A direct sequel to the original game, Death Adder reaquires the titular Golden Axe, forcing our trio of heroes plus a fanboy to off him again.
The animation is nice, pretty fluid given its budget. The story and characters themselves are servicieable as well.
However, the show’s irony-driven sense of humor is quite off putting and makes taking anything seriously a chore. I don’t think it was the correct way to go with this series, especially when the original games were more campy.
In Ukraine a girl is forced to live with her father because her grandomother’s ill. While she initially doesn’t like her new circumstances, she finds a cub siberian tiger (or possibly one of the last caspian tigers?) and raises it as her own, forming a strong bond with it.
The animation, done by celebrated animator Andreas Deja, is a 2D reminescent of slavic paintings, and it is rather pleasing to the eye. The story is a typical “child and X” animal stories, but it ends on a high note.
Happy & Gay is an old ruberhose animation short featuring a lesbian and a gay couple, both seeking to party at a night club but set upon by the homophobic powers of the day (ain’t it topical now…)
The animation as mentioned before is reminescent of Flestcheir animation works, and aside from the occasional odd stiffness it accurate portrays that animation style. The main characters are lovely while the homophobic antagonists get their commeuppance, an inversion of the Hays Code.
I just wish the movie did away with the black and asian racist caricatures. Yes, its period accurate but still.
It’s been a while since I did a review on MTG critters, and as Reality Fracture’s story has wrapped up I feel like reviewing the elder sphinxes from the set (which didn’t appear in the story proper; such a waste).
Denlizore Fatehold
We start with the white/blue sphinx, the dean of Hexhaven’s Fatehold. Wheres Arcavios’ Lorehold focuses on the conflict between history as random (red) and history as a march towards perfection (white), Fatehold takes the latter position and doubles down on it, as this college specialises in altering the future.
The design of Denzilore is rather abstract, having wings made of scrolls and three books as heads, that the legends article informs look towards the past, present and future. The elder sphinxes have arms in addition to their lion legs, making them a kind of centaur; this is a design element I’m ambivalent about.
Uldaros Theorix
The blue/black sphinx represents the college of Theorix. Whereas Quandrix revolved around the conflict of applying mathematics to the real world (green) or to study their abstractions (blue), Theorix doubles down on the latter, creating downright unnatural equations that summon monsters from other dimmensions.
I like Uldaros more cheetah/antelope like body, which contrasts heavily with the humanoid hands. The wings are basically plates and a tad less elegant than Denzilore’s scroll wings, but they too communicate that these sphinxes aren’t natural beings.
Ingris Stingerquill
The opposite of Arcavios Silverquill, which focuses on the conflict of communication being used to uplift others (white) or denigrade others (black), Stingerquill is all about being the meanest, most hurtful motherfucker around. Ingris does have flavor text in Break Under Pressure in that its implied she’s a sadist, but her role is to make sure her students can defend themselves, making it a case of a “not fully evil” black character.
Her’s is by far my favourite design. The inverted batwings add a ton of originality and personality to this constantly cursing mad gal.
Aerid Konstrari
Our only non-binary sphinx (come to think of it, being in red/green they’re the furthest away from Jace’s blue alignment. Interesting…) rules over the Konstrari. Whereas the Prismari debated about art being perfection (blue) or emotional self expression (red), the Konstrari double down on art being expressive by focusing on constructing artifact beasts.
Aerid is by far the most bestial of the sphinxes and the one I consider closest to what a sphinx should look like. Their hands are even barely noticeable, being part of their mane. The wings are still rather weird, and seem to be made of wood.
Kwia Vigorbloom
Our final sphinx rules over Vigorbloom. Wheres Witherbloom was about nature being defined by death (black) or by propagation (green), Vigorbloom doubles down on the later, since Vigorbloom college openly claims to be about “invasive healing” and its students “heal” others by surgically grafting plants to the poor bastards. Of course the primarily white-aligned faction is the most terrifying of the bunch.
Kwia herself is creepy in a biblically accurate angel way. She has these tiny arms in constrast to her leonine lower body, has a face concealed among strutures which I can only assume are plant tumours and her wings are malformed rafts of vegetation. Ingris is my favourite, but Kwia comes a second close.
Dang! follows three Chinese american siblings, two of which screw ups and another on the process of becoming a screw up as well. Their hijinks revolve around trying to get a stable job, crushes and the like.
Humor wise its a generic adult show, albeit not very crass. The animation is where it shines, as it has cute character designs and fluyidity rarely seen in american adult animated shows.
Aethersworn is a science fantasy series inspired by iranian mythology with LGBT themes. It centers around the crew of the titular ship, as they retrieve an artifact sought after for destruction by the sun shah, who believes its ending will bring about the end of all suffering. Yet, it is a religious relic, and the crew won’t give up without a fight.
Another post by an idea by Pennycuick, the “flying squirrel barrier” is a hypothetical limitation to gliding mammals. Basically, a gliding mammal can only specialize so much until adaptations for aerial locomotion limit their abilities to climb. This has historically been used to explain why bats and volaticotheres are the only flying mammals despiste gliding having evolved multiple times.
A recent study studied the aerodynamics of several gliding mammals and found that colugos occupy an in-between state, above the barrier but still unable to develop powered flight, which may be an additional barrier.
In general, this relies on the assumption flight evolved from gliding. The basalmost bat Onychonycteris finneyi does have proportions similar to gliding mammals, and another study proposed that a denser atmosphere in the Eocene allowed this barrier to be crossed. These two studies thus paint a picture that gliding animals are limited by a barrier very rarely crossed and thus there are few “in between” states between gliding and flying.
I’m not fully convinced that flight evolved from gliding, as bat flight has alternatively been suggested to develop from fluttering. Fluttering is a rare enough behaviour that it would explain why flying is rare in tetrapods while gliding isn’t, and is seen with sifakas and likely the ancestors of birds, pterosaurs and other archosaurian flyers like Microraptor.
After enduring countless failures by ACME products, Wile E. Coyote decides to hire a lawyer to make a formal legal complain against the corporation. In the process, a dark secret is revealed…
The animation and live action incorporation is almost seamless. True, most of the animal is cel-shaded CGI, but there are legitimate moments of true 2D animation and it’s faultless all the same.
The humor is par excellance, as is the drama. There is an undercurrent of toons being second class citizens, which make the entertaining villains also genuinely insidious at times. What better way than to criticise the company that nearly buried this movie?
Hypothetical proto-bird patagia model from Your Dinosaurs Are Wrong.
It’s been a while since I talked about flight in dinosaurs, and discussions on it go increasingly polarizing on whereas it was developed once and lost multiple times or if birds are just one product of many flight developments. I myself find easily swooned by either argument, so here’s something less controversial.
In Modelling the Flying Bird, C.J. Pennycuick proposes that the patagia seen in modern birds are the remnants of a full bat-like wing that degenerated over time. This would make the ancestral flying dinosaurs more in line with other flying and gliding vertebrates that usually start with patagia, only to be an unique case where the patagia is replaced by another airfoil.
This hypothesis is perhaps vindicated in the discovery of membranous winged scansoriopterygids, which depending on the study are either basal avialans, basal oviraptorosaurs or ancestral maniraptors, putting them in a basal position in relation to dinosaurs with feathered wings. We now know Caudipteryxis secondarily flightless, so the idea of volant ancestral oviraptorosaurs is particularly tempting with their discovery.
I myself doubt this model, however, as there is no other case of flying vertebrates replacing their patagia with other structures. Unambiguously flightless dinosaurs like Psittacosaurus also have patagia, so the development of patagia in bird wings and the more extensive patagia of scansoriopterygids could just have simply developed from a plesiomorphic smaller patagium.
