Animation Celebration - Love Thy Polish review

Maybe it's just rose coloured nostalgia, but I really do feel that there was something special about the cartoons of the 80's. I have what some would consider an embarrassingly large collection of them at home - Duck Tales, Batman: The Animated Series, X-Men, Rainbow Brite, I've got them all. I can't even explain to you how excited I was to finally track down a cartoon I hadn't seen since I'd hit Primary School, with only the vague memory that it was some sort of Ulysses in space story with a really annoying robot and a character that looked like a pixie. (In case you're curious, the show in question was Ulysses 31) So needless to say when I saw Love Thy Polish was doing an Animation Celebration collection, I was ALL OVER IT.

Yes, alright, it took me a while to blog this. I'm a bad blogger.

Because unfortunately I can't afford to buy ALL the polish, I picked out the three I couldn't possibly pass up - East Australian Current (inspired by Finding Nemo), No Ordinary Teddy (inspired by Superted), and How Do You Spell F.B.I? (inspired by Toy Story)



East Australian Current is a squishy blue jelly base crammed full of teeny tiny sparkles in a stunning array of blue, teal and purple. It's inspired by the scene in finding Nemo where Nemo gets a lift down the East Australian Current with a nest of surfer turtles. (And yes, a nest is the proper name for a group of turtles - I did have to look it up)

All these shots are two coats, layered over a navy base, with topcoat over it to make it sparkle as much as possible.

You don't really need to layer this for opacity, but I do think the dark base helps the glitters really pop out. This polish has absolutely amazing depth with very little effort - I only used two coats over the base, and couldn't stop staring at my fingers all day.

Next up is How Do You Spell FBI?, a beautiful dark green glitterbomb. I actually got my bottle in the first What's In-Die Box, a monthly indie polish box, but Love Thy Polish added it to this collection so everyone who wasn't lucky enough to get the In-Die box could still enjoy it. The theme of that particular box was Toy Story, and How Do You Spell FBI? is inspired by the delightful T-Rex toy, Rex.

How Do You Spell FBI? is a green jelly base absolutely jammed full of dark green microglitter, and various shapes of larger green glitters. 

I really like this one, even though I'm not normally much for more gold toned greens. It just reminds me so perfectly of Rex that it makes me smile just looking at it. These pictures are two coats over a base of Pretty Serious in Tux, but it turned out the base was totally unnecessary - you could absolutely just wear this on it's own. 

And finally, we have No Ordinary Teddy, inspired by one of my favourite shows as a tiny little ProtoCassie, Superted!

No Ordinary Teddy is a squishy red jelly with red microglitters, medium red squares, and a smattering of silver micro glitter. It's a little bit more transparent than the others, so I would recommend layering a nice red underneath it to help the glitter really leap out. I used Illamasqua Scarab for these shots.

The formula on all of these was absolutely perfect. I had no issue getting them beautifully smooth, despite the enormous amount of sparkle in them, and How Do You Spell FBI? is the only one I had to remove with the foil soaking method. The other two came off perfectly with just normal remover.
They're all available from the Love Thy Polish website within Australia, and from Mei Mei's Signatures internationally.

I didn't really need an excuse to rewatch the cartoons that inspired these polishes, but I took it anyway, and rewatching Superted in particular really got my brains ticking away about why I enjoy this sort of show so much. I mean, I'm fucking 32 years old - I should be over trying to recapture my childhood by now. But I know plenty of other people my age who enjoy cartoons still as well. And it got me wondering why this is.

Part of the reason I still watch the same shows twenty five years after I first saw them is most obviously because they are associated with largely positive memories for me. I had a pretty great time as a little kid - my brothers and sisters didn't come along to get in my face until I was about six, and my parents and grandparents spoiled me rotten. Watching them makes me feel better for the same reason eating gummi lollies makes me happy. The gummi always reminds me of this time in my life because my mum would bring me home gummi rats from the restaurant she worked in (told you I was spoiled), and the TV shows reminds me of long afternoons where I would curl up on the couch with nowhere in particular to be for the foreseeable future. These shows remind me of a time when my world was much smaller, and in turn, my problems were much smaller. When you grow up into the sort of adult who's problems can involve being homeless and jobless for months at a time, or having a disgruntled customer waving a baseball bat at you, it's comforting to remember a time when the biggest problem I'd faced was being served ham steaks for dinner.

(To be fair though, ham steaks are DISGUSTING)

I was discussing with fellow blogger Bec from Colourful Curves just what was so special about these cartoons, and she pointed out that as well as reminding us of our childhoods, there are particular qualities that are peculiar to this era of cartoons. Thundercats, TMNT, She-Ra, Mysterious Cities of Gold and all the rest of them have a certain earnestness that you don't see much in children's TV anymore. They all have a sort of old world niceness to them - everyone works as a team, no one makes fun of the clever kids, the bad guys are never REALLY that bad, and can always be defeated at the end of 20 minutes. There's no ambiguity - everyone is either Good or Bad, and there is an episode where everyone in the team gets to be a hero. While the jokes are hokey and predictable, it's refreshing to watch a half hour of TV where no one is sarcastic, no one is bitter, and all the characters are just as delightfully lame as each other. It's charming for the same reason that Thor's olde worlde dialouge in the movies is charming - it reminds you of a world you always believed in growing up, but that discovered later didn't really exist, a world where everyone is nice and every problem has a solution.

Some days...some days I really need that. For all my bluster and anger and cynicism, sometimes it's nice to forget all the things I've learned about the world since I was five, and believe again that a teddy can really be a superhero.