The Ink and Think Hour: Recent Episodes
Lin Darrow and Jeremy G.
A podcast where two best friends talk about cartoons like they're high art -- because they are!
Season One: Walt Disney Animated Studios Feature Films.
New episodes every other Tuesday.
Artwork by Alex Assan.
In this episode, we discuss:
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racism, sexism, and the white male fantasy in the Edwardian boy's adventure story,
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the depiction of childhood as the time in your life that you can act however you like without regard to the consequences your actions have for other people,
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the accidental, backwards subversiveness of the game played by the Indigenous characters and the Lost Boys,
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the subversive potential of Smee as the pirates' mother,
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how much we love Captain Hook as campy, theatrical dandy, and
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the sudden and arbitrary importance of appearing honourable in the last 20 minutes of the movie.
In this episode, we discuss:
-the politics of literary adaptations and why the cartoon is the ideal medium for adapting Alice,
-how the world can feel like nonsense when the logic you learn in school doesn't hold true in 'real life',
-how to recognize what kinds of authority need to be rebelled against and what kinds of authorities should be respected,
-how silly language is and how easily we can play with it,
-how rote memorization isn't actually learning (and how honing your critical thinking skills is), and
-our dream that Alice could become a socially-just lawyer/suffragette/elected official.
In this episode, we discuss:
-how much of this movie is actually about the mice,
-the Tremaines' need to denigrate Cinderella's inherent class value to make themselves feel better,
-how much work shady, shady Cinderella has to do to choose kindness,
-Cinderella's inability to identify the prince (or, perhaps, her calculated performance of not knowing who the prince is so that he will fall in love with her),
-our uncertainty about what Cinderella's queenship might be like, and
-Jaq the mouse's potential as a romantic partner.
In this episode, we discuss:
-The Adventure of Mr. Toad being a Beatrix Potter story (if Beatrix Potter wrote stories about devastatingly disastrous characters),
-Angus MacBadger's 'Scottish' accent that is so bad we theorize that he is not Scottish in-universe,
-some wild theories about why Toad Hall is weirdly both human-sized and animal-sized at various points,
-the moral obligation of the idle rich to respect and care for the people affected by their excessive lifestyles,
-the ethics of being fabulous (spoilers for the BoJack Horseman finale 27:13-29:35),
-Ichabod Crane's scholarly, metropolitan threat to an agricultural town,
-The Legend of Sleepy Hollow as a proto-Beauty and the Beast, and
-whether we'd most like to marry Ichabod Crane, Brom Bones, or the Headless Horseman.
In light of the current political climate, we decided to re-record portions of this episode to make our critiques of American power structures more clear. As a result, you may notice slight variances in the audio quality. These variances should be resolved for future episodes.
In this episode, we discuss:
-the limits of our love for anthropomorphic musical instruments and shorts about the seasons changing,
-our projection of a good, old-fashioned lesbian love story onto a cute little Christmas card romance,
-the movie's investment in exploring a pioneer version of Americana and its celebration of the Christian-American expansion into the Western frontier,
-the misadventures of a little tugboat who is a menace and a miscreant but who ultimately wants to be good,
-the return of our boy José Carioca, and
-our various opinions about whether or not we would stay friends with a horse if he sent the other to space.
In this episode, we discuss:
-the retconning of Jiminy Cricket as a 'conscience' without a care (despite the fact that he sees how awful the world is),
-our choices for a better host for the movie,
-the use of face-slapping as a courtship ritual in an inherently kinky bear culture,
-Jiminy Cricket crashing the worst party ever (where a little girl is seemingly held hostage by a middle-aged ventriloquist and his drunk and deeply depressed puppets),
-our differing opinions on whether or not it would be fun to hang out with Jiminy Cricket in a neutral location, and
-Disney's really clever and inventive take on the story of Jack and the Beanstalk.
In this episode, we discuss:
-how this film fulfills our dream of a jazz Fantasia,
-the roots of America's gun violence problem in a short with a high body count,
-censoring boobs, slimming butts, and the rules that govern the relentless pursuit of pleasure in the 1940s,
-the fragile masculinity of a showboating, All-American proto-Gaston baseball player,
-being emotionally invested in a clandestine love story between two resilient hats, and
-the tragedy of a The Whale Who Wanted to Sing at the Met singing his only sold out show in Heaven.
In this episode, we discuss:
-Jeremy's distaste for this film as a discerning gay child,
-the goofy display of misremembering in 'The Flying Gauchito,'
-our appreciation of Aurora Miranda's appreciation of chaos,
-the Aracuan bird's not-malicious attempts to kill Donald Duck and José Carioca, and
-our sincere wish that he was successful so that we didn't have to watch 20 minutes of women generously suffering Donald Duck operating as a sex mosquito in a horny fugue state.
In this episode, we discuss:
-the mixed-bag nature of the short collection,
-Disney’s explicit cultural exchange project,
-our deconstruction of the film’s advertisement of a romanticized, “strange and exotic” Latin America,
-our speculation about how Pedro the plane keeps himself from being “another martyr to the mail system,” and
-the introduction of Lin’s newest favourite Disney character.
In this episode, we discuss:
-the movie’s failure to escalate in places where it might have been interesting for it to escalate,
-how a tenth of the movie is Bambi struggling to stand up,
-Bambi’s weird, withholding deadbeat (ghost?) dad,
-the horniest Disney song ever written (which seems to have been scrubbed from the internet), and
-the human perception of the cyclical nature of the natural world.
In this episode, we discuss:
-the question of sexual propriety in a world where babies are literally delivered by storks,
-the long history of the denigration of clowns,
-a consideration of the feelings of animals being exploited by humans,
-an extended deconstruction of what it is to be an elephant and the essence of "elephantness,"
-an ambivalent engagement with the crows as a depictions of black entertainers in the 1940s, and
-the nature of human cruelty and its connection with circus culture.
In this episode, we discuss:
-using the orchestra to legitimize cartoons and using cartoons to make the orchestra accessible
-our speculation that 'extremely gay' Tchaikovsky would have loved Disney's sexy fish
-the terrifying design of Yen Sid, the (maybe) evil wizard,
-being vocally excited about the evolution of life on Earth,
-cupid butt hearts,
-the greatest romance of all time, and
-fun suckers ending the devil's cool party at 6 AM.
In this episode, we discuss:
-Jiminy Cricket uncomfortably flirting with inanimate objects,
-predatory culture in Hollywood and the long history of exploitation of child actors,
-tricking destructive young boys into becoming working bodies by letting them smoke and drink,
-being happy to live in the belly of a whale with your cat, your fish, and your puppet-son,
-the Blue Fairy's lazy grading scale for goodness, and
-why Pinocchio is not a satisfying story.
Copyright Disclaimer: Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, commenting, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favour of fair use.
In this episode we discuss:
-misconceptions about a creepy corpse-kissing prince,
-Snow White's deep determination to hustle,
-a Wicked-style backstory about the dwarves mining jewels for the Queen,
-using music to make meaning in a laborious life, and
-the joy of watching the joy the Evil Queen takes in murder.
Copyright Disclaimer: Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, commenting, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favour of fair use.
Welcome to The Ink and Think Hour, where two best friends discuss cartoons like they're high art -- cuz they are!
In this episode we discuss:
-our vision and goals for The Ink and Think Hour,
-why we chose to talk about cartoons,
-how we plan to get deep about cartoons,
-Lin-spiracy theories,
-our moms,
-gabbing like old hags, and
-what's coming up on our first season: The Walt Disney Animation Studios canon!