Each year seems to feel more apocalyptic than the last. Hell, we’ve all had headaches, but even as the sky falls (or perhaps because the sky is falling), we’ve been tuning out the news cycle by ’tooning up.
Since early October, The Dot and Line has been on soft hiatus, but make no mistake: 2018 was a banner year for us. We’ve focused on ramping up our team and building our beloved animation site into everything we want it to be (and more!) by overhauling our operations and business model. But even still, we rolled out huge packages on your favorite shows (like Cowboy Bebop Month and BoJack Week) while publishing exclusive interviews with the best minds in the biz.
While 2018 might have been yet another hell year for the books, we’re going to take a second to celebrate what our fabulous ‘toon-loving writers have accomplished this year as we look to 2019.
Morty Is Mixed, Just Like Me. And That’s Complicated.
“Maybe like me, he’s white, but not too white. White, but with a streak of ‘flavor’ that has some random strangers asking, ‘There has to be something else…I can’t tell…what are you?’”
Izzy Kings opened up about seeing herself in half of Rick and Morty’s namesake as a mixed-race person who often “passes” as white.
Steve Blum Revisits Spike Spiegel 20 Years After ‘Cowboy Bebop’: Exclusive
“It’s simply my voice, with a much cooler attitude and giving 60% less F’s.”
The Dot and Line sat down with the English voice actor for Cowboy Bebop’s Spike Spiegel to discuss everything from the show’s particularly high-quality English dub to Blum’s relationship with his fellow Bebop voice actors (yes, two decades later!).
D+L Podcast: Was “Toys in the Attic” Just a Big Nod to the Movie ‘Alien’?
During Bebop Month, we decided to try our hands at something new: enlisting our friends Kevin Conway and Steve Maher (yes, John’s younger brother) to record a podcast about the incredibly complex “Toys in the Attic” episode. If you haven’t given it a listen, now’s the time.
“A Very BoJack Halloween” Teaches Us Nothing Is Scarier Than Learning from Our Mistakes
“If you refuse to let life change you, you’ll keep having the same fight at the same party.”
If you keep on making the same blunders, will you ever really grow? For BoJack Week, New Yorker cartoonist Jason Adam Katzenstein combined his artistic and writing talents in this stunning reflection on Season 5’s Halloween episode.
Why So Many Early ’00s Cartoons Couldn’t Escape the Male Gaze
“It’s not that these shows didn’t exhibit feminine power. It’s that, in the gender and diversity department, they just don’t hold a candle to the cartoons of today.”
Shelby Lynn Peake analyzed animation’s portrayal of women last decade — compared to the shift for which Rebecca Sugar has almost single-handedly paved the way.
How ‘BoJack’ Skewers the #MeToo “Comeback”
“While we aren’t quite at the point where the real-life men who committed assaults have come full circle and been totally accepted by the public again, they’re at the very least trying. And there are plenty of apologists chomping at the bit to continue supporting them.”
For BoJack Week, Nicole Ortiz highlighted how Season 5’s Vance Waggoner and his relatively quick public recovery (after literally hitting a woman with a baseball bat!) hits close to home in light of #MeToo.
“Faye Is a Feminist”: Wendee Lee Revisits ‘Bebop’ 20 Years After Its Debut
“Faye is a feminist. She’s a sexpot and a feminist from my perspective. She uses her talents and her wiles to her advantage, but she’s clearly in control. She’s consensual.”
Because our obsession with Cowboy Bebop has clearly become borderline unhealthy, The Dot and Line *also* sat down with the English voice actor for Cowboy Bebop’s Faye Valentine to discuss what it was like to play the iconic character.
An Oral History of the Phrase “Get Shrek’d”
“Most people think the John Cale version of “Hallelujah” was the only Cohen song used in the movie, but several others were considered, including ‘Everybody Shreks,’ ‘Hey, That’s No Way To Say ‘Onion’,’ and ‘I’m Your Ogre.’”
Brothers Dan and Nick Powell discussed (read: riffed on each other about) the longstanding cultural impact Shrek would have in the decades to come — from memes to verbiage. It’s exactly as ridiculous as you’d expect.
Jackson Publick on the Ambition of ‘The Venture Bros.’
“Artists and comedians are all traumatized. And we’re making animation. We’re obviously all stuck in our own damn childhoods and trying to make sense of them.”
Instead of the weekly terrible long-read everyone is dunking on Twitter, may we suggest this weighty interview with The Venture Bros. co-creator Jackson Publick? (It’s not only super good, but also, we all owe him one. We’re looking at you, Dan Harmon.)
The Secret Origins of the Otaku
“Things didn’t stay all bad for the otaku…The term is less offensive in Japan than it once was. And there’s one very important reason for this transformation: anime.”
Andrew Luecke delves into the origins of otaku — which once was just an honorific pronoun meaning “you” in Japanese and has since morphed into so much more.
What ‘Wall-E’ Taught Us About Progress and Capitalism 10 Years Later
“Who better to talk about the existential threat to humanity than multi-trillion-dollar conglomerates can pose than Disney?”
Unless you don’t have a soul, you probably felt some sort of anxious remorse for the state of our world when you first saw Pixar’s Wall-E (which turned 10 this year!). Seth Dellon dissected the impact of the film — otherwise known as the cutest skewering of climate change we’ve ever seen — in this piece that aptly begins with “Corporations, man.”
Johnny Yong Bosch Reflects on Vash the Stampede 20 Years Later: Exclusive
“[Vash the Stampede] was not only my first, but one of the biggest roles I’ll ever play.”
We talked with the Vash voice actor, who still has much fondness for the beloved anime character.
Adam Muto on Why an ‘Adventure Time’ Reboot Is Inevitable
“These characters had a life off-screen that kept going, and maybe you’d only see it from a distance or just get this really short vignette to see where they were. I think that helped make the world feel lived-in and expansive.”
This year saw the end of one of the most influential all-ages cartoons on TV: Adventure Time. In our Time for One Last Adventure package, we spoke to showrunner Adam Muto, who gave us a ray of hope: He thinks a reboot is just a matter of time.
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