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"I was just yelling at my ... mother's urn!"
I rewatched Megamind while working on comic pages tonight and I still just love that movie so much. I know it's not perfect, but nothing is, and I keep forgetting it was made almost a decade ago. The animation holds up well, the music's great, and aside from the fact that I think we all know I'm a sucker from a redemption arc, I tend to forget just how good the movie's twists are. You can obviously see the general direction that it's going from a mile away, but a lot of the smaller twists along the way are just genuinely really well done and surprising.
Also, I absolutely love that both the movie's main (eventual) antagonist and main (eventual) hero/love interest are a very similar kind of lonely nerd with a crush on the hot girl, and I love how the movie explicitly contrasts the way they both deal with Roxanne: the way they do or don't project onto her, the way they befriend her, and especially the way they deal with rejection: Hal ignores her numerous attempts to gently detach him and then more explicitly tell him she's not interested, whereas Megamind flat-out leaves when she tells him to, and only comes back because he needs her help saving the city, but with no romantic strings attached.
I just ... really like this movie, and I always forget how much I like it when I haven't watched it in awhile. I like the way it deals with romance, and heroism, and potential and self-determinism. I appreciate that it doesn't end up on either extreme of "how people treat us determines what we become" or "you can be absolutely anything you want to be" but instead ends up in an interesting middle ground where it's actually a little of both.
... plus, I can't think of any other media I've seen, certainly no other kids' movie, that not only shows that thing where someone who's kind of socially sheltered/isolated tends to pronounce words phonetically because they've never actually heard other people say them, but does it in a sympathetic way.
Also, I absolutely love that both the movie's main (eventual) antagonist and main (eventual) hero/love interest are a very similar kind of lonely nerd with a crush on the hot girl, and I love how the movie explicitly contrasts the way they both deal with Roxanne: the way they do or don't project onto her, the way they befriend her, and especially the way they deal with rejection: Hal ignores her numerous attempts to gently detach him and then more explicitly tell him she's not interested, whereas Megamind flat-out leaves when she tells him to, and only comes back because he needs her help saving the city, but with no romantic strings attached.
I just ... really like this movie, and I always forget how much I like it when I haven't watched it in awhile. I like the way it deals with romance, and heroism, and potential and self-determinism. I appreciate that it doesn't end up on either extreme of "how people treat us determines what we become" or "you can be absolutely anything you want to be" but instead ends up in an interesting middle ground where it's actually a little of both.
... plus, I can't think of any other media I've seen, certainly no other kids' movie, that not only shows that thing where someone who's kind of socially sheltered/isolated tends to pronounce words phonetically because they've never actually heard other people say them, but does it in a sympathetic way.
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That is great. In written fiction, I have encountered it in Theodore Sturgeon's Venus Plus X (1960).
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I remember that fondly about the movie too! (And my kids still do the “spiyayder” thing :)
IIRC another book that does this, or at least talks about this, is Terry Pratchett’s earlier Tiffany books. And a sympathetic character mispronounces words in Sarah Rees Brennan’s In Other Lands, though there it’s less a question of him being socially isolated and more that he is turning to reading these kinds of books for the first time and so has a learning curve.
(I really like this trope, and apparently tend to notice / remember it :)
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I like this trope too. I'll have to keep an eye out for it now.
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Which I'm commenting about because I'd be interested in hearing about the ways in which the movie DOESN'T do that, if it doesn't? Because people who like it seem to REALLY like it, but that on its own hasn't been enough to counter the wariness (people loved The Lego Movie too so like), but on the other hand that doesn't seem like the kind of thing that would appeal to you either, so I'm curious.
(nb: this is meant totally in a "hn, maybe this isn't actually something I'd hate?" way, not in a DEFEND YOUR TASTES!!!! way at all - I'm p sure you know I'm cool with "people love what they love and no justification is needed" and like if it is that and you like it anyway/because of that is also cool, no harm done, but I figure It's The Internet, I should probably clarify.)
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But I also really dislike the "it's not black and white morality, it's WHITE AND BLACK morality!" thing (it was one thing that put me off Captain Marvel somewhat), and one of the reasons I love this movie is that it doesn't do that. The setup kind of looks like it's doing that and then it veers off in a completely different direction instead.
For anyone reading the comments who hasn't seen the movie, MEGAMIND SPOILERS FOLLOW ... (Not movie-ruining spoilers, though; I mean, most of this you'll probably figure out pretty quickly.)
The basic setup is a riff on Superman's origin story: both the hero and the villain are from different exploding planets whose escape pods crash-land on Earth, one falling into comfortable, privileged circumstances, the other (Megamind's) landing in the city jail. Megamind ends up a social outcast at school and decides to embrace it and just be evil, dammit, since everyone thinks he is anyway, while the other kid turns out to be charismatic and a natural hero type. As adults, they've settled into a Superman-and-Lex-Luthor kind of dynamic, until Megamind accidentally kills his rival and finds himself in the awkward position that HE FINALLY WON and he didn't actually expect to and oh shit what does he do with his life now. He always took for granted (or more accurately, convinced himself) that he never had a choice about being evil because he was The Bad One and the other guy was always around to stop him anyway, and now suddenly he does have a choice and the only person stopping him is now him. So he ends up in a downward spiral of bad decisions as he tries to hold onto his mental image of himself as The Evil One and attempts to find someone new to outsource his self-control to, i.e. he needs a new hero to be The One Who Stops Him.
(There are also a couple of entire other subplots I'm not really touching on; I actually really liked the romance in this one, for example.)
But basically it's not "the villains were right/the heroes were evil all along" so much as a matter of getting locked into a toxic self-image because of things that happened in childhood, and then learning as an adult that you don't have to remain that person just because other people say so and because you've always thought that was who you were.
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Thaaat does in fact sound way more interesting than what it looks like/what most people end up describing it as in a spoiler-avoidy way. I shall have to keep that in mind. Thank you!
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There are definitely much worse kids' movies she could have gotten hooked on!
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ETA: Don't get spoiled if you can help it. The twists in this movie are really a lot of fun.
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I love that it's not a complete flip, like, the Superman analog isn't a bad guy, Megamind isn't the hero of his own story but has to become the hero.
And also, yeah, it's one of the most savage skewerings on the nice-guy thing I've ever seen, it's so satisfying on that end.
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Yessss, this is honestly one of my favorite things about it - Metro Man really IS a nice guy! Megamind really IS a villain and has to figure out how not to be one. It's not a movie that's about flipping black-and-white morality for white-and-black, it's more about the characters learning how to be people instead of being stuck in the roles they were cast in. It's just such a satisfying movie.
I was surprised how much I had forgotten about it despite having only seen it a couple of years ago. The plot has a lot of really fun, unexpected turns.
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(I love how the superhero mythos, and especially the Superman mythos, is so embedded in our cultural consciousness that even if DC maintains an iron grip on the trademark names, the stories themselves are so well known that anyone can do a pastiche and be confident that the audience is going to get it...)
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Yes! I really appreciate that; I think what I don't like about the role-swap "heroes are villains and vice versa" type of superhero story is that it feels like a "gotcha" on the audience -- you liked this character? You bought into the myth? Haha, joke's on you! Whereas this movie really doesn't feel that way. It's about expanding the characters beyond their roles rather than implying that the audience is naive or stupid for believing in them.
And the one real villain of the movie becomes that way through his own choices; he could at any point have done what Megamind does (become less entitled, give Roxy agency, use his powers to help people instead of boosting his own ego) but he doesn't, it's selfish decisions all the way down.
(I love how the superhero mythos, and especially the Superman mythos, is so embedded in our cultural consciousness that even if DC maintains an iron grip on the trademark names, the stories themselves are so well known that anyone can do a pastiche and be confident that the audience is going to get it...)
Haha, I know! It was also kind of mind-bending to watch this movie and remember that it came out before the MCU got big, when Superman was the hero that most people primarily think of when they think of superheroes.
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"HUGS"
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Really sorry for being so unclear!
*hugs*
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Maybe we should rewatch. I bet Progeny doesn't even remember it at this point; maybe we can get her to watch at some point with us.
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