If you’ve been online and especially on my side of Twitter for the past few months you’ve probably seen this quote or this still from The Mitchells vs. the Machines. Maybe you’ve seen this badly edited meme of The Super Mario Bros. Movie this week too.

If 2023 has been defined by anything in middlebrow film culture it is the notion that time is running out. Marvel and DC movies are flopping as both franchises have begun to overwhelm audiences with too much to keep track of, every original movie on streaming looks like a fake movie from Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, and the only ‘original’ movies for miles around are “based on a true story” b-movies and weird indie stuff that middlebrow people don’t enjoy going to the theater to see. The Mario movie is now the highest grossing film of the year thus far and will probably stay that way for at least the next few weeks, leading to discourse online that is frankly a tale as old as time.

You see, the internet has made us all want to believe that we have good taste. This is an inherently flawed philosophy as most people, by definition, do not have good taste. And it’s fine to not have good taste! There are so many other things to care about than cinema, all the bartenders and D&D actual play podcast hosts I see on TikTok seem like they’re living the high life with their hobbies. But film is subjective and taste is subjective, meaning we can and largely do spend an infinite amount of time arguing what good taste even is. The “animation is cinema” movement reminds me very much of the “positivity gang” that existed on the fringe of film Twitter a few years ago (founded by a guy who turned out to be an abusive piece of shit), that seems to exist simply to instead drown out any criticism of anything.

Animation is cinema, you see, and cinema is immune from criticism! You can’t be mean to these movies because they’re for kids, you also can’t expect them to be good because they’re for kids, but they’re really good.

This movement seemed to solidify with the release of Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, a sequel spinoff of a twenty year old franchise that was hailed as a move forward for kids’ animation. I watched The Last Wish, it’s pretty good! It has a colorful cast of characters, a compelling visual style and a mile a minute pace that makes it really exciting to watch. It’s not perfect but I can see how people latched onto it. Because here’s the secret, movies for kids are dumb. Now, dumb movies can be fun. Lowbrow cinema can be insanely exciting, I recommend Simon McNeil’s excellent essay on the joys of it. But these people do not watch dumb animated movies that are fun in the way that an Albert Pyun (rest in peace) film is, for example. They are disciples of Disney, Pixar, Sony Pictures Animation, Illumination and Dreamworks. They refuse to go outside of their comfort zone even when it is as accessible as a few clicks on Netflix. Even Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, the movie that inspired the quote that gave this group its name, seems to have escaped them. The reason for this is because the bar for quality is insanely low. This is a group of people chasing the high of watching Toy Story for the first time as a five year old every time they walk into a Secret Life of Pets or a DC League of Super-Pets. Many of the worst offenders of this genre have winks and nods to the more adult audience members, whether you’re talking about the Easter eggs in Into the Spider-Verse or a simple dick joke in a movie like Shrek. This makes audience members like these think that the movie is secretly being made for them all along, allowing them to add it to the pile.

What you rarely see this group doing is championing fringe art, be it international efforts, documentaries, rotoscope-led projects, or the like. I saw very little love for Flee or Apollo 10 & 1/2 when those were initially making the rounds. Few celebrate the work of filmmakers like Ralph Bakshi or Richard Linklater, few even seem to watch anime films. This is where we get to Suzume, the latest arbiter of my frustration with this “movement.” The latest movie from Makoto Shinkai is not anything game changing, but it’s the kind of animated movie I love to go to the theater to see. It’s big, visually imaginative, and contains a story with a lot of heart. Nobody in this group that seems to care so much about animation is talking about it. Suzume is a pretty simple movie, one that would be great for older kids (think 8-13), with real themes about overcoming past trauma and an interesting take on modern fantasy thanks to its implementation of the history of natural disasters in Japan in the past century. It’s a visual marvel with subtle filmmaking flairs I’ve come to expect from a director like Shinkai who knows how to use a camera in an animated space.

Suzume is now the fourth highest grossing film produced in Japan behind Shinkai’s previous Your Name, Spirited Away and the Demon Slayer movie. As Shinkai grows more and more as a name in the industry he should be making his way into the canon for these people as “animation as cinema.” But there is rarely a peep about Suzume, at least not on that side of Twitter. I’m going to go ahead and sum up what a few have already said in much less time and with much less dillydallying: “animation is cinema” is a movement that still treats animation as lesser while wanting it to be virtuous to consume. It’s all about consumerism, being seen as a Good Consumer, and wanting to be met with no disagreements while you spew your opinions online that expecting the Mario movie to be as good as a Pixar movie is unfair, that even expecting it to be good is unfair. But it’s good, I swear!

I have little patience for this kind of virtue, this want to be seen as someone consuming things worth consuming and participating in fruitful discussion about how they perfectly adapted the aesthetics of a track from Mario Kart Double Dash or how seen you felt when a cartoon cat and/or the video game plumber had a panic attack for sixty seconds. It is a desire to be seen as intellectually engaging while refusing to discuss anything intellectually engaging, or even discussing something that isn’t in an engaging way. I’m glad Suzume is doing well at the box office, but it deserves to be seen by even more people. Not just because it is different, but because the world of art and criticism will always be better when it has room for more.

Go see Suzume.