I haven’t bothered with DC movies since Wonder Woman (2017). It was an OK movie, and then I stepped outside and forgot about it. So I can’t speak to how bad those movies are, haha. With Marvel, I do think the quality is good, it’s just that I’m not interested anymore. I have a hard time understanding how anyone is still excited after 15 continuous years of the same stuff.

I’m just bored of superheroes in general, I think. I watched up to the first Avengers movie as they came out, and kind of lost interest after that. GotG was fun, and I liked the first Black Panther. Loved Thor: Ragnarok. There’s just probably a limit to how much someone can do with that set of concepts without getting repetitive.

i would love to see revivals of old franchises go the way of the dodo. i am as nostalgic as any millennial but if i want to see indiana jones or ghostbusters or whatever, i’ll just watch the originals.

i don’t think the superhero franchises are going anywhere, unfortunately. they are still reliable, even with some people losing interest over time. it seems like a good moneymaking bet for disney at least. and all the studios seem really risk-averse lately, more than they used to be.

It’s bizarre to me that they’re still calling these remakes “live action,” even when there are no human characters in the film, and all the animal characters are animated (in a realistic style, but still animated).

Hultgren’s The Art of Animal Drawing is really good, nice to see it highlighted here.

I’d like to suggest a couple more books:

• Cartoon Animation by Preston Blair: A great introductory text for character animation, with lots of examples. If someone came to me with some basic cartooning skills and said they wanted to learn animation, I’d point them here first.
• Character Animation Crash Course by Eric Goldberg: Some overlap with Blair’s book, but includes more production skills.

I am pumped for the next season of Lower Decks!

I only realized yesterday that Wes Anderson is releasing a new movie this summer. Asteroid City. I watched the trailer, it looks great! On the other side of the spectrum, I’m not usually that big on franchise movies anymore, but Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem looks delightful. In general it’s nice to see CG animation starting to lean into a visual style instead of just imitating Disney/Pixar.