Archive for the English Anime Category


Momentary Lily Okazu Staff Review

January 15th, 2025

Colorful image of tables in a restaurant, with six girls colorfully dressed, eating and drinking, and smiling with banality.It appears that Okazu Staff huddle together when they encounter a trashfire in media, so once again, we are here to debrief and detox.

Today we are gathered together to memorialize our sanity, lost via Momentary Lily, streaming on Crunchyroll.

 

 

 

Christian LeBlanc

My first impression of the new GoHands joint was that it felt like being grabbed by the shoulders and shaken violently by someone vomiting glitter everywhere. And this is coming from someone who generally enjoys GoHands’ output, in defiance of people who point out the flaws in their animation.
 
Admittedly, I’m not particularly literate in cinema, and so online discussions will often illustrate to me why a scene in a movie works as well as it does. Likewise, people online can point out how GoHands is using an ambitious camera angle or perspective in the wrong place, but I may not always notice something’s off, and simply enjoy seeing the camerawork go absolutely ham for someone walking up a flight of stairs. And why not? Anime is generally exaggerated anyway, right?
 
Well, let me explain in terms of music. Momentary Lily is like a slow ballad where someone starts shredding on their axe like crazy halfway through the first verse. Yes, it’s an impressively face-melting, blisteringly-fast guitar solo, but what is it doing after a line and a half of lyrics? Some people will be open-minded enough to simply enjoy the guitar solo, and won’t be bothered by how out of place it is. Conversely, some listeners won’t understand why the gentle singing was interrupted by a piece of music from a seemingly different tune, and will be taken out of the song because it’s so jarring and distracting.
 
My colleagues will expand on how all the different elements of this show make it less than the sum of its parts, but let me pass the baton with this: one character’s death lacks gravitas because we haven’t gotten to know them well enough over two episodes, while another girl’s breasts defy gravitas even as she’s sobbing over her impending doom. Please learn to read the room, Erika Koudaji’s breasts.
 

Eleanor Walker

I watched this while nursing a tremendous hangover and I’m genuinely not sure if it improved the experience or not. The main thing going through my mind was “she breasted boobily” every time a certain character was on the screen. I still don’t know why these collection of walking stereotypes, sorry, characters are doing what they’re doing, what the “Wild Hunt” is and where they’re getting the ingredients for the random cooking segments. It’s like one staffer wanted to make a cute girls doing cute things cooking show and another wanted to make a monster fighting explosion show and the studio just shrugged and said “eh, whatever, we can only afford to animate one pair of breasts so work together”. The voices are particularly grating, I’m not generally one who notices particularly bad voice acting, especially in Japanese (I didn’t notice Hideaki Anno in The Wind Rises, for example, which was widely complained about online) but dearie me the voices in this one make me want to gouge my eardrums out with a melon baller.

 

Erica Friedman

This project is infamously animated by GoHands, a group that takes their work as animators VERY seriously, as everything in this anime moves, constantly. Even things that do not actually ever move.

In a post-apocalyptic world in which humans have been hunted by “The Wild Hunt” – over-animated kaijuu – a girl with a mysterious ability to call up a magical, science fiction-y, mega weapon finds a small group of other teenage girls with similar abilities.  Whether you consider these girls to be special forces, or refugees or just plain child soldiers, don’t worry about the details…their misery and trauma will be mined for laughs and pathos and boob jiggles. And cooking lessons, so even at the end of the world, we can make a nice meal of rice and canned mackerel. We got to get our priorities straight.

As for the service – to quote the great Pamela Poovey, “Inappropes.”

Grab a Dramamine and watch Momentary Lily, with a cast of girls with verbal tics that stand in for a personality.

 

Frank Hecker

Fans of the anime Shirobako may recall a scene in which two animators are discussing a new technique for making reflections off eyeglasses look more realistic, followed by a shot of one person’s glasses illustrating that very technique. Watching Momentary Lily is like watching that scene on infinite repeat, but without the self-reflexive humor. After viewing the first couple of minutes of episode 1 in the conventional way, I turned the sound and subtitles off so I could appreciate Momentary Lily for what it really is, a SIGGRAPH demo with fighting girls. (I originally wrote “magical girls,” but they don’t have transformation sequences—more’s the pity.)

Watching the show this way helps make sense of some of the shot and plot choices. Why does one of the girls show off her moisturizing regimen in the first scene? So that we can see how well GoHands can model shiny skin (presumably using Phong shading or some more recent technique). Why do the girls take a break from fighting monsters to have a meal? So that the animators can take a break from animating kaijū and relax themselves, modeling various foods, plastic packages, tin cans, utensils, and so on. (They even show a cousin of the famous Utah teapot.) And most notably: why does the girls’ hair fly around so much? It’s simultaneously a plea to the production committee and a boast to the viewer: “If we had a bigger budget, we could animate every hair.”

I guess there’s a story here somewhere and presumably some attempts at characterization, but really the girls are to GoHands what the Madonna and child and other Biblical scenes were to Renaissance painters, a conventional set of stock images used to demonstrate mastery of their craft. (My using the word “craft” and not “art” is deliberate; there is little art here.) Watching Momentary Lily like I did highlights those demonstrations: the omnipresent lens flare that shifts position depending on which way the light is coming from, the focus pulling and bokeh, the way the clouds constantly moving across the sky are reflected in the windows of the buildings in the background. For me, the emotional climax of episode 2 was not the foreground scene of a girl in extremis, but rather the background shot of a tree with all its leaves rippling in the wind.

I especially loved the shots of buildings shown in dramatic perspective, whether during the day or at night, viewed clearly or enshrouded in fog. Which brings me to my recommendation to GoHands: forget plot, character, and dialogue. Ditch the monsters, include more scenes with buildings and benches, erase the girls from every shot, and create what the world has been waiting for: a true masterpiece of “yuri of absence.”

 

Luce

Well that sure was an eye workout. Ow.

Setting aside the camera for now, this is distinctly mediocre. Sci-fi and post-apocalypse isn’t my thing, but this wouldn’t sell me. The five characters we see initially are unmemorable, apart from ‘onee-chan’ with the big bouncing boobs that are totally unnecessary and look like they’re about to float her off to space. (One character says ‘too much jiggle’. Don’t call it out and flaunt it at the same time.) Renge, the ‘main’ character, is screechy, then apologising for the weirdest things, like ‘imposing’ on the group with a awkwardly cut cooking ‘segment’, as they refer to it. Wow, she’s amnesiac, has a cool weapon and can one shot the big robots. Great, sure sounds like a plot thread right there. Too bad I’m not interested.

Sadly, even if I was interested, watching this feels like an attack on the optic nerve. Aside from over-animated hair and one set of boobs, the animation is middling, but not awful. But it’s like someone heard ‘dynamic camera angles’ and decided this meant ‘camera must move every two seconds’. It’s at odd angles, or moving, but in really jarring ways that almost follow characters but not quite. There’s more lens flares than Star Trek. And what is with the split screens?!

If you have a tendency to migraines, or any visually triggered illnesses, avoid this. I promise it’s not worth it. I’m off to have a lie down.

 

Matt Marcus

When my friend and cohost Sibyl sent me the trailer for Momentary Lily, my first thought was “someone must really like RWBY.” As the announcement began circulating in my online spaces, I had only seen dismissive, but not illuminating, comments about the studio that made it. It wasn’t on my radar, but between my friend’s excitement and the reactions from the folks in the Discord after episode 1 dropped, I figured I would give it a shot.

Y’all, I was not prepared.

I could go on about the visually chaotic and cacophonous opening, but that’s just where it begins. From opening to ending, watching Momentary Lily is like reading one of those giant posts of text with three emojis after every sentence, but also the font is Wingdings.

The script feels like it was written by ChatGPT trained using the dialogue of every lady-led shonen show, but dumber. There’s the gamer girl who chugs energy drinks and calls them her “buffs” in every sentence she speaks. There’s the chipper leader with a verbal tic. There’s the serious dark-haired girl with glasses with a verbal tic. There’s the “big sister” archetype with absurd breast physics. There’s the gyaru girl. And, of course, we have the overpowered amnesiac lead who is so obscenely shy that half her dialogue is in pantomime. The characterization is so thin I’m surprised that their models are not literally transparent.

But we’re not here for deep ruminations on the human soul, are we? No, we’re here to see some overly-stylized teenagers do some high-flying ass-kicking! So that part must be good right? I got bad news for you: the action is messy, hard to follow, and extremely headache inducing. The characters don’t match the garish, hyper-saturated 3D backgrounds in both visual style and, worse, in framerate. Even in shots where the background isn’t moving as if the camera is being controlled by a drunk crane operator, the point of view zooms in and out and bounces around like a nap-skipping toddler on caffeine. It’s as if GoHands was afraid that if they didn’t jangle every key in front of our face for the entire scene, we’d lose interest mid-sword swing.

But beyond all that, the biggest sin is the pacing. Characters only have space to do schtick between the barest of exposition. Tone shifts rapidly from “badass” action to cutesy cooking segments where Amnesia Girl shows her new pals how to make otaku struggle meals. (Each episode is named for the dish said girl makes, so I guess this was The Thing GoHands decided the show should be About.) Scenes are smashed together with no sense of time passing. A character is killed in episode 2, and the previews of the next episode suggest that the show is going to tell us why we should’ve cared about this girl in the first place. It’s jarring and exhausting and boring at the same time.

And don’t get me started on the worldbuilding. Almost every human on earth has been vaporized yet social media still functions! Can’t wait for the plot to hinge on the crew posting their 7-Eleven survivalist stews on the ‘Gram. GOD this sucks.

The thing that strikes me the most about the show is that there is clearly effort and skill on display, and yet it is applied in the most artless way I have ever seen. It’s fascinating in that way: a show ostensibly about cooking that lacks taste. For all the “flavor” tossed in, this is very thin gruel.

Ratings:

Story – eh
Characters – verbal tics and trauma
Animation – LOL
Service – too much jiggle
Yuri – no thank you

Overall – canned fish





Sorairo Utility, streaming on HIDIVE

January 13th, 2025

On a turquoise background, girls and golf equipment are scattered about.Who could have possibly imagined that I’d be writing about yet another golf anime. And yet, here we are.

After the breakaway Gundam AU, gay and breathtakingly outlandish Birdie Wing, after which most of fandom understood that what we wanted was more gay and outlandish women’s sports drama, what the old men who run entertainment conglomerates decided was that we needed more anime about golf.  Not the Dinah Shore kind of golf, either. I’d be down for that.

So instead of gay and outlandish rugby anime (I imagine an anime version of Ilona Maher and start praying for  women’s rugby anime immediately) or gay and outlandish guts and tears softball anime, we get more golf. Okay, we work with what we get. I wrote a review of the second season of Tonbo! for Anime News Network and here we are today, talking about Sorairo Utility, streaming on HIDIVE. This is not the same as the Sorairo Utility movie on Crunchyroll.

For once, we begin with a true newbie. Minami is a girl who likes gaming and truly does want to be good at something, anything, but just does not have the skills needed to find a club or sport that she takes to. When she helps an elderly gentleman in town, she finds herself introduced the world of golf… and to the cool onee-san whacking the balls at the driving range. Taken by this older girls’ form and skill, Minami is introduced to the world of amateur golf, with a foursome that is helpful, encouraging and doesn’t mind that she sucks.  Did I mention that the older girl is cool? Haruka lends Minami equipment and advice and encouragement and is very, very cool when she golfs.

This…is very refreshing.The two old dudes have old-man humor, but are very chill as far as their playing goes. And Haruka genuinely seems to want Minami to *enjoy* golf, more than be good at it. It is this last that imbued Tonbo! with its watchability and here, it continues to be the driving force of an anime that is otherwise about learning golf.

Since golf courses in Japan are probably watching their clientele of old dudes in the corporate world aging out and young people skipping things like over-spending in order to get into niche circles of access to power, the recent flight of golf anime probably isn’t that surprising. Anything to get young folks to keep up the old traditions, like shogi, go, and bankrupting one’s self to golf with the boss’s boss.

And fanservice. Because clearly if you’re making an anime about a wholesome sport for “ladies and gentlemen,” that doesn’t have to be for old dudes only, you definitely want to make sure there is a long conversation between the two young females in the shower as that is the only place young women have heart-to-heart discussions. So, yeah, that kinds of sucks the sincerity right out of the series, which is otherwise really kind of nice.

Tiresome service aside, Sora-iro Utility is a shockingly nice anime. About golf.

Ratings:

Art- 7
Characters – 9
Story – 8
Service – 5
Yuri -1

Overall – 7

 





Acro Trip, Streaming on Crunchyroll

October 16th, 2024

Against a blue sky, magical girls and the evil they oppose are laid out in a way that makes it impossible to recognize which is the protagonist. Date Chizuko has been moved around a lot in her young life. When he finds herself living with her grandfather in his typical little town, Chizuko is convinced she won’t find anything interesting here…until she sees a magical girl, Berry Blossom, defeat a bad guy. Completely besotted by Berry Blossom and her skills, Chizuko thinks that maybe there’s a reason to stay here, after all, in Acro Trip, streaming on Crunchyroll.

The bad guy, Chrome of the Fossa Magna (not quite as hilarious as Kekko Kamen’s foe, Toenail of Satan, but another amusing use of anatomy) happens to live with Chizuko’s grandpa too. And so, Chrome uses his one real skill – manipulative sales – to convince Chizuko to sign on with him, so she can fight Berry Blossom herself! Yeah, this is like less skeezy Gushing Over Magical Girls…which is fine with me. I don’t need skeezy in my stupid.

The animation is very shoujo magical girl. Chrome, whose hair seems ripped from the page of Yu-Gi-Oh, is a bad guy full of pathos and incompetence. The story isn’t about to take itself seriously…except for Chizuko’s obsession with Berry Blossom, which is overplayed with an obsessive seriousness that kills the otherwise goofy vibe for me. When Berry Blossom is recovering from an injury at her house, Chizuko manages to be creepy, weird and kinda of dumb all at the same time. And, yes, I did say “at her house” because despite the fact that this is a sizable town, every one seems to end up at Chizuko’s grandpa’s house somehow. I’m not complaining, I’m just saying.

Anyway, “creepy obsession portrayed to look kind of cute and harmless” is not my favorite iteration of Yuri, but I won’t pretend it doesn’t fall under the big Umbrella o’Yuri for many.

Magical girls are all the rage this season as Bands were last. Get those boots and gloves on, put the ribbons in your hair and get ready to use magic, because we got a LOT of magical girls to talk about. And what the heck, why not?

Ratings:

Art – 5 Nothing amazing, but fine
Story – 6 Not sure if it’s going to something eventually or nothing forever. Either way is fine.
Characters – Silly and lazily developed
Service – 5 Chizuko’s crush is definitely on the servicey side
Yuri – 3 See above

Overall – 6, I guess.

A friend said that after one episode it was their favorite series of the season and I’m going to agree to disagree, but you might as well give it a watch.





Girls Band Cry, Guest Review by Cryssoberyl

October 9th, 2024
Pictured: On a blood red background, four girls spin in magical-girl power moves, color streaming from their instruments.There’s a show called Shirobako, which began airing exactly ten years ago today, as it happens. A love letter to its own industry, it’s an anime about making anime. In that show, there is a conflict between the cast about the place of 3D computer-generated imagery in anime, with many of the senior animators dead-set against its then-nascent creep into the industry. “2D anime is about hand-crafted animation, unlike 3D!” says one. “3D animation is a waste of time. There’s no flavor or style to it,” says another. I have always been in complete agreement with those characters. So when I learned that there was a 3DCG show called Girls Band Cry that was blowing up in Japan, I was unhappy. I felt like a popular 3DCG show would only accelerate its rise in anime.
 
In short, I didn’t want to like this show. I didn’t want to watch this show. But my partner Zefiris, always the more reasonable of us two, wanted to give it a chance – and well, we can add this onto the large and ever-growing pile of wonderful experiences I would not have had without her intervention. Thank you for everything and for this, dearest.
 
Those animators were wrong, and I was wrong. At least about Girls Band Cry.
 
This is both an odd show for Toei to have made, and a completely unsurprising show. Odd, because Toei is known primarily for safely commercial, mainstream, primarily children’s animation. Unsurprising, because Toei has become one of the most routine and extensive users of 3DCG in their shows; Precure ending sequences have for many years been tech demos of what 3DCG can do, at least in terms of expressiveness and fluidity in dance sequences. In short, Toei has been building their in-house 3DCG muscles for a long time, and it’s clear the company felt that it was time to show them off. The result is one of the most carefully and masterfully crafted shows you may ever see, with a staggering amount of polish and uncountable small flourishes of attention and care. This is never more true than during the show’s frequent band performance scenes, which may just be some of the most visually and cinematographically impressive scenes of that kind that anime has ever produced.
 
What Toei has done here, though, is not only to have made a great show. It is just possible they have shown us a blueprint of what the future of anime might look like. One of the most interesting parts of GBC is when it chooses to use, not 3DCG, but conventional 2D animation. This happens frequently, and at both high- and low-budget moments. Some of the most important and climactic scenes of the show are in 2D, but it is also used for many quick and simple moments when making and choreographing another 3DCG model clearly would’ve been more work. The show leverages both formats to cover, contrast, and enhance the weaknesses and strengths of the other. If this is a blend that will be adopted to a greater extent in the future, we can only be hopeful that it shines the same way as in GBC.
 
All of this is to say, the show is a clinic of technical excellence – but so far this is all just an anatomy lesson. We have yet to speak of the soul of the show, of the writing and the characters, and just as much care, thought, and effort went into crafting that spirit as did the body for it to live in.
 
The cast of GBC, and their relationships, are by turns beautifully, hideously, startlingly human. Let’s not pretend they aren’t cute anime girls, they certainly are, but they are also a diverse and thoughtfully-written group of complex, flawed, self-contradictory, self-destructive young people. The soul of the disillusioned counterculture rocker abides deeply within them, manifesting in a myriad of flavors: Nina’s adamantly inflexible self-righteousness and anger at the world for constantly disappointing her idealism; Momoka’s wounded cynicism and trust issues, still moving forward but only in a kind of bleak inertia at times; Subaru’s awareness and dislike of her own two-faced facade, though she is in fact healthier in her relationship with herself and her problems than most of the others; Tomo’s deeply antisocial perfectionist nature at odds with a desperate desire to be heard, included, and valued.
 
Finally, there is the contrasting spice to the rest of the cast, Rupa. The only true adult in the band, in a maturity sense if not an age sense, the tragedy in Rupa’s past dwarfs all the other girls’ first world problems, but her whimsy and gentle kindness is of one of those extraordinary people who were able to emerge from hardship with their wisdom and empathy tempered by the experience, to be a blessing to all who encounter them.
 
The cautious friendships between these girls, all hurting in their own ways, tentatively reaching out despite their fears of more pain and disappointment, are all the more endearing, all the more believable for their frequent clashes. The arc of this group of young women is of groping slowly toward greater understanding and greater unity, with their resonating feelings of hesitance and fear leading ultimately to an intense trust and comradery that might otherwise be impossible. There are many funny, cheerful, and feel-good moments that are all the stronger and better for the struggles betwixt.
 
And in fact, the moments when the choice of 3DCG shines the most is not in its sumptuously-wrought performances, but in these moments, the emotionally intense interchanges between characters. There is a subtlety and intimacy to the interplay of the body language at these times that 2D simply cannot replicate, and it adds so much to the effectiveness of emotional scenes. I won’t spoil, but there are many movements, touches, and gestures that you will remember later as defining moments of the show.
 
The only real weak point in this glorious mélange is that the show makes liberal use of stock “girl band drama” tropes to drive its greater ambitions. There are times, more than once, when you may roll your eyes at another “X is threatening to quit the band!” moment, or feel yourself benumbed at “will they cancel the event?!” furor. But if this is an anatomy lesson, think of these moments as the bones of the show, supporting the meat. This unassuming scaffolding is what makes the great performances, the growth of the band, and the wonderful, ugly, beautiful character moments possible.
 
But yuri, you ask? Well…in the classic sense of the word, this is a very yuri show, one that is centered on deeply emotional, consequential relationships between women. But if you are asking about romance specifically, the picture must largely be one of your own making. Nina and Momoka have a particular scene that would be easy to read in an explicitly romantic way but (as often happens with such moments in anime), the show never follows up on that moment or invites the participating characters to reflect on what it meant, leaving the viewer to fend for themselves. Of more interest to me is Tomo and Rupa, who come into the show with an established relationship of deep trust, intimacy, and mutual care which is so beautiful to see. Again nothing is ever confirmed, but it is worth noting, Rupa is more than once shown to be incredibly popular with the female fans…
 
Well, I better stop here. I haven’t even mentioned the music itself! Which is its own galaxy of interest and execution that could be talked about! Go watch the show!
 
Ratings:
 
Art – Honestly? 10. For sheer craft and the success of that craft, nothing more could reasonably be asked.
Story – 7, the show frequently resorts to the tried-and-true “band drama” playbook, but it’s all in service of the,
Characters – For me 10, a frequently irritatingly human, always supremely lovable cast of prickly young women and their relationships.
Service – 1, there are a vanishingly few number of scenes and shots that could be taken this way.
Yuri – 3, there are two couples here if you want them, but you must do the mental legwork yourself. Rupa’s a ladykiller though, that much is certain.
 
Overall – 10, an amazing achievement and its success is richly deserved.
 
Girls Band Cry is, finally and at length, available for purchase on the Microsoft Store, Amazon Video, Fandango at Home (formerly Vudu), and for free on Hoopla if you are fortunate enough to be a member of a library within the Hoopla network (unlike my local library). If this distribution seems odd, you aren’t alone in thinking so; this is not the first Toei work to have a confusing and difficult path to the West, and probably won’t be the last. But it’s here now. Take advantage of it.




Movies on a Plane Mini-reviews

September 29th, 2024

I am of an age to remember the classic Justice League cartoon, so was interested in this new version of the team. It was a bit of a readjustment with new characters and new people playing some of the superheroes, but I’m pretty flexible and picked up on who did what on the League side pretty quickly. I finished watching RWBY not too long ago, so was solid in my Remnant lore. Thus fortified, while on a plane I found myself watching a surprisingly fun cross-genre mashup. Justice League x RWBY: Super Heroes & Huntsman Part 1.

I loved the change in art for the JL to match the RWBY style and as, always, found the fight choreography well-executed. Yang’s reactions to Golden Age DC comic tropes was amusing. The main story interested me less than two side stories. I really liked Bruce Wayne and Weiss bonding. It was a good match of energies. And watching a young Bruce Wayne struggling with whether he even belonged in Gotham was pretty solid, as well. Even more powerful, I loved the bond that formed between Blake, Diana and Yang, as fellow warriors. Jaune and Jessica bonding also was pretty fantastic.

The relationship between Blake and Yang was only hinted at, which was predictable in a DC story, but still a bit meh. My one genuine complaint was Clark being a tad condescending to Ruby when he learned she was the team leader. He walks it back later, but I am never okay with any portrayal of Superman that allows him to be bitchy – he’ll always be the embodiment of tolerance and support I remember from my youth.

Overall, this was entertaining enough that when I came home, I watched Justice League x RWBY: Super Heroes & Huntsman Part 2. Again, I enjoyed the shift in art style, and had some fun with Yang’s reactions to Golden Age tropes. Blake was given a moment to indicate that she’s closer to Yang than just teammates, but no more than that. Once again, the main story was not as interesting as watching each of our characters coping with the change in circumstances. There were several important stories of loss, trauma and lonesomeness that were surfaced, that might have made for good character development scenarios, that I would have loved to see developed, but there was no time, so Flash’s trauma is set aside for “oh, it’s fine now.”

Once again, the fight scenes were great, something I’ve always come to expect from RWBY, and the main story played out as it had to. If one had little knowledge of the Justice League, but knew RWBY, I think the story would hold together, but without Ruby’s exposition at the beginning of Part Two, if one had no knowledge of Remnant, I think it might be harder to follow – unless one is good at learning from context. For instance, a line to Weiss about the loss of Atlas hits harder when you understand that Atlas was her home city, not a dog or a ship or house, or something.

For two completely different media franchises with no overlap at all, both halves of this was a solid outing.

On the way home, I watched Furiousa: A Mad Max Saga. I’ve watched all of the Mad Max movies, some of them multiple times for whatever reason. I mean, Thunderdome was really popular, okay? I had also watched Fury Road on a plane, as it happens.  It still has all the extended chase scenes through the Australian desert by fantasy vehicles as imagined by a bunch of 12 year olds and explosions and gross deaths we expect.

As Mad Max stories go, this one actually made sense, which puts it at the top of the heap. It even explained a handwave from Fury Road. Is it “good”? I dunno, but it was  a couple of hours of loud stuff and creatively awful armor. ^_^ Anya Taylor-Joy and Chris Hemsworth were interesting as absurdly pretty people playing ugly people. Alyla Browne is outstanding as young Furiousa.

I can’t help but notice that DC has done a good job getting their movies onto planes. I guess Disney is just hunkering down over their IP and demanding everyone come to them.

Well, that’s my movie consumption for 2024. ^_^