Here is a tiger just going about life until this human gives it the fright of its life. Still cute af. Dream job to be honest. 17/10 would be such an honor to pet
no no no no no look at those ears, tiger totally knows he’s there
tiger thinks the bipeds are terrible, terrible tigers and don’t know how to tiger worth a damn so when one actually pays tiger cub ambush game tiger is so happy
look at that happy tiger
look at it
YES YOU TERRIBLE TIGER YOU ARE FINALLY LEARNING HOORAY 😀
Just a heads up right now: on the day when Trump dies, I’m going to be extremely tasteless about it. It’s going to get ugly. You are going to see a side of me I am not proud of. I don’t want any call-outs in my inbox, I’m stating right now that lines will be crossed.
How disgusting can someone be
I wouldn’t even say this about my worst enemy
Forget the fact that its trump. If you agree with this youre fucking evil. Evil literally lives inside you. Wow.
Anyways all of y’all AND the evil that literally lives inside of you are invited to the sick ass house party I’m throwing when lord dampnut kicks the bucket
I feel like all you Americans need to take a look at what happened here in the UK after Maggie Thatcher died. Because when it comes to tasteless celebrations fuelled by anger and the death of a hated political leader, we REALLY pushed the boat out. We had street parties. We had burning effigies. We pushed “Ding Dong the Witch is Dead” to the top of the charts out of sheer hatred. Bone up kiddos, and I really hope you manage to do that truly American thing, of dramatically outdoing us with your celebrations.
Reblogging for last comment.
full offence but I’m not taking moral advice from someone with a URL based on Jeffery Dahmer
Coraline is a masterfully made film, an amazing piece of art that i would never ever ever show to a child oh my god are you kidding me
Nothing wrong with a good dose of sheer terror at a young age
“It was a story, I learned when people began to read it, that children experienced as an adventure, but which gave adults nightmares. It’s the strangest book I’ve written”
This is a legit psychology phenomenon tho like there’s a stop motion version of Alice and Wonderland that adults find viscerally horrifying, but children think is nbd. It’s like in that ‘toy story’ period of development kids are all kind of high key convinced that their stuffed animals lead secret lives when they’re not looking and that they’re sleeping on top of a child-eating monster every night so they see a movie like Coraline and are just like “Ah, yes. A validation of my normal everyday worldview. Same thing happened to me last Tuesday night. I told mommy and she just smiled and nodded.”
Stephen King had this whole spiel i found really interesting about this phenomenon about how kids have like their own culture and their own literally a different way of viewing and interpreting the world with its own rules that’s like secret and removed from adult culture and that you just kinda forget ever existed as you grow up it’s apparently why he writes about kids so much
An open-ended puzzle often gives parents math anxiety while their kids just happily play with it, explore, and learn. I’ve seen it so many times in math circles. We warn folks about it.
Neil Gaiman also said that the difference in reactions stems from the fact in “Coraline” adults see a child in danger – while children see themselves facing danger and winning
i never saw so much push back from adults towards YA literature as when middle aged women started reading The Hunger Games. They were horrified that kids would be given such harsh stories, and I kept trying to point out the NECESSITY of confronting these hard issues in a safe fictional environment.
SAGAL: No. I mean, for example, your incredibly successful young adult novel “Coraline” is about a young girl in house in which there’s a hole in the wall that leads to a very mysterious and very evil world. So when you were a kid, is that what you imagined?
GAIMAN: When I was a kid, we actually lived in a house that had been divided in two at one point, which meant that one room in our house opened up onto a brick wall. And I was convinced all I had to do was just open it the right way and it wouldn’t be a brick wall. So I’d sidle over to the door and I’d pull it open.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
SAGAL: Right.
GAIMAN: And it was always a brick wall.
SAGAL: Right.
GAIMAN: But it was one of those things that as I grew older, I carried it with me and I thought, I want to send somebody through that door. And when I came to write a story for my daughter Holly, at the time she was a 4 or 5-year-old girl. She’d come home from nursery. She’d seen me writing all day. So she’d come and climb on my lap and dictate stories to me. And it’d always be about small girls named Holly.
SAGAL: Right.
GAIMAN: Who would come home to normally find their mother had been kidnapped by a witch and replaced by evil people who wanted to kill her and she’d have to go off and escape. And I thought, great, what a fun kid.
It’s anxious adults who desperately want to “soften” stories. Kids prefer the real thing: with monsters, bloodthirsty ogres and evil murderous stepmothers; where the littlest brother always wins and all the villains are horrendously punished in the end. The world is threatening to the eyes of a child, so they need a fictional universe where the little people have a fair chance against the big and strong.
This isn’t specifically about stop motion but it is about how sad or scary parts of movies aren’t really all that bad- IE the 80′s movies, particularly Don Bluth’s films. (X- The Melancholy of Don Bluth, by Meg Shields )
How the children’s animation of the 80’s made room for sadness, and what that taught us.
There was a time when McDonalds used to give away VHS tapes with happy meals, and by some stroke of luck, one day my mom picked The Land Before Time. It
was the first film to etch itself onto me ‐ the way film tends to with
kids. I would recreate the plot with stuffed animals and parrot the
lines to whoever would listen; I pawed that VHS box until the cardboard
went soft.
A couple years ago, I saw that Land Before Time
was playing on t.v. and couldn’t remember the last time I’d watched it
all the way through. Within five minutes I was completely obliterated
and sobbing into a throw pillow. This is a shared experience for
children raised with Don Bluth: that as a kid, I could only clock a hazy sense that his films felt different
from Disney fare, but that the articulations of this difference, and
their ability to emotionally floor me, are something I’ve only become
aware of in retrospect.
There was a regime change in animation
during the 80’s. Quite literally in the form of Bluth’s official break
with Disney in ’79, but in a more elusive sense with the landscape of
what children’s animation during that decade felt like. For
whatever reason, be it Bluth’s departure or a diseased managerial ethos
in the wake of Walt’s passing, the 80’s were a mixed bag for Disney.
Don’t get me wrong, they’re amiable and charming films, but The Fox and the Hound and The Great Mouse Detective are not classics. And for all its ambition, The Black Cauldron cannot be redeemed on technical merit. Disney would eventually yank itself out of its slump in ’89 with The Little Mermaid ‐ but animation during the 80’s, along with the childhoods of a slew of millennials, were definitively shaped by Bluth.
That there is a dark tenor to Bluth’s work has been thoroughly, albeit perhaps vaguely, noted, often citing individual moments of terror (cc: Sharptooth, you dick). While I don’t doubt that frightening and disturbing scenes contribute to an overall sense of darkness in Bluth’s work, I’m unconvinced that they’re at the root of what distinguishes his darker tone. There is, I think, a holistic sadness to Bluth films; a pervasive, and fully integrated melancholy that permeates his earlier work.
These stories are full of crystalline moments of narrative sadness; specific story moments at which I inevitably mutter a “fuck you Don Bluth,” and try not to cry. There’s Littlefoot mistaking his own shadow for his dead mother; Fievel sobbing in the rain (a Bluth mainstay) convinced that his family has abandoned him; Mrs. Brisby shuddering helplessly after she and the Shrew temporarily disarm the plow. Other plot points are less tear-jerking so much as objectively miserable: the cruelty of the humans in The Secret of NIMH; An American Tail’s intelligent allegory for Russian Jewish pogroms and immigration; Carface getting Charlie B. Barkin drunk and murdering him at the pier.
You know — FOR KIDS!
Thematically, there is an ever-present air of death about Bluth’s work that is profoundly
sad. Bones litter certain set-pieces; illness and age are veritable
threats (shout out to Nicodemus’ gnarly skeleton hands); and characters
can and do bleed. Critically, Bluth films don’t gloss over
grief, they sit with it. From Littlefoot’s straight up depression
following the on-screen death of his mom, to Mrs. Brisby’s soft sorrow
at finding out the details of her husband’s death.
There is a space for
mourning in Bluth’s stories that feels extra-narrative, and
unpretentious. Critically, this is distinct from, say, wallowing.
Bluth’s films have a ridiculously productive attitude towards mourning,
most lucidly articulated through Land Before Time’s moral
mouthpiece Rooter: “you’ll always miss her, but she’ll always be with
you as long as you remember the things she taught you.” Disney
meanwhile, tends to treat death as a narrative flourish, or worse, a
footnote. And in comparison, even notable exceptions like Bambi and The Lion King seem immaturely timid to let palpable grief linger for longer than a scene, let alone throughout a film’s runtime.
Look at all the fun times they’re missing.
Musically, James Horner and Jerry Goldsmith’s impossibly beautiful scores are laced with a forlorn undercurrent. In particular, Horner’s tonal dissonance in The Land Before Time theme punches the Wagner-lover in me in the throat (admittedly, a good thing). Further to this, the first half of Goldsmith’s “Escape from N.I.M.H,” is reminiscently Tristan and Isolde-y. And while I’m here, I would also like to formally issue a “fuck you for making me cry in public” to American Tail’s “The Great Fire,” which when combined with visuals, is nothing short of devastating.
Speaking of visuals, backdrops of grim and vast indifference dot Bluth’s work; from the twisted Giger-esque caverns of the rats’ rosebush, to the urban rot of a thoroughly unglamorous New York and New Orleans. That these landscapes are in a state of decay is particularly dismal; there is a tangible barrenness, a lack of the warmth our characters are desperately hoping to find by their film’s end. These are depressed and morose spaces ‐ and that they are so seemingly unnavigable and foreboding makes them all the more compelling, and narratively resonant.
The way Bluth uses
color is also notable, with dark, earthy tones prevailing throughout
only to be blown out quite literally with the golden light
characteristic of Bluth’s hard-earned happy endings. Before Littlefoot
and friends reach The Great Valley, an event marked by gradually
illuminating god-rays, they must slug it out through the parched browns,
blues and pitch of their prehistoric hellscape. Like Charlie’s final
ascendance into heaven, Fievel must endure similarly muted shades until
he is finally (finally) reunited with his family and soaked in
glitter ‐ a level of Don Bluth conclusion-sparkles perhaps only rivaled
by the radiance of Mrs. Brisby’s amulet as she Jean Grey’s her homestead
to safety at the end of NIMH. Because Bluth leans into darker,
less saturated tones, these effervescent conclusions are all the more
impactful, which speaks in part to the methodology of Bluth’s
melancholy.
The plucky leads of Bluth’s early films are all
fighting for the same thing: family. From Mrs. Brisby’s persistence to
protect her children, to Charlie’s (eventually) selfless love for
Anne-Marie, these are characters in search of home. Invariably, each of
these characters gets their happy ending, but they have to go through
hell to get there, literally in Charlie’s case. In a recent interview,
critic Doug Walker asked Bluth if there was any truth to the rumor that
he thinks you can show children anything so long as there’s a happy
ending, to which Bluth replied:
“[If] you
don’t show the darkness, you don’t appreciate the light. If it weren’t
for December no one would appreciate May. It’s just important that you
see both sides of that. As far as a happy ending…when you walk out of
the theatre there’s [got to be] something that you have that you get to
take home. What did it teach me? Am I a better person for having
watched it?”
Melancholy isn’t just a narrative device
for Bluth, it’s a natural part of navigating life, of searching for
wholeness, and becoming a better person. Bluth acknowledges sadness in a
way that never diminishes or minimizes its existence; he invites
melancholy in, confesses its power, and lets it rest. Sadness is, for
Bluth, an essential characteristic of the world and living in it. That
is a wholly edifying message for kids, delivered in a vessel that is
both palatable and unpatronizing. For this reason, among innumerable
others, Bluth’s work has immense value as children’s entertainment…even
if it means crying into a throw pillow twenty years later.
ok but why is ‘potato’ always used negatively in phrases? ‘couch potato’ and ‘he looks like a potato’……… what the hell have potatoes ever done to you? potatos are the mvps of the food world, the backbone of many dishes. they never let u down. potatoes are the real winners here and we should feel honoured to be described as one
I can think of at least one time potatoes have let down a very large group of people.
That was not the potatoes’ faults! That, like most things, was on the British.
date a selkie, but don’t hide her cloak. let her go home and visit her family now and then, knowing that she’ll come back and hang her seal cloak in the closet like she always does. trust is important.
The first time she lets the redhead take her home, she’s diligent about hiding her cloak. She folds it carefully against tears and rips and abrasions, and hides it in a sea cave whose entrance is concealed by the tide.
She does the same, the second and third and fourth times, careful, wary, mindful of her mother’s lessons. Remembers the way her mother’s hands had chafed on her soft cheeks, rough with cooking and cleaning for her fisherman husband, the way her mother’s peat-dark eyes had been tense and harsh with the lesson.
“Mind me, Niahm. Never let them find your cloak.”
The way her mother’s mouth had curved, a sickle of dissatisfaction and relief and envy, as she had escaped into the waves.
So she minds her mother’s lesson, and she takes care with her cloak.
Would that she had taken as much care with her heart.
The fifth time, she wears the cloak to the girl’s door, clutched about her throat, dripping along the darkened lanes.
She enters the home, welcomed with soft kisses and gentle touches and kindling passion. She drapes the cloak, artful in her carelessness, across an old wooden chair, the one that creaks and tilts slightly if you don’t sit just right.
When she wakes, in the wee hours of the morning, even before her lover, the cloak still rests, supple and dappled by the sea, on the back of the chair.
She frowns into the softening dawn, dons the cloak, and returns to the sea.
And again, the sixth time. And the seventh.
The eighth time, she finally breaks, prickling and hurt with longing, gripping a handful of russet hair in her hand, firm with emphasis.
“Surely you know what I am,” she says to her lover, the cool froth of sea foam and the call of gulls curling around her voice.
“Of course,” her lover responds, soft and tender in the dawnlight, throat arched willingly, pale as the inner whorls of a shell. “You taste of the sea,” the girl whispers, reverently.
She shakes her lover’s head gently, fingers tangled still in russet locks. “Why?” she demands. “Why won’t you keep me?”
A long silence that waits and fills, like a tidepool, stretches between them. Cool as a current. Deep as the Channel.
Her lover’s eyes are dark and tender. “Must I trap you to keep you, my heart? Is that the shape of love that you desire?”
She sinks into the thought, struck and stymied, remembering her mother’s harsh hands, her cold eyes. Her hand eases into russet waves, caresses where her grip had punished. Her lips press cool and damp as the sea against the arching curve of her lover’s shoulder. “What shape of love will you give to me?”
The answer is easy, quick, certain. “Myself. Only myself, whenever you should wish it. Your cloak by the door, your body in my bed, and the freedom to go, whenever you must. As long as you wish.”
It’s not an answer a fisherman could ever give, nor would think to.
The ninth time, she hangs her cloak by the door, draped in careful dappled folds next to a drying oilskin jacket.
As small as the world 