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Enormous "Size and Strength"
🕑 Added 2020-06-20 15:02:14 +0000 UTCHey, wanna see me make a total neckbeard of myself?
You know, they really missed a pretty good opportunity by not going this route. I'm barely even kidding. I mean, not only is it a bit of a stretch of my suspension of disbelief that her dress just kinda grew with her, (I can believe that a radioactive meteor can make her grow, but what, did it mutate her dress too somehow? I mean, it technically rips, but barely, a couple holes get ripped in the sides and the bottom becomes frayed, but that's it. At least at the climax when she shrinks and then grows again, she was wearing a suit made by the aliens so I can chalk that up to it being designed to do that, but her Earth-made wedding dress? Come on.) and yeah I know it's an animated family movie, there's a limit on how much you can show, but hasn't pushing boundaries and being much edgier than their competition (Disney) kinda always been Dreamworks' thing? That's why I think they could have gotten away with at least tearing her dress into two segments so it's midriff-baring, (realistically it would have torn way more, but even that would have made more sense than basically nothing) considering Disney got away with Ariel and Jasmine. Hell, they probably could have gotten away with way more considering that when Ariel gets turned into a human, she isn't magically given pants, she spends the next scene until Eric shows up basically naked except for her bra. Yeah, you don't see anything, the shots are always carefully set up so that you don't, but that's the context of the scene; she's almost naked. So Disney proves not only that you can totally get your lady character at least that naked in an animated family movie and get away with it as long as you don't actually show anything you couldn't see on display in public on a beach, but that a decent enough animator/cinematographer can make getting her naked but not showing too much happen. So really, this scene could have been made better in four ways by tearing off Susan's dress when she turns into Ginormica;
Reason One: The scene makes more sense. And yeah, again, I know, it's an animated movie where both monsters and aliens exist, but otherwise the world it takes place in is pretty much ours. Introducing monsters and aliens to our world won't suddenly make clothes expandable. Even if they actively chose not to get her naked of their own accord and not to appease moral guardians, as in it was part of a genuine creative vision, a.k.a. a motivation I can actually get behind and respect, there were still other ways they could have pulled that off, like maybe the wedding hall had a really big table outdoors just big enough that when her dress starts to rip, she can grab the tablecloth from it from off-screen and then be wrapped in it in the next shot. Or maybe there was a really long banner hung up on the outside of the building and she uses that. Or when the military shows up, they could just inexplicably have some kind of futuristic device, (maybe they somehow convinced Doc Roach to make it with some kind of deal, then a joke could be made about it later. He is shown trying to make a nuke out of legos, maybe that's where he got the legos from.) that can materialize clothes onto her. It would be overly-convenient, but still theoretically possible in the context of the film. The point I'm getting at is that every way you slice it, having her dress just grow with her was the least-imaginative solution, and in the context of an animated movie, less-imaginative is usually not a good thing.
Reason Two: The "censorship," the means to cover up exactly what needs to be to get away with the nudity, would have opened up the opportunity for visual gags. The shots could be set up so that something in the foreground covers her up Austin Powers style, and as the scene goes on, maybe the shot setups could get progressively sillier. Like, each shot, whatever object or character is exactly where it needs to be just gets more and more improbable. I dunno, I guess that doesn't sound that funny when it's described verbally like that, but I can't think of many visual gags that are done justice by being described verbally, so I'm just gonna say that a decent comedic writer (a.k.a. not me) could *probably* make that joke work.
Reason Three: Like I said before, Dreamworks' whole thing was always being edgier and more hardcore than Disney, and Disney's gotten away with getting their (debatably) sexiest lady almost naked, and they don't even *try* to be edgy or hardcore, so when presented with an opportunity in which they could have one-uped Disney by getting theirs *completely* naked, and passing on it, they effectively let Disney beat them at their own game. Sure, maybe to Disney and Dreamworks naked cartoon ladies aren't a competition, but they are to me, so I have to ask, what mainstream American animation studio is going to step up with a theatrical release in hand to try to take the nude crown from Ariel?
Reason Four (the most important reason): Naked women improve everything.
Thank you for coming to my Tit Talk.
