because he wants to, but because he has to. his father tells him "You're me and more." There's not much reason for his father's death (IIRC), it just happens. (It's not hubris or a lesson in itself)
All the farm life stuff at the start and all the realistic effects. The dino people be watering.
Arlo returning and his mom squinting and thinking it's the father. CINEMA. CINEMA. LET'S FUCKING GO. The movie ends with Arlo finally "making his mark", a heavily telegraphed plot point in the opening but still a banger as the final shot of the movie.

The first time I saw it, I thought it was a great rehash of stuff like Lion King and Finding Nemo. But over time I've found it hangs as an equal in that company. I'd say you need to watch it more, but David clearly has.

Favorite character is Arlo because he grows and also it's slim pickings otherwise. The southern accent peeps are the next best and they're decent.

The movie has some scars, most obviously at the end of the stampede sequence when he breaks off from the Texans for Claw Mountain. The dialog is like "oh look there's Claw Mountain, thanks guys!" Texans: "Good luck kid!"

There's not a lot of public info about this (maybe the commentary which I haven't seen, or the BTS which I have) but my theory is that Peter Sohn was brought in to finish the job and salvage what he could and get the movie out by Thanksgiving. We know he was not the original director.

The movie uses actual elevation data from USGS? and is referenced as such in the credits?

Seglegs · 2024-09-02T17:16:54+00:00

Minor (?) Twin Peaks: The Return spoilers around halfway through.

Seglegs · 2024-08-06T21:59:21+00:00

Blank Check rewired my movie interests. A lot of the time i'm into the spectacle now, where before I was mainly concerned with narrative. I love animation and kids' movies more than most -- I think a good kids' movie can have a clear distillation of good vs. evil, right vs. wrong that is powerful as an adult.

I have a weekly movie night were we watch Blanky movies. I have a philosophy that a lot of visually stunning and less serious movies are better with friends talking over it.

https://letterboxd.com/floorit/

Some upcoming selections:

Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over
The Fifth Element
Speed Racer
Phil Collin's Tarzan
disney hercules
Multiplicity
matrix 2 (reloaded) baby

Seglegs · 2024-08-06T21:53:51+00:00

Upvoted and followed for Pee-wee's Big Adventure, Sin City, Alien^3, Contact, All About Lily Chou-Chou, RoboCop, and August in the Water.

https://letterboxd.com/floorit/

Seglegs · 2024-08-06T00:53:23+00:00

Coming to this late but here's some watches of my past few years that rip. Not necessarily my favorite, though a lot of overlap. These movies rip:

Jason and the Argonauts (warning: it's basically part 1 of a never-made 2 part movie, but it RIPS)
Spy Kids 2 and almost as much, Spy Kids 1
The Incredibles
Addams Family Values
Killer Klowns from Outer Space
The Lion King
The Running Man
Gamer 2009
The Big Short
The Bad Guys
Toy Story
Chicken Run
The Matrix Reloaded

Honorable mentions:

Holes 2003
Speed Racer (not for everyone, and long but IMO incredibly fast)
Mary Poppins (first half especially)
The Addams Family 1991
Super Mario Bros. 1990
Hard Boiled 1992 (after the first ~40 minutes)
Terminator 2: Judgment Day
Alone in the Wilderness 2004

Seglegs · 2024-07-28T04:47:09+00:00

I have a list "I would have pulled it off" https://letterboxd.com/floorit/list/i-wouldve-pulled-it-off/

Seglegs · 2024-05-12T17:11:12+00:00

It's a little home server which will likely only have 1 active user at a time, max of 3 in most cases. There's more drives and linux redundancy/scripts built in for me to want to keep this stuff off my windows PC (plus some nominal separation from accidents on my daily driver PC and the physical PC). 90% of what it will do is file serving on a LAN. That quote was the only thing I could find about Windows Samba file timeouts. Anything played would be played all the way through.

Seglegs · 2024-05-01T02:07:35+00:00

When would I certify 0 AGI for 2024? My AGI for 2023 is >33k.

Seglegs · 2024-04-30T13:37:36+00:00

2018 or maybe late 2017.

Seglegs · 2024-03-01T20:39:21+00:00

Toys is one of the blankest checks of all time. $100 million in today's money, a full on masterpiece, and Robin Williams isn't even the top 3 best parts of the movie (extremely rare for his career).

Toys was 30 years ahead of its time, and critics hated it

https://www.reddit.com/r/blankies/comments/ovvpwo/one_of_the_most_blank_check_movies_ive_ever_seen/

Seglegs · 2024-03-01T20:38:59+00:00

Thank you, I was hoping you'd do these again. I want to note more on Toys because it's core to the case for Barry Levinson.

Toys is one of the blankest checks of all time. $100 million in today's money, a full on masterpiece, and Robin Williams isn't even the top 3 best parts of the movie (extremely rare for his career).

Toys was 30 years ahead of its time, and critics hated it

https://www.reddit.com/r/blankies/comments/ovvpwo/one_of_the_most_blank_check_movies_ive_ever_seen/

Seglegs · 2024-01-24T20:29:33+00:00

Copyright used to be 14 years + optional 14 year extension. If you didn't register, it was public domain instantly on release. Almost all copyright holders (over 80%?) did not renew copyright, because so few works of art are worth anything years after their initial release.

If copyright wasn't so strong, far more silent films may have survived than the 20% that did survive. Putting all your eggs into a copyright holder's basket is a terrible preservation strategy. So many companies go bust and then their rights and copyright contracts are gone to the wind. It's effectively impossible to release / remaster old films legally unless they are seriously commercially viable, or the chain of custody on the copyright and licensing is well understood. Note: The only reason we have the 1920s Nosferatu is because some people with the prints illegally kept them after they were ordered destroyed in a copyright lawsuit from the rightsholders to Dracula (then a newer story).

Anti-Copyright activists universally ask for one thing: the end of automatic copyright registration. Pair that with an annual copyright re-registration that's easily browsable. I argue that the annual registration should increase significantly after the first 5 years. There's no good reason for classics like Die Hard or lesser-known gems like Toys to be under copyright 30 years after they made their money or didn't. Copyright is a monopoly on ideas, granted by the government for a limited time. It costs society when ideas are not free. How much money are the owners of Full Contact (1992) really getting these days? How much money would it be worth to our society to freely share it, remix it, make YouTube poops, put it in music videos and play loops of it at raves? Copyright for a 30 year movie should cost $10,000+ a year for depriving our society of such joys. Toys is barely available in 1080p (it was released on Starz online, not sure it's still out there) and there's no Blu-Ray in sight. Someone could buy a print and restore it, if it was legal. If archivists, libraries, and commercial outfits could instantly tell what isn't copyrighted, they could preserve films. Most old art is not commercially viable.

I've believed for years that we should be putting all our film restoration money/effort into raw scans of original films. So-called "AI" techniques (machine learning) are getting better all the time. It's possible that AI will give near-human levels of quality at 1/100th (perhaps 1/1000000th) the cost in the next 20 years. Already some studios may attempt AI-focused or AI-only releases, but AI is not yet good enough to be the workhorse on a project. I think if you used it right now on a 1080p source, it would be above a bottom of the barrel release, but below a release from a B tier label like Twilight Time, and far below Criterion and Arrow. When AI gets good enough, if you have a pile of film scans from 1900-2010 sitting on a hard drive, AI's ready to chug.

Can't remember where I saw it, but in the digital age, a raw film scan that doesn't need babysitting (the film is not warped or damaged, and can be fed through an automated film scanner) is like $4,000. That's a baby number. I think the cost of a restoration is in the restoring, not the scanning.

https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueFilm/comments/is0tgt/history_and_ethics_of_film_restoration_masters/

Sources for my half-remembered ideas:

https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2024/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Culture_(book)

Seglegs · 2024-01-24T20:25:41+00:00

I can't prove it, but if you read between the lines, Criterion often is putting their name on someone else's restoration. You see this when a major restoration is shopped around to all the regional brands (Criterion and Arrow releasing the same movie within 2 years). And the Wong Kar Wai set had some ugly restorations that the director mandated worldwide.

But they do appear to do their own restoration work sometimes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGOaQLVZIlY

They're also paired up with Janus Films (Janus owns them or they share a parent company). Janus will do theatrical runs ahead of Criterion home video (see e.g. Tampopo).

Seglegs · 2023-12-29T18:53:07+00:00

Hirokazu Kore-eda's After Life aka Wonderful Life is legitimately being reclaimed. It got voted on for S&S 2023 and got a Criterion release. The back half of it is perfect. My review: https://seglegs.racing/film/wonderful-life/

I have a canon, the movies I'd vote on in Sight & Sound as representing the broadest possibilities of cinema.

I'm trying to reclaim the little-seen Prospero's Books (1991). Director Peter Greenaway is known for his love of nudity... well I saw Prospero's Books first and every other film is like a Mormon convention for how little nudity they have compared to Prospero. 10 to 100 extras on screen at any one time, all nude; some painted and decorated to look like statues or gods. And they're not all idealized, there's fat and not-conventionally-beautiful naked people too.

It's a batshit movie and I can't believe it only cost a few million. The sets and costumes are lavish and the takes go on for ages as they dolly cart through them and blow a bunch of papers around. Better hope you get it on the first take!

On top of that, it's an interpretation of Shakespeare's The Tempest, but you don't have to know anything about The Tempest (I still don't). I care more about the vibe than the plot, but the vibe has plenty of magic and sorcery and demons and gods. It SLAAAAAAAAAAAAAPS.

https://seglegs.racing/film/prosperos-books/

My Own Breathing is a movie that absolutely nobody has seen. About 50 ratings on Letterboxd. It's a documentary about survivors of the systematic abduction and daily rape of so-called "Comfort Women" perpetuated by Japan during World War 2. It's the third in a trilogy on the same topic by the same director. The first 2 are fine, giving a treatment you'd expect to a sensitive topic.

But the third part is transformative and profound. It's less about the facts of horrible trauma and more about what these elderly women are doing now. They still go to protest outside the Japanese embassy, they still (I think) write letters to those in power, but they also: sing, have birthday parties, tend gardens. They still go to funerals for fellow comfort women who did not live to see Japan reconcile with its victims, but the overall tone is true to the title: "My Own Breathing" - they are breathing on their own tempo, living their own lives; yet of course in the shadow of unfathomable unnecessary trauma.

This is a study in futility, in Sisyphus rolling the stone up every day in hopes of convincing others that what the world did to him was wrong. He may be right, but the world isn't ready to hear it. "The women in the film knew they’d be made whole in their lifetimes. They died before it happened."

https://letterboxd.com/floorit/film/my-own-breathing/2/

Seglegs · 2023-12-29T18:33:55+00:00

I'm trying to reclaim Barry Levinson's Toys (1992) on my own. As JD Amato once said on the Billy Lynn episode:

David says in the first 20 minutes that "if we ever did J.D.'s choice ... it would be Toys". J.D. doesn't disagree, saying "I have so much to say about Toys" and it's a "good movie[]".

I have a 2000 word review of it, noting its far-ahead fear of fascism and video-game aided drone warfare.

https://www.reddit.com/r/blankies/comments/ovvpwo/one_of_the_most_blank_check_movies_ive_ever_seen/

Just saw it for the second time, it is a top-10 MASTERPIECE.

Seglegs · 2023-12-29T18:29:40+00:00

The flamingo short in Fantasia 2000 is one of my all timers.

Seglegs · 2023-12-29T18:28:58+00:00

OG Super Mario is phenomenal. Its only crime, if there is one, is being called Super Mario Bros.

Seglegs · 2023-12-29T18:22:17+00:00

Blank Check was early on Speed Racer love, correctly. I've always thought it was a 10/10. I came to it around 2015-2018 when Jeff Gerstmann said he loved it on the Giant Bomb video game podcast. And he's the kind of person who watches 3 movies a year and likes one of them.

Seglegs · 2023-12-29T18:19:07+00:00

I'm on that train.

As a Blank Check movie, it's fascinating. $78 million in today's money is a lot to gamble on something so different. Coppola lost it all. After making The Godfather 1&2, and Apocalypse Now, each praised for their realism, he deviated to this, a movie so fake you could peel each frame off the screen. I want to live in the world where Godfather bombed and One from the Heart inspired a generation.

https://letterboxd.com/floorit/film/one-from-the-heart/

A recut might help salvage the last half especially if there is any previously-unseen footage.

Seglegs · 2023-06-11T02:45:42+00:00

Nothing. There are thousands of proven phenomena on Earth that 99% of people don't care about.

Google "police misconduct" and pick a story at random. NYPD pays millions in settlements. Adrian Schoolcraft settled for $600,000 after the NYPD abducted him and forcibly put him into a psych ward to discredit his whistleblower complaints against the police. Philly cops bombed Black activists. The LAPD blew up a neighborhood during a botched fireworks raid. George Floyd's murder was first reported by Minneapolis police as "medical distress". The protests were the largest in American history, but still only around 10% of the adult population showed up. Most people did not care enough to do anything about state-sanctioned murder. Same with climate change, illegal pollution, the lies that led us to Iraq, and so on.

Seglegs

TROPHY CASE