The original had years put into it, with the effects complimented by real world prosthetics, in-world immersion (ie interacting with real plants/water/rocks on location) and clever directing (ie night scenes)... that harmony was absent in WWD25, making the jobs of the creative teams impossibly hard.

I can honestly believe it. As is so often the case even with the biggest budget movies now, those calling the shots have little interest in the time and resources actually required to deliver... WWD was in clear need of more of both of those things...

Impossible Pictures were the production company hired to do the 1999 Walking with Dinosaurs and are releasing a new series of their own next year about mass extinctions, which again looks superb, and says yet again that it's really all entirely a money game now.

Yeah, it's all a money thing really. The BBC and Apple hire MPC to do their visuals, and they're industry leading - that won't be cheap. Having names like Jon Favreau and Hans Zimmer attached both suggest it's not cheap either.

Walking with Dinosaurs 2025 was a brand name put on something budget.

The BBC just can't do this stuff any more. The recent Walking with Dinosaurs series had disappointing visuals, the narrator sounded bored, and the budget just wasn't there for any aspect of it at all.

PP: Ice Age is the spiritual successor to Walking with Beasts I always needed 😍

😭😭😭

I think because it was the first Pixar movie to lean into being one huge American cultural reference, meaning the critical response in the US was vastly different to elsewhere. The college setting just doesn't translate universally.

Toy Story 4 was slop. Pretty. But slop.

That's fair. I doubt you'll get anything from the third one then, but it's not offensively bad or anything. There are now Toy Story and Monsters films that I think are worse - which isn't really the most glowing endorsement, but still 😅

I actually really liked Cars 3. If you thought the first one was okay you'll likely think the same of the third, it's more a sequel to the original and ignores the hell out of Cars 2

Elemental was mediocre af, but I just saw Elio and was pleasantly surprised

Same, it has the stink of Disney corporate greed all over it

AI chats are relentlessly guilty of positive affirmation - with Google being the most useless. Ironically Grok seems to be the one least inclined to do this.

But the government is on it anyway - ushering in policies like the 100% soft drinks tax in restaurants, fewer will even ask these questions.

If any nationality is going to presume someone or something is from their neck of the woods without actually checking, you can sure as hell bet it'll be Americans.

The Green's are now the largest non-right wing party in UK politics, and just today came third in polling for the first time - the strategic vote would be for the Green's right now anyway.

I love Kassandra and the story in Odyssey is quite sublime (I only recently learned on a replay that there are different endings too) but I'm a bit of a simp for Ancient Egypt, and I just love the world they made for it too. I only wish Aya had got her own game, maybe in Ancient Rome.

Really? I loved it! I felt it was a bit primitive in Assassin's Creed III where they introduced it, but they did a decent job at fleshing it out whilst making it accessible in Black Flag.

I will legit be ignoring this rule, and bringing my own drinks into any restaurant that tries to actually strictly impose it.

Anyway this newly imposed 100% sugary drinks tax is elitist rubbish that only penalises poor people, and ignores the considerably large number of people who avoid aspartame sweetener for health reasons - myself included.

This government is more Tory than some of the dismal Tory ones we had.