Originally Posted by JeroenDStout
Surely 'life' is treating people as more than prizes or accessories? It is even ironic given their big lesson in the animation is to treat one-another as friends rather than a means to an end.
Again, I really like the animation but I had some difficulty accepting the authorial view of male-female interactions when it came to this.
It was 10 minutes... so they took short cuts.
The trick really was "running the world like it simply is" and "Walking the style like we own it."
So they simplify it in a way where their world's women are all just swimsuit models.
If they made the girls anymore than posturing sex objects the film would automatically be longer (and more difficult). This is fair game to them... and simple gratification for its male audience.
They also come up with newspaper strip sized gags, like how the heroes gain their weapons... because another pair of "heroes" were probably doing the nasty (again... quick sell to the ribald male audience) at a nearby bush and completely left everything unattended.
Thinking with your pants... you accept the logic and move on. (Just like the male audience would with the "initial reward motivation" of young nubile women).
Another clever thing: Your magic wand fires all by itself even if you didn't study magic at all.
To quickly drive home the gravity of being distracted in life, one of the heroes loses two of his fingers because the other guy got drunk. Because when you're strapped for time, gore and blood is the fastest way to let people know how terrible something is.
How do they show the reconciliation of the two heroes? The other guy has sobered up and bandaged the injured hand! It's shallow.. it's not the greatest thing... But it's visual... and the characters treat it earnestly (they man-cry to each other). And that's it.. you move on.
It's these little things.... These guys were VERY smart.