I watched The Mitchells vsd The Machines with two 9 yr olds last night and we all loved it. Watch it. S'great.

However, what I think is more interesting is that it wholly owns the YouTube hyper-edit language in a way that I haven't seen before.

Why is this deep?
Because the kids I was watching it with TOTALLY read it. COMPLETELY.

The illustrative use of smash cuts, layering, filters, animations that are all over tiktok/yt/insta etc. has become a tacit part of how they process the world, so that no moment exists that isn't commented upon
If you watch a lot of Youtube aimed at 8-14year olds (which I, by default, do) there has evolved a way of creating content that is all to do with the limits of production. Essentially, one long static shot is visually boring and viewers lose interest very quickly
To combat this, TELEVISION production has traditionally employed many camera operators, editors etc. so that there are lots of different shots to cut to/from. Thus the content can be reasonably mundane, but there's visual interest, and you retain viewers.
99.9% of YouTubers/Vloggers/Tokkers etc. don't have those resources. Almost all of them start out with just a single camera - so the visual interest is added in other ways: overlaying gifs, distorting the pic/audio, push ins etc.
You can buy edit programs now that specialise in adding all of this digital confectionary to video, and theyre being sold to kids. It's amazing.

However, in the 20 or so years that we've had global, gatekeeper-free video distribution - the edit language has changed.
No surprise there. It always does. It's why we find black and white movies sometimes rather hard to watch. The pacing is too slow, the shots don't move enough etc.

So, by this point, videos made for/by 13 year olds look, to my grandparents generation, like...
screaming neon vomit. A meaningless kaleidoscope of non sequiturs, flash and noise.

But not to two nine year old girls. The speed at which TMvTM hurled jokes and commentary into the eyes of these two young girls left them not simply unphased, but feeling seen.
This was a movie that spoke to them in a language they already speak. Indeed, a language they own.

Anyway, it just made me super aware that we can talk about language changing, and yahboo! to the canutes who think language can be fixed...
but I'd never considered that

a) 'visual language' evolves in the same way
b) that we now live in a post-reading age (don't @ me), so the layers now being added to our language could never have been imaginable before the technological miracle of smart devices
We're now used to people saying internet acronyms (LOL, jk, OMG) but I wonder whether perhaps, if my daughter's children might also have a required visual component to how they speak. My generation has been largely unafraid of air quotes. Maybe an entirely new physical ...
lexicon is coming?

Folks already do the heart hands, or that korean finger heart thing... maybe millennials will reach their twilight years surrounded by a generation irl emojiing at each other, no clue what's being said around them, as I'd imagine many centagenarians feel now
Anyway, a long old ramble, that - but ultimately, it felt like the first time I'd seen that aesthetic in a major motion picture and thought - oh. It's changing everything.

which is fine, because the only thing that doesn't change is...

...

...

change.
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