"Hey Kids, Do You Like Violence?"

"But don't blame me when little Eric jumps off of the terrace

You shoulda been watching him; apparently you ain't parents"

 

Eminem - Who Knew

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"A successful business politician [...] guards his reputation for sticking by his commitments - because he wants to stay in business - go on stealing, that is - not only this week but next year and years after that. So if he's smart enough to be successful at this very exacting trade, he can have the morals of a snapping turtle, but he performs in such a way as not to jeopardize the only thing he has to sell, his reputation for keeping promises.
But a reform politician has no such lodestone. His devotion is to the welfare of all the people - an abstraction of very high order and therefore capable of endless definitions. If indeed it can be defined in meaningful terms. In consequence your utterly sincere and incorruptible reform politician is capable of breaking his word three times before breakfast - not from personal dishonesty, as he sincerely regrets the necessity and will tell you so - but from unswerving devotion to his ideal.
All it takes to get him to break his word is for someone to get his ear and convince him that it is necessary for the greater good of all the peepul. He'll geek. After he gets hardened to this, he's capable of cheating at solitaire. Fortunately he rarely stays in office long - except during the decay and fall of a culture."

Robert A. Heinlein - Time Enough for Love

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Circumstances beyond my control saw me reacquainted with the younger crowd's cinematheque recently. Suzume... actually proved quite a pleasant surprise, but I'll leave it for another day. The newer Watership Down miniseries was a bit harder to defend.

 

I liked it, but then much of that was Kingsley's damn fine voicing of Woundwort and my own nostalgia for the book itself. That highlights reel playing in your skull makes it easier to ignore the stiff, low-fidelity, painfully cheap CGI or the gratuitous departures from the story (like downplaying the black rabbit's creepiness or even losing the title reference, of all things) or its bloodless and truncated bunny carnage. Watership Down rather infamously played straight nature's survival horror mix of hope and terror. The miniseries for instance plays up the environmentalist angle when it was plenty loud in Adams' text, plus unnecessarily emphasizes Efrafra's superficial Nazism while eliding the more rabbit-level concerns like eating, shitting, biting and fucking. But then we live in superficial times.

 

The real stomach-turning revelation was Nimona, a propaganda piece vapid even by gradeschooler standards lavished with mandatory uncritical acclaim from every corner of wokedom. You can see the check-boxes being ticked away from beginning to end, scene by telegraphed scene: plucky underdog, gay kiss, light-skinned villains, dark-skinned hero outshined by female just as social justice pecking order dictates, obligatory third-act schism between the heroes to be mended by a declaration of unquestioning devotion to the girl, shallow analogy of shapeshifting to "gender fluid" attention whoring, all-powerful heroine who's somehow also oppressed by everyone and everything, tech evil, planning evil, reason evil, impulsiveness and emotionality good. Any questions? Aside from that, even the action scenes lack any necessary choreography, randomly bouncing off the walls, and if the low-fidelity textures in Watership Down looked cheap, that's still better than Nimona's obviously over-budgeted low fidelity.

 

If you'd like one example of Nimona's idiocy, try the scene where the monster girl makes friends with another little girl who is then turned against her friend by the adults around her. Obviously children could only learn to attack those different from themselves by having their minds poisoned by adults... said noone who has ever actually met a group of kids, any group of kids in the history of humanity! Watch them spontaneously and instinctively bash, bully and hound whichever of them happens to have any random noticeable feature arbitrarily called out as different, from freckles to wearing the wrong t-shirt to lisping or having big ears, big nose, big toes, being too tall, too short, too pumpernickel, whatever. It takes two solid decades of adult supervision to teach kids not to murder each other over having their hair parted the wrong way, on instinct. But hell, screw the entirety of observable evidence in ten thousand years and nine billion apes' worth of exhaustively documented child-rearing lore, we need to parrot "institutionalized prejudice" to suit p.c. thug propaganda.

Then there's the narcissistic conceit of the heroine's supposed isolation. (Leaving aside the constant misinterpretation of "chaotic" archetypes - there's a difference between personal freedom and tantrums with no attention span.) I mean, aside from the fact she demonstrates scene after scene that she really is an impulsively destructive danger to everyone around her... but it's somehow racist against Godzilla to say it... there's the little detail of her omnipotence. She can blend in just fine, but refuses to. She can thrive outside the city effortlessly but refuses to leave, even temporarily to get her shapeshifting out of her system. She's had a thousand years to set up a press conference and plead her case but couldn't be bothered. And she makes friends by tossing people off skyscrapers. This is basically the logical extreme to which characters like Wesley Crusher were already leading thirty years ago. If you're magically "special" you can act as stupidly, recklessly destructive as you want; don't worry 'cause the universe will restructure itself to suit your tantrums.

Generally when watching a kids' movie you accept the protagonist will share kid qualities, and a certain amount of quirky, kooky, rambunctious bounciness is expected. Animaniacs were animanie, totally zany, random refrainie, but without pretending the absolute entitlement of an aggrieved minority. Their jokes could be evaluated for meanness, comedy or social critique on a joke-by-joke basis. Industry bigwigs until recently at least understood human nature better than to openly preach narcissistic vandalism to eight year olds as a moral high horse! And get showered with every award in the business for it!

One of Watership Down's most endearing facets, among many which have cemented it as a classic, is the rabbits' keen awareness of their limitations even as they attempt and sometimes succeed the impossible. They fight when cornered but would rather run and hide; they play desperate gambits but if given a choice build their culture around sensible solutions; they respond to population pressures by spreading out instead of demanding the world grow around them. The tragedy of Efrafra lies not just in superficial goose-stepping but untenable, unhealthy, cramped and overpopulated and wastefully over-regimented lifestyles. Woundwort himself is not just a big meanie but unnatural and much worse irrationally unaware of his own nature, as demonstrated by his last scene.

Nimona is basically what you'd get if you tried playing Woundwort for the hero: bunnyzilla crying that nobody likes it even as it demolishes Tokyo in a willfully ignorant toddler tantrum, all while Tokyo self-flagellates over its "institutionalized privilege" for not giving in to a mindless unstoppable force of destruction's every whim. Did we all already decide to forget the wokeysition claims to stand up for the voiceless and downtrodden? Power to the whichever people, I guess.