I Would Suggest He Do The Same For You, But You're Already Cold Hearted

She wouldn't have if she knew that Trisha was gonna be her mother

Nah, I just know the sound of someone getting the crap kicked outta them when I hear it. Just wanted to embarrass you :)

Not an actual tooka but rate my tooka?

Dark markings over half his face. Always looking up at me. Maintains a good attitude despite the circumstances. Absolutely don't need another one of these, 4/10

This is the greatest thing I've ever seen and it made my day

Op’s caption was: Single father supports his sons :)

Rex: Nothing in life is free.

Padmé: Love is free!

Ahsoka: Adventure is free.

Obi-Wan: Knowledge is free.

Anakin: Everything is free if you take it without paying.

“For some time, Hollywood has marketed family entertainment according to a two-pronged strategy, with cute stuff and kinetic motion for the kids and sly pop-cultural references and tame double entendres for mom and dad. Miyazaki has no interest in such trickery, or in the alternative method, most successfully deployed in Pixar features like Finding Nemo, Toy Story 3 and Inside/Out, of blending silliness with sentimentality.”

“Most films made for children are flashy adventure-comedies. Structurally and tonally, they feel almost exactly like blockbusters made for adults, scrubbed of any potentially offensive material. They aren’t so much made for children as they’re made to be not not for children. It’s perhaps telling that the genre is generally called “Family,” rather than “Children’s.” The films are designed to be pleasing to a broad, age-diverse audience, but they’re not necessarily specially made for young minds.”

“My Neighbor Totoro, on the other hand, is a genuine children’s film, attuned to child psychology. Satsuki and Mei move and speak like children: they run and romp, giggle and yell. The sibling dynamic is sensitively rendered: Satsuki is eager to impress her parents but sometimes succumbs to silliness, while Mei is Satsuki’s shadow and echo (with an independent streak). But perhaps most uniquely, My Neighbor Totoro follows children’s goals and concerns. Its protagonists aren’t given a mission or a call to adventure - in the absence of a larger drama, they create their own, as children in stable environments do. They play.”

“Consider the sequence just before Mei first encounters Totoro. Satsuki has left for school, and Dad is working from home, so Mei dons a hat and a shoulder bag and tells her father that she’s “off to run some errands” - The film is hers for the next ten minutes, with very little dialogue. She’s seized by ideas, and then abandons them; her goals switch from moment to moment. First she wants to play “flower shop” with her dad, but then she becomes distracted by a pool full of tadpoles. Then, of course, she needs a bucket to catch tadpoles in - but the bucket has a hole in it. And on it goes, but we’re never bored, because Mei is never bored.”

“[…] You can only ride a ride so many times before the thrill wears off. But a child can never exhaust the possibilities of a park or a neighborhood or a forest, and Totoro exists in this mode. The film is made up of travel and transit and exploration, set against lush, evocative landscapes that seem to extend far beyond the frame. We enter the film driving along a dirt road past houses and rice paddies; we follow Mei as she clambers through a thicket and into the forest; we walk home from school with the girls, ducking into a shrine to take shelter from the rain; we run past endless green fields with Satsuki as she searches for Mei. The psychic center of Totoro’s world is an impossibly giant camphor tree covered in moss. The girls climb over it, bow to it as a forest-guardian, and at one point fly high above it, with the help of Totoro. Much like Totoro himself, the tree is enormous and initially intimidating, but ultimately a source of shelter and inspiration.”

“My Neighbor Totoro has a story, but it’s the kind of story that a child might make up, or that a parent might tell as a bedtime story, prodded along by the refrain, “And then what happened?” This kind of whimsicality is actually baked into Miyazaki’s process: he begins animating his films before they’re fully written. Totoro has chase scenes and fantastical creatures, but these are flights of fancy rooted in a familiar world. A big part of being a kid is watching and waiting, and Miyazaki understands this. When Mei catches a glimpse of a small Totoro running under her house, she crouches down and stares into the gap, waiting. Miyazaki holds on this image: we wait with her. Magical things happen, but most of life happens in between those things—and there is a kind of gentle magic, for a child, in seeing those in-betweens brought to life truthfully on screen.”

A.O. Scott and Lauren Wilford on “My Neighbor Totoro”, 2017.  

Yes. Just yes

yknow what i think the clones would really like?

can you imagine? someone would tie like fifty of them together and then drag it across the ship. they’d be in helmets, shoes, hanging from their blasters. Ahsoka makes one move all by itself and the boys start screaming. Hardcase has like twenty peeking out of his pack “so they can breathe.” Kix bans them from the medbay until someone lays one in a cot under the blanket like its getting treatment and just breaks down laughing/crying. Fives starts a game of seeing how many worms they can tape to Rex without him noticing.

Rex, with a cape of worm-on-a-strings: what’s wrong is there something on my face?

Cody, deadpan, about to pass out from not laughing: nothing

Didn't say no

The lab's all set up, boss.

Actually, Hunter's the boss. I merely chauffeur everyone, design everything, and devise ingenious solutions to all of our problems.

You assume I have more than one brain cell that I have to share with my friends? Also intriguing

Hardcase: if any of us were to turn evil, who would be the scariest?

Fives: hmmm, probably-

Echo: Kix.

Jesse: Kix?

Echo: He could kill every single one of us and make it look like an accident.

Kix: *sitting in the corner* Echo is the only one I'd spare-

How can you support this show

Creating content does not imply unequivocal support. But I'll bite. Despite its many sins, particularly with regard to representation (which is not unique among Lucasfilm stories - please read that linked post if you haven't before), I would ask, after viewing the show:

💀 Could you have more compassion for a veteran struggling to transition, recalling the whiplash of a tremendously capable Sergeant suddenly barely being able to feed his family while they live out of their car?

✋🏾 Could you more readily accept that trauma recovery is a fractious, nonlinear path, and "grumpiness" might actually herald the affected regaining sense of self by re-asserting their commitment to justice?

⚡ Could you have more patience with people whose brains work a little differently, appreciating that a blunt and unemotional communication style might not belie callousness, but represent their genuine effort to connect?

💣 Could you create more space to recognize that a scarred and physically intimidating person might also have the greatest capacity for gentleness, kindness, and emotional intelligence?

⌖ Could you offer more grace to people who are difficult to reach, because perhaps a facade of cool, unaffected competence punctuated by a quick temper is a natural reaction to achievement-based acceptance culture and the fear that if we lose control even for a moment, the consequences will be our fault?

None of this changes anything. It doesn't redeem the show's inherent issues; in fact, the good qualities only stoke my frustration because a viewer has to claw through some pretty devastating failures to see them. But that trade-off is not an anomaly in television, media, or frankly in the world. The meaningful themes that make The Bad Batch more than pretty pixels still persist. I'll leave it there.

rb this post to give the person u rbed it from a pretty fall leaf :]