Abah and His Band rock it out, big news about indie gaming world

Hello, everyone, good morning.

This was a very busy month for me, many things happened in my life, and I was very much in doubt about what to write. I ended up choosing to tell news in Brazilian animation and comment on the great news in the world of indie games.

Abah and His Band is a hit

Directed by Humberto Avelar, Abah and His Band is a feature film that once again demonstrates the great potential of Brazilian animation. It tells the story of a world of fruity people, where Abah, prince of the kingdom of Pomar, dreams of following in his mother's footsteps and becoming a musician. He then forms a band with Juca and Ana to play at the great Music Festival, which has enormous cultural importance for the kingdom for celebrating the relationship between bees and fruits.

It is a surprisingly political and very didactic film. The great villain of the story is Don Coco, who aims to carry out a coup d'état, come to power and end the diversity of fruits, setting up large monoculture coconut farms, and cultivating them without the help of bees. And throughout the film it is interesting how Abah, who was previously completely alienated from the problems of the kingdom that he will soon have to rule, creates class consciousness, especially with the help of Ana, who is part of the group of rebels against the monarchy.

The strongest point of the film is its visuals and the quality of the animation. Spectacular, very interesting designs, a mix of 3D characters with very well painted 2D scenarios, it is very pleasant to look at. However, I feel that the feature struggles a bit in the script, as some scenes I got the impression that they were just there to the planned run-time, and some parts could have been better polished.

Going through a brief tangent, these recent times watching several Brazilian films (both in commercial cinema and in festivals), I realized that a very recurring problem that ends up overturning several interesting concepts is lack of attention to the script. Sometimes the film doesn't have a clear message, dialogues that don't make sense or don't have a well-defined target audience (which for me is the most serious problem). Obviously, each case is different, but I often get the impression that if certain films had dedicated more time to the script, it would have gotten where it was intended.

At least Abah and His Band manages to establish very clearly its target audience, and I would recommend anyone who knows children to go see it. You can laugh at some jokes, the action scenes are cool, the songs are incredible (and  very catchy) and it's a movie that can't be questioned: it's Brazilian in all aspects.

Check out the trailer!

Deltarune TOMORROW?

Right at the beginning of the month we received great news from the indie gaming world: release date for chapters 3 and 4 of Deltarune, the RPG successor to the great Undertale, Toby Fox's first game.

For those who are lost in the ride, Deltarune was announced in 2018, with the release of the demo of the first chapter of 7. Since then, only the second has been released in 2021, still as a free demo, and fans are thirsty for more content. At least this time Toby Fox is making recurring updates to his newsletter and had already promised since last year that the next release would be in 2025.

As production seems to advance, people started making "deltarune tomorrow" memes, because really at any moment an announcement could be made. Some fans speculated that an announcement would be made in some Nintendo Direct (Nintendo's online event to announce news about its consoles and games), but the probability was low. After all, it doesn't make sense for an indie game to be announced at an event of such a large company and with such outstanding IPs. Or so we thought...

i've never been so happy to be wrong

So, June 5th is coming, I'm extremely happy and excited and counting the days. Deltarune in (a few) tomorrows.

Another update that I am planning

Some people suggested me to post my texts on Substack as well. At first the idea didn't excite me, but finding out more about how it doesn't look like so much social network dictated by the algorithm, I found it very interesting. I still want to keep the blog on my own site for archive reasons and because I still want to have a space 100% mine, but throughout May I intend to take there also what I post here.

I believe that’s it, a shorter edition to compensate for the fact that the April edition had so much. Anything you can comment here or send me a message on instagram, I'll answer! Let's chat!