@GhaleonQ:disqus I know Anno was a key animator on the God Warrior in Nausicaa, but that's sort of the exception to the rule.

Korra just ain't the same without that playing every commercial break.

With all the surefire hits scheduled for 2015, I wonder if next year might be the year we can get some serious original breakthrough hits. There's Transcendence, Jupiter Ascending, The Boxtrolls, Book of Life, Interstellar, and Tomorrowland, plus you got non-sequel adaptations that seem to be more fun and creative…

Badass Digest comments thread: http://badassdigest.com/201…

@avclub-0f0d67e214f9fef69b278e3d08114da9:disqus Personally: I care mainly because it's been my dream job since I was a kid to work at Pixar, and now the more I hear about what's happening there it doesn't sound like such an ideal work environment anymore.

So was this really because it was a bad film (in which case how'd they
let it go this far in production) or was, as I've heard rumored, that it
was "too grown-up"? If it's the latter I'm really sad. Pixar made
Wall-E and Up, films with serious "grown-up" leanings and not the most
easily marketable that were still…

I'm kind of hoping Brad Bird goes to LAIKA. They're definitely in the quality-over-franchising mindset and someone like Bird would give them the right push to pure amazingness.

But nobody got fired from that, except maybe hack screenwriters Joel Cohen (not Coen) and Alec Sokolow, and given their other output we can say that's not a loss.

Monsters University and Brave were solid B/B+ movies. The problem is that Pixar hasn't had an A-grade movie since TS3 and it sounds like the executive meddling on Brave seriously hurt what could have been a great movie and turned it into a good but seriously flawed one.

@avclub-de9878e9d33c60263a094abc94fab3f0:disqus The first one wasn't great but it was a solid enough kids film with a clear passion for its subject matter and a fairly interesting sense of nostalgic Americana. From what it sounds like the second doesn't even have those virtues.

I guess this kind of throws a wrench in my theory that baby Finn was cryogenically frozen for 988 years because of Simon. Unless with a body frozen a soul could still travel outside that body.

Sloan seems to be somewhere on the spectrum, so I'd love it if next season she gets the chance to rip apart all the BS trying to blame Aspergers for the Newtown shooting.

Simpsons was smart to go with the Germans.

Finn and Jake are bros, and they know racism totally ain't math.

America loses the war, British Empire takes over the world, then we get giant robots and Code Geass happens.

Ren and Stimpy certainly got dark, but wasn't particularly complex.

If it's set up in a pro-bending/sports context as opposed to just fighting, then it could work.

Also, the same time CN started their whole "CN Real" experiment (which was already a couple years after they started airing live-action stuff, while Craig McCracken was still working on Fosters), they canceled Craig's Cartoonstitute program which was probably the main reason he left (they later realized the error of…

Batman: The Animated Series was 20 years ago, though of course that's a different sort of dark and complex than Adventure Time.

I'm still baffled Dexter's Lab never got a box set. At least Season 2 needs to be released on DVD (we don't really need the post-Genndy episodes).