Song of the Sea

Song of the Sea, animated movie from a few years back by the same people who did the excellent Secret of Kells. Charming, visually gorgeous and distinctive, made me cry a bunch, highly recommended if you like that sort of thing. Kids enjoyed it too.

I will caveat that there's a bit of a "men are so incompetent at emotions that it takes a 6yo girl to help her father and 10yo brother handle their grief" thing here, why is it her job, but I'm also not going to pretend like small children as the carriers of emotional authenticity isn't a well-known movie trope, so, hey.

Also re the character design, I am getting pretty tired of enormous burly fathers and skinny mamas. It's not just this movie, it's HTTYD's Stoick and Valka and Brave's Fergus and Elinor and Mr. Incredible and Elastigirl (although I guess I have to give them a pass because the design there is related to their respective powers) and Tom and Sabine from Miraculous Ladybug (although I guess in that case Sabine is more like just short than particularly skinny - she looks a little fuller-figured than her very thin teen daughter, at least) and maybe Gru and Lucy (ok, Gru isn't really burly, but his shoulders are like three times as wide as hers, and Lucy isn't the bio mom and I think I feel this particularly about women who are being represented as bio moms because of the bigness associated with pregnancy and sometimes the permanent legacy of pregnancy). And I feel like cartoon women who are bigger than their husbands are usually being played as verbally abusive for laughs, although I don't actually have a good example of that trope at hand. Anyways, can we please have some more equally-sized couples, and some big mamas with loving relationships? Shoutout to Steven Universe for good work on this front with Rose and Greg, although we don't actually get to see Rose and Greg in action together as Steven's parents, so it's not quite as good as having the whole family onscreen at once would be. (ETA) And also Rose is an alien space rock and ideally I'd like more big cartoon moms who are just normal human women (or, you know, warrior queen human women or whatever the genre is).

Austen fanfic rec

Miss de Bourgh in Bath by SwordSwallower17, a post-Pride and Prejudice novel centered around Anne de Bourgh, the daughter of Lady Catherine who Lady Catherine was hoping Mr. Darcy would marry. Really well done and very satisfying if you like Austen or Heyer or Regency romances. There is also a second sequel, The Miss Bennets Set Forth, about Mary and Kitty Bennet, which I also really enjoyed, although for accurate-reccing purposes I will say that it's longer, and gets kind of slow and repetitive for awhile before picking up again, and has a satisfying resolution for one of the POV characters but only a partial resolution for the other one, which was presumably going to get tied up in the last part of the trilogy, The Last Miss Bennet, but the author never finished writing it. I'm still glad I read Miss Bennets Set Forth but if you will be driven mad by an unfinished WIP maybe stop with Miss de Bourgh in Bath.