Good day, everyone!

Alright, is everybody ready?

Yes? No? Maybe so?

Anyway, it's intro time. I am the Animation Cynic. I don't have a degree, I don't have any credentials, and I definitely don't have a life. I just love watching animated films.

Now, if you have gone through the trouble of digging up this post, I'll venture a guess and assume that you want to know one thing: Why do I do this? Why do I spend my free time watching an endless stream of animated films, then get on the internet and write reviews of them on a blog that few people will ever read or care about?

It's a pretty simple answer. And it all began with Youtube.

One day, I was wasting time on Youtube, looking at videos of foxes. I don't even remember why I was doing this. I do like foxes a lot, but in between the videos of red foxes jumping on trampolines and fennec foxes trying to dig through tile floors, there was something that interested me more. It was a very short animated clip of an anthropomorphic fox, who was apparently named "Fifi." Having never heard of this cartoon character, I looked for more videos; through a bit of curiosity-clicking, I learned that she was from a film called The Elm-Chanted Forest.

Now, the weird title alone was enough to prompt more curiosity-clicking. I tried to look up the film on my old standby for trivial information, Wikipedia. However, Wikipedia didn't have an article about the film. The only place it was mentioned on the site was an article I didn't even know existed: a list of every feature-length animated film ever created.

Simply put, this list boggled my mind. Before I saw it, I thought I knew jack about animation. After I saw it, I realized I didn't know anything. Sure, I had seen a few famous anime films and some avant-garde European stuff along with the usual Disney, but I had been among the general populace who assumes that Walt Disney, the world's most famous animator, had created the first animated feature; how many people actually know that the first animated feature in history was created in Argentina a full twenty years before Snow White saw the light of day? Looking at this list, I suddenly found out about dozens upon dozens of animated films that I had never heard of before.

After this, my curiosity was stoked; I started looking for animated films on Netflix, on Amazon, on streaming sites, at libraries, at used media shops, and everywhere in between. And now, having seen a great deal of animated films, both famous and obscure, I want bring a few opinions to the table. I want to incite discussions. I want to make people seek out stuff they wouldn't normally watch. And, more than anything, I want to make readers aware of films they would never know about otherwise.

So, regardless of whether you're a casual visitor, a hardcore animation fan, or a friend whom I have conned into reading this blog, I hope you enjoy it!