image courtesy of mubi.com Conceptually, social media is supposed to be "good" for people. The idea of a utopian society where anyone can be whoever they want without fear of ridicule or persecution, because everyone is supposedly starting from the same level ground. Obviously, that isn't the case, and never has been. I'm an elder millennial, so early social media platforms like AOL Instant Messenger, early Facebook, and MySpace were essentially built for me and my generation

Image courtesy of mubi.com Animator Ralph Bakshi spent the 70s and 80s as animation’s id to Disney’s fledgling superego, hitting theaters during the studio’s weakest creative stretch with raw, adult work Disney wouldn’t touch. Fritz the Cat, the first X-rated animated feature, kicked things off with raunchy countercultural satire, followed by the gritty urban grotesques of Heavy Traffic and Coonskin. He then pivoted to rotoscoped fantasy with Wizards and The Lord of the Rings

Image courtesy of gkids.com First - and I should’ve said this at the beginning of this series - subs over dubs. If you can watch an animated film in its native language, do it. My youngest son watches a lot of anime, but mostly the Westernized stuff you see on Netflix, like Naruto or whatever else. I don’t watch any anime tv shows and haven’t seen a lot of anime movies. I’ve seen most of the big ones - Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Perfect Blue, all the Miyazakis if that counts.

Image courtesy of hollywoodreporter.com I wasn’t allowed to watch MTV as a kid. So, of course, I watched it all the time. This was when MTV still played mostly music videos, and some of my favorites were the animated ones - music videos that took the song’s central theme and developed an entire story that, at its heart, wasn’t exactly a narrative interpretation of the lyrics, but spring-boarded into something creative and weird. One of the most memorable of these was the song

image courtesy of mubi.com You ever go to a children’s pageant? Fewer events are entered with lower expectations. You just hope it’s cute or quick or, at the very least, nobody starts crying in the middle of it. Every so often, something crazy will happen - some kid has the voice of an angel, some little girl goes viral with an incredible dance number, or, more likely, the show just stays together. This film feels like one of those latter shows. This film came out in 1926. Th