i know i was grumping about naive female characters the other day but now i gotta grump about how naivety in male characters is allowed to be endearing but in female characters it’s either a flaw or it’s uncomfortably sexualized and anyway! fuck that noise
When a storyteller sets up something as a mystery, they are telling the audience that the answer to that mystery is important to the narrative. This is why some “twist endings” work and others don’t. If the revelation changes the situation or the audience’s perception of it, then that’s a satisfying reveal. One needs only to look at, say, any given Hercule Poirot story to see this. All the pieces fit together once you know the answer.
On the other hand, lets say you have a story where, for instance, a major hero is struck dead by lightning in the second act. And when people go “hey, what’s with this lightning bolt out of nowhere?” and then you say “its a mystery!”, you’re telling people its not just a random event. It meant something to the story. If you knew where the lightning bolt came from, that part of the story would make sense. That’s the understanding you’re coming to with the audience. So when you go and say “the lightning bolt happened because an un-involved monarch butterfly flapped its wings in Tibet” you haven’t given an answer. You’ve given an explanation. It tells you why there was a lightning bolt, but functionally its no different than saying the character was unlucky or it was Tuesday.
There’s no answer. No meaning.No agency.
Which is fine, so long as you don’t pretend it was a mystery in the first place,
Milt Kahl gave the final look to all deer characters, including adolescent Bambi. He ended up animating most of his personality scenes, including the section where Bambi meets Feline as an adult. As usual, the anatomy in his drawings feels rock solid while offering possibilities for unrealistic, even cartoony animation. Milt’s animation of Bambi following Feline through the clouds has nothing to do with realistic deer motion, but it interprets instead the dreamlike state of falling in love.