(apologies for the length, im pretty passionate about animation)

when i look at that poster and the animation my thoughts are immediately "this looks like Sony Pictures' style" and ironically you of course bring up Into the Spiderverse, which famously has a very particular artstyle which doesnt follow Sony's usual pattern, and has honestly made me wonder why sometimes because, like. i imagine, in good faith at least, that a reason the same studios get locked into a certain style is because that's what they're good at, and thats the particular brand of "not quite disney, not quite pixar" the actual character and background designers have for styles. Into the Spiderverse is a weird exception because, well, we all know that artists can have multiple styles - but for various money related reasons, western studios won't usually do it. i'll get back to that

there's a lot here that I'm not going to try to respond to in too much depth cause the history and context is interesting but sort of tangential to the stuff I'm most interested in (the specific choice of aesthetic for a Discworld adaptation, stylization choices as thematically meaningful, and uh I guess the sort of not directly stated frustration with a lot of "animation is for everyone!" discourse). I do want to shout out The Bad Guys though as another movie recently that really did something different with 3d in the sense that it seemed MUCH more interested in very strong keyframe drawings rather than necessarily a ton of fluid motion. which isn't new of course to traditional animation--I think of Chuck Jones every time I watch bits of The Bad Guys. but it feels like another attempt to push 3d in a bit of a different direction, bolstered by really excellent character designs, and it feels like the aesthetic very much fits a world that's surely influenced by stuff like Lupin III.

I wanted to note that it's not just darkness or violence per se that I was interested in but specifically the function of topics like mortality and frailty and humanity in Discworld. it's hard to put this into words I guess for someone unfamiliar with the books, or at least I'm struggling to do it... but like, I keep thinking about the recurring motif in the Tiffany Aching books of "who cares for the elderly when they can't take care of themselves anymore", for example. this isn't about violence, exactly, but it is about bodies and aging and awareness of human frailty?

and what I'm trying to express is that I think a style that's sort of halfassedly aping disney aesthetics for, as you say, corporate marketing and production reasons can't really... capture that weight. characters in the trailer feel like if you dropped them from a window they'd make a cartoon splat sound and go "oof" at worst. and I'm not sure how to connect that to that sense of frailty and mortality. what I mean when I say Kidby's character designs feel like they have bones is just that: he's got a good anatomical sense that I think even when he's stylizing the hell out of characters never lets you forget that this is a person with a body. [scrolls back up and looks at that girl's toothpick legs again] [scrolls back down] I Do Not Think This Is True Of The Current Most Popular And Dominant 3D Animation Style. :I I keep trying to imagine stuff that happens in these books in this style and it just ties my brain into knots! and it's too bad because I think the books can be adapted well and deserve to be not necessarily because discworld is in vogue or whatever (though... in fairness the book only came out in 2001, the Tiffany Aching series ran literally up till Terry's death) but because they're valuable stories in their own right.

um and I guess at heart that's a big part of my frustration with a lot of the sort of movement on places like twitter to say that "animation is for everyone". like... yeah, totally! every time I see that kinda thing trending I click on it hoping for the best... and then every time I get a bunch of people posting screenshots of Frozen and Moana and uh whatever the latest shonen du jour is. and it's sorta like... now wait are these folks saying "let's celebrate the breadth of animation" or are they saying "I will never update or expand my tastes and you're oppressing me for suggesting I should"? lol. so that's where my frustration with the discourse about how Animation Isn't Just For Kids Anymore comes from, this sense that this feels a bit like a ploy to just expand the buying base for what was already being produced. though I guess it could be worse. we could be getting the animation equivalent of Identity Crisis I suppo- AH FUCK I just remembered Invincible exists. god DAMMIT. anyway yeah I just feel like broaching the subject of "beyond 'does this look good' can we see that stylistic choices might carry weight and a lot of the popular ones right now undermine their subject" is a hard sell, in the same way that talking about less famous or popular or recent animation feels like kind of a hard sell.

but maybe that's just Online Fandom in general now lol.