If you want the internet to stop censoring queer content, FOSTA-SESTA has to go.
If you want tumblr and other websites to have porn again, FOSTA-SESTA has to go.
If you want algospeak to stop being the norm, FOSTA-SESTA HAS TO GO.
There is NOTHING that tumblr staff can do without this law being gone.
There is NOTHING that any moderator, website, or app can do without Net Neutrality being reinstated and iron-clad again.
Did you all forget what caused the porn ban in the first place? It was not a random decision every company made overnight.
It was FOSTA-SESTA.
Freedom of speech is called Net Neutrality online, and until 2018, Net Neutrality was sacrosanct.
We must have Net Neutrality back if we are to have the freedom to speak online.
If you are queer, you must fight for Net Neutrality. If you have opinions about anything, you must fight for your right to say them. FOSTA-SESTA TOOK THAT FROM YOU. TOOK IT FROM US ALL.
If you want things to change, don’t whine to staff on tumblr, don’t boycott Tiktok.
you must get political. you must organise to remove FOSTA-SESTA from the books. You must clamour, and holler, and write your politicians and raise up the voices of sex workers and VOTE to protect your free speech.
Pornography and sex work are inextricable from freedom of speech. The right of pornography and sex work to exist is inextricable from the rights of queer folks. If you do not fight to protect your right to ‘dirty books’ and uphold 'rule 34’ they will come after YOU next. They already are coming after queers just like they always do when a ban on porn is involved! It will escalate until it comes after EVERYONE.
I cannot emphasise enough that all this censorship increasing since 2018 is connected to the porn ban. It is the same oppressive and harmful legislation causing it.
I may be the single worst and dumbest artist to have to tackle this subject, but bear with me.
I will defend animation to my dying breath, eveniftoanextent. But feature animation is such a precious medium to me, a medium that is widely mishandled and misinterpreted by industries and filmmakers alike and thus demands care and attention, as at its most remarkable, which very often is from outside the studio system, it more than live-action and at times more than short-form arts/entertainment feels like comfort food with practically no sudden pause. I myself take occasional interest in short films whenever I’m up to it, but it’s features that are my primary focus, because it’s twice as exciting to escape to a whole world conjured up by hundreds of incredible animators for an hour or longer, no less projected onto a giant screen.
If a festival taking place as far from home as
Dalston Kingsland
curates an animated feature, that’s nearly always a priority for me. And yet, the world of animated cinema is so vast, and not even most people I know in the community outside of journalism can or want to see past the American products that are so easy for them to track down.
Of course, it’s easy to understand why: many independent and foreign films like the ones listed in this comic strip are hardly likely to play in their area, they’re often buried rock bottom within the depths of digital platforms even on their first day of availability, numerous countries including the UK* can’t even squeeze most of them into the theatrical window, and personally, what do I know? I can’t convince the entire mainstream public that they’ll adore the filmography of Pedro Costa as much as I do. International animation can’t appeal to everyone when it isn’t geared towards a wide, universal audience; Klaus is an Emperor’s New Groove esque comedy about a postman who ended up being Santa’s little helper, I Lost My Body is a French surrealist drama about a disillusioned stalker cutting off his hand that turns sentient and ends up trying to better himself after snapping a pigeon’s neck. Mainstream animation, whether it be western or Japanese, is generally easy to talk about and dissect every frame of, specifically easier to meme (sometimes even too easy to meme). But some fans have never logged a Ghibli film in their lives!
Not to mention, and I’m off on a kind of protest here, that beautifully traditionally/stop-motion/stylistically animated films from across the globe are receiving the theatrical treatment every year and yet it’ll usually only take an Oscar nomination for audiences with such a demand for something different to discover them (unless you’re
I Lost My Body, even if you win the independent Annie). As addressed by The Royal Ocean Film Society in his video The Current State of Animation, 2018 saw 11 major studio releases in the United States and a whopping 32+ non-major/independent current releases
(not mentioned in the video are Big Fish & Begonia, Liz and the Blue Bird and Tito and the Birds).
The major releases included Incredibles 2, Teen Titans Go! and Into the Spider-Verse, but while the minor slate was largely dominated by Japanese animation which boasts almost as broad a presence amongst the community if not equally, it brought more original, non-IP ideas to the table than the entire Hollywood slate. And given how Spider-Verse is arguably the best film of 2018 (and I’ve seen hundreds from that year), it’s hard not to just cherish a big league out of all of these. But just because the underdogs may be inferior and harder to have a humorous discussion about, doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be treated like the antithesis to the Hollywood problem that they are and just not worth at least bringing up.
GKIDS, the latest distributor to hold the US rights to Studio Ghibli’s filmography, have been responsible for handling a good many of these minor releases, and no other distributor, not even Netflix, has committed so much so devotedly for the medium as a whole. They founded the Animation is Film Festival. They championed the best of their acquisitions to awards status and so often has it worked. They have the most inclusive library of animation of any independent distributor in the world. They’re the answer to all your quarrels. Browse their library and feel that inspiration kick in.
I wish not to sound stern or force readers to start watching and promoting animation they may not be interested in, but there are better ways to cherish the art form than fixating exclusively on how the cold brew at no point hits in Arctic Dogs or how Playmobil is deservedly Hollywood’s greatest loss since Coupon: The Movie. Animation is not just for kids, but if the familiar fare is all you’re concerned about, which is usually geared towards families, then I would leave the choice up to you, but if you’re also one of the most trusted sources for animation fandom and buzz on whatever social media platform you’re most hooked on and you claim animation to be your source of power, isn’t that also part of the problem?
Because by ignoring the expanded world of animated kino GKIDS is trying to introduce to you and talking about/paying for only the boss babies and the Sherlock Gnomeses, you’re refusing to expose an adventurous community to some of the most subversive, original animated films available right now. Search around for foreign and independent animation, buy/rent/stream what you can find. If that’s hard for you in your country, get yourself a American account on iTunes and buy a regional gift card. Keep a look out for festival screenings and releases in your area when it’s safe to go outside again. Follow outlets like Animation Magazine and *sigh* yes, even Cartoon Brew outside of Amid’s constant hate-spewing. Annecy has transferred the majority of their 2020 programme to streaming, and a world of animation in short and feature form will be at your fingertips for a €15 subscription!
Support all good animation!
The Bears’ Famous Invasion of Sicily (2019, Lorenzo Mattotti)
*This brings me to the sort of exposure independent feature animation gets where I live, which only adds to the frustration. The UK has suspicious lack of a market for alternative animation beyond festivals and the bottom of the VOD bin. No matter what the issue, and unless they are Have a Nice Day (MUBI) or Tehran Taboo (Peccadillo), no company here is as daring as GKIDS or Shout to champion independent animated cinema that is not Japanese or geared towards children in the whimsical sense, or at all, not even on demand. Not even StudioCanal, beyond giving light to, as far as foreign-language films are concerned, the work of Benjamin Renner. Helping less is the sudden disinterest taken by Soda Pictures, which used to be the last hope we had, bringing to our shores Mary and Max, Tatsumi and Tales of the Night, even hosting a special children’s club that brought Rémi Chayé’s Long Way North (a must-watch with Chayé’s new Calamity Jane film on the horizon) to cinemas that wouldn’t have any other excuse to play it before stopping at My Life as a Courgette and folding into Thunderbird.
Curzon Home Cinema and Ourscreen included the mesmerising Coco alternative The Day of the Crows in their libraries for a brief period, but for years since I thought I’d never come across it again until discovering it on little-known VOD service FilmDoo, accessible everywhere in the world but North America. Heck, not even an Oscar nomination could convince any UK distributor to pick up Boy & the World even after it screened at the Barbican a year before the campaign began. If not for Netflix and their UK theatrical deal, I Lost My Body would be another part of the problem, which is saying so much since this is as fantastical and artful and complex as you can get with many of the features that have a hard time trying to capture the attention of UK buyers.
If you live in the UK and you’re having the same problem as I, then search far and wide; check film festivals when cinemas are open again or even online to see if they are screening anything animated. As a resident nearby London, I will always go for the animated features selected for the London Film Festival, I attend the London International Animation Festival every year usually for the occasional feature (I had to travel as far as Dalston Kingsland to see last year’s most staggering cinematic solo act Away and Japan’s one-hour oddball On-Gaku: Our Sound), and Ciné Lumière is more keen on screening European animation than any other cinema in the country. Don’t be stick guy. Explore away!
I may be the single worst and dumbest artist to have to tackle this subject, but bear with me.
I will defend animation to my dying breath, eveniftoanextent. But feature animation is such a precious medium to me, a medium that is widely mishandled and misinterpreted by industries and filmmakers alike and thus demands care and attention, as at its most remarkable, which very often is from outside the studio system, it more than live-action and at times more than short-form arts/entertainment feels like comfort food with practically no sudden pause. I myself take occasional interest in short films whenever I’m up to it, but it’s features that are my primary focus, because it’s twice as exciting to escape to a whole world conjured up by hundreds of incredible animators for an hour or longer, no less projected onto a giant screen.
If a festival taking place as far from home as
Dalston Kingsland
curates an animated feature, that’s nearly always a priority for me. And yet, the world of animated cinema is so vast, and not even most people I know in the community outside of journalism can or want to see past the American products that are so easy for them to track down.
Of course, it’s easy to understand why: many independent and foreign films like the ones listed in this comic strip are hardly likely to play in their area, they’re often buried rock bottom within the depths of digital platforms even on their first day of availability, numerous countries including the UK* can’t even squeeze most of them into the theatrical window, and personally, what do I know? I can’t convince the entire mainstream public that they’ll adore the filmography of Pedro Costa as much as I do. International animation can’t appeal to everyone when it isn’t geared towards a wide, universal audience; Klaus is an Emperor’s New Groove esque comedy about a postman who ended up being Santa’s little helper, I Lost My Body is a French surrealist drama about a disillusioned stalker cutting off his hand that turns sentient and ends up trying to better himself after snapping a pigeon’s neck. Mainstream animation, whether it be western or Japanese, is generally easy to talk about and dissect every frame of, specifically easier to meme (sometimes even too easy to meme). But some fans have never logged a Ghibli film in their lives!
Not to mention, and I’m off on a kind of protest here, that beautifully traditionally/stop-motion/stylistically animated films from across the globe are receiving the theatrical treatment every year and yet it’ll usually only take an Oscar nomination for audiences with such a demand for something different to discover them (unless you’re
I Lost My Body, even if you win the independent Annie). As addressed by The Royal Ocean Film Society in his video The Current State of Animation, 2018 saw 11 major studio releases in the United States and a whopping 32+ non-major/independent current releases
(not mentioned in the video are Big Fish & Begonia, Liz and the Blue Bird and Tito and the Birds).
The major releases included Incredibles 2, Teen Titans Go! and Into the Spider-Verse, but while the minor slate was largely dominated by Japanese animation which boasts almost as broad a presence amongst the community if not equally, it brought more original, non-IP ideas to the table than the entire Hollywood slate. And given how Spider-Verse is arguably the best film of 2018 (and I’ve seen hundreds from that year), it’s hard not to just cherish a big league out of all of these. But just because the underdogs may be inferior and harder to have a humorous discussion about, doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be treated like the antithesis to the Hollywood problem that they are and just not worth at least bringing up.
GKIDS, the latest distributor to hold the US rights to Studio Ghibli’s filmography, have been responsible for handling a good many of these minor releases, and no other distributor, not even Netflix, has committed so much so devotedly for the medium as a whole. They founded the Animation is Film Festival. They championed the best of their acquisitions to awards status and so often has it worked. They have the most inclusive library of animation of any independent distributor in the world. They’re the answer to all your quarrels. Browse their library and feel that inspiration kick in.
I wish not to sound stern or force readers to start watching and promoting animation they may not be interested in, but there are better ways to cherish the art form than fixating exclusively on how the cold brew at no point hits in Arctic Dogs or how Playmobil is deservedly Hollywood’s greatest loss since Coupon: The Movie. Animation is not just for kids, but if the familiar fare is all you’re concerned about, which is usually geared towards families, then I would leave the choice up to you, but if you’re also one of the most trusted sources for animation fandom and buzz on whatever social media platform you’re most hooked on and you claim animation to be your source of power, isn’t that also part of the problem?
Because by ignoring the expanded world of animated kino GKIDS is trying to introduce to you and talking about/paying for only the boss babies and the Sherlock Gnomeses, you’re refusing to expose an adventurous community to some of the most subversive, original animated films available right now. Search around for foreign and independent animation, buy/rent/stream what you can find. If that’s hard for you in your country, get yourself a American account on iTunes and buy a regional gift card. Keep a look out for festival screenings and releases in your area when it’s safe to go outside again. Follow outlets like Animation Magazine and *sigh* yes, even Cartoon Brew outside of Amid’s constant hate-spewing. Annecy has transferred the majority of their 2020 programme to streaming, and a world of animation in short and feature form will be at your fingertips for a €15 subscription!
Support all good animation!
The Bears’ Famous Invasion of Sicily (2019, Lorenzo Mattotti)
*This brings me to the sort of exposure independent feature animation gets where I live, which only adds to the frustration. The UK has suspicious lack of a market for alternative animation beyond festivals and the bottom of the VOD bin. No matter what the issue, and unless they are Have a Nice Day (MUBI) or Tehran Taboo (Peccadillo), no company here is as daring as GKIDS or Shout to champion independent animated cinema that is not Japanese or geared towards children in the whimsical sense, or at all, not even on demand. Not even StudioCanal, beyond giving light to, as far as foreign-language films are concerned, the work of Benjamin Renner. Helping less is the sudden disinterest taken by Soda Pictures, which used to be the last hope we had, bringing to our shores Mary and Max, Tatsumi and Tales of the Night, even hosting a special children’s club that brought Rémi Chayé’s Long Way North (a must-watch with Chayé’s new Calamity Jane film on the horizon) to cinemas that wouldn’t have any other excuse to play it before stopping at My Life as a Courgette and folding into Thunderbird.
Curzon Home Cinema and Ourscreen included the mesmerising Coco alternative The Day of the Crows in their libraries for a brief period, but for years since I thought I’d never come across it again until discovering it on little-known VOD service FilmDoo, accessible everywhere in the world but North America. Heck, not even an Oscar nomination could convince any UK distributor to pick up Boy & the World even after it screened at the Barbican a year before the campaign began. If not for Netflix and their UK theatrical deal, I Lost My Body would be another part of the problem, which is saying so much since this is as fantastical and artful and complex as you can get with many of the features that have a hard time trying to capture the attention of UK buyers.
If you live in the UK and you’re having the same problem as I, then search far and wide; check film festivals when cinemas are open again or even online to see if they are screening anything animated. As a resident nearby London, I will always go for the animated features selected for the London Film Festival, I attend the London International Animation Festival every year usually for the occasional feature (I had to travel as far as Dalston Kingsland to see last year’s most staggering cinematic solo act Away and Japan’s one-hour oddball On-Gaku: Our Sound), and Ciné Lumière is more keen on screening European animation than any other cinema in the country. Don’t be stick guy. Explore away!
If you chose to support this blog on newTumbl, you’d probably waiting for a post, a photoset, a video, anything. I apologise for the shortage of activity, but sadly, at the moment doing business as usual over at this platform seems impossible without one specific key feature. The problem isn’t that I’ve been slacking off, it’s just that not only has newTumbl got a long way until it can fully surpass the useless kiddy pool this once creator-driven site now is in terms of media sharing, but the staff of newTumbl have yet to take notice of the still-broken video embed function, and trying to present pilots direct from YouTube or Vimeo will instead leave the uploader permanently hanging. newTumbl as of yet is bursting with potential; hopefully when the issue is finally dealt with, my nT experience will actually begin.
Tumblr itself has been a waste of energy for over a year, and early in 2021 when the copyright directive kicks in, it frankly won’t be alone. Trying to manage it in 2020 seems almost pointless when everything you post is at risk of being wrongly filtered to protect an audience that probably doesn’t even use this site. But the thing is, just look at us. Look at us.
There are times when I’m dying to get back to business providing you all with abandoned animation history (even while the fine folks moderating Art of Lost and Cancelled Media are keeping the tradition alive over on Twitter), as I’ve discovered a plethora of rejected animation history that deserves a place on a blog I just couldn’t bear to run for 16 months, giving creators and their projects without a future some well-deserved exposure (this is especially a bummer following the passing of Chris Reccardi (IMP, Inc. | The Modifyers | Meddlen Meddows)), but the very fact that we’re a month into quarantine because of a major, heightening health/economic crisis - under an authority based on fascism and laziness no less - feels like my breaking point coupled with the fact that a Tumblr alternative where you control what young audiences will somehow stumble into can’t even keep this archive afloat. And so, I feel like it’s time to treat all you patient, cautious folks with the official return of F Yeah, Failed Cartoon Pilots. On Tumblr.
This will be the only blog I’ll be running here, as unless my short-lived F#$! Yeah, Advertising Icons finds a future hidden within this clutter somehow, it feels like the most accessible blog I’ve ever had the courtesy of moderating. So while this blog’s activity may be outpaced by my constant daily viewings of obscure cinema, the new Animal Crossing routine (SW-0417-3040-6344) and anything else I’ve been doing to keep myself busy during this………..this, expect more fascinating film/TV projects that could never make it past pitch/pilot stage to be showcased for as long as we the free internet survives.
The “Log Off” protest is in response to the recent NSFW ban announced by Tumblr. The ban flags all content the filtering system detects as NSFW, reducing visibility to the community. The system has proven time and time again that is inefficient, oftentimes flagging SFW material as NSFW.
This SFW material includes art, memes and so on. This ban directly hurts the community and will not solve the actual problems at hand due to the poor flagging system. Because of this, the entire community will suffer.
So to respond, I propose that every user on Tumblr logs off of Tumblr for 24 hours on December 17th at 12 am EST.
Times are listed above depending on timezone!
This post responds to some very common questions about the protest. So make sure to read it over!
The plan for the 17th, when the adult content ban comes in, is to protest.
To do that, we are making as much noise either side of the 17th as possible, and using the site as normal.
On the 17th, dead silence.
People are saying log off but what they really mean is don’t open the site or the app.
But, on the 17th make as much noise as possible on every other platform. Tweet about it and post on facebook and instagram and everywhere else.
What this does is causes a massive dip in ad revenue for one single day. That does not make staff think ‘oh everyone’s gone let’s shut down.’ What it actually makes them think is ‘oh shit people aren’t happy and if people don’t keep using our site we’re out of money and out of jobs.’
A boycott reminds a company that the users (consumers) have the power to make their site (business) worthless with one single coordinated decision.
If you want to join in, here’s what to do:
Do:
Close all open instances of the app and site on all your devices before the 17th
Make posts before and after the 17th on tumblr and other platforms, talking about why this ban is bad
Make posts on other sites during the 17th. Flood the official tumblr staff twitter and facebook with your anger and your opinion
Come back on the 18th and check in
Don’t:
Delete the app from your phone (this doesn’t affect their revenue and since it’s off the store at the moment it’ll be hard to get back)
Delete your account. I mean you can if you want to, but if you keep your account and don’t use it you’re saying to staff that there’s still time to save it. If you delete it’s hard work to come back.
Open the app or website (including specific blogs)
Make any posts (turn down/off your queue and make sure nothing is scheduled)
Go quiet elsewhere. Make it clear that this is just about tumblr, not a mass move away from all social media.
Remember: the execs don’t care about anything but money. Shutting down the site means there’s $0 further income from it. That’s their last possible course of action. If we make it clear we’re not happy, they’ll have to do something or we can do more and more until it becomes too expensive.
Protests take commitment. They’re a defiant action against a business that is doing something wrong. They will try to scare you into not participating, because they’re scared. We hold all the power here, sometimes the execs just need to be reminded of that.
The plan for the 17th, when the adult content ban comes in, is to protest.
To do that, we are making as much noise either side of the 17th as possible, and using the site as normal.
On the 17th, dead silence.
People are saying log off but what they really mean is don’t open the site or the app.
But, on the 17th make as much noise as possible on every other platform. Tweet about it and post on facebook and instagram and everywhere else.
What this does is causes a massive dip in ad revenue for one single day. That does not make staff think ‘oh everyone’s gone let’s shut down.’ What it actually makes them think is ‘oh shit people aren’t happy and if people don’t keep using our site we’re out of money and out of jobs.’
A boycott reminds a company that the users (consumers) have the power to make their site (business) worthless with one single coordinated decision.
If you want to join in, here’s what to do:
Do:
Close all open instances of the app and site on all your devices before the 17th
Make posts before and after the 17th on tumblr and other platforms, talking about why this ban is bad
Make posts on other sites during the 17th. Flood the official tumblr staff twitter and facebook with your anger and your opinion
Come back on the 18th and check in
Don’t:
Delete the app from your phone (this doesn’t affect their revenue and since it’s off the store at the moment it’ll be hard to get back)
Delete your account. I mean you can if you want to, but if you keep your account and don’t use it you’re saying to staff that there’s still time to save it. If you delete it’s hard work to come back.
Open the app or website (including specific blogs)
Make any posts (turn down/off your queue and make sure nothing is scheduled)
Go quiet elsewhere. Make it clear that this is just about tumblr, not a mass move away from all social media.
Remember: the execs don’t care about anything but money. Shutting down the site means there’s $0 further income from it. That’s their last possible course of action. If we make it clear we’re not happy, they’ll have to do something or we can do more and more until it becomes too expensive.
Protests take commitment. They’re a defiant action against a business that is doing something wrong. They will try to scare you into not participating, because they’re scared. We hold all the power here, sometimes the execs just need to be reminded of that.
Apologies in advance. | 29 | he/they
