'Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire' Review: Ten Refreshing Blasts of Bliss

Watch it quickly! Plus: Disney Minus disappears more "content," including 'Crater,' 'King Shakir Recycle' and 'More Than Robots.'

Now Streaming: The newest animated series from Disney debuted on their Disney Plus streaming service yesterday, which means you need to watch it today, for fear that it may be gone tomorrow, and you might therefore miss out on seeing ten blasts of refreshing entertainment.

By Disney's description, the series, with "ten futuristic visions,"  is inspired by the African continent's "diverse histories and cultures," drawing on "uniquely African perspectives to imagine brave new worlds of advanced technology, aliens, spirits and monsters. This is Africa as you've never seen it before." 

Naturally, the word "visions" reminds me of Star Wars: Visions, which in its first season featured filmmakers from Japan and its second season filmmakers from around the world, all presenting their wildly varied interpretations of George Lucas' Star Wars, which served as a familiar linchpin for viewers who had ever seen or heard of the movies and television shows. 

The difference for me is that I am not familiar to any great extent with Africa's "diverse histories and cultures," and so every episode takes off from a new and different vantage point that I didn't truly comprehend. While it's sobering at my age to be reminded how much I don't know, it's also refreshing, since it reminds me of how many new things I have yet to know or experience. 

Younger people will, undoubtedly, pick up much quicker. Indeed, as I've rewatched episodes of the show, it's only increased my enjoyment, something that is made possible by its presence on a reasonably-priced streaming service -- for now. [Disney Plus]

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The Case of the Mysterious Disney Plus Disappearance: Or, how Disney Plus became Disney Minus.  

I couldn't help but take it personally when Disney announced it would be removing more shows and movies from its streaming service worldwide in an effort to cut costs. As reported at What's On Disney Plus, that includes "content" that I've reviewed here, including the very fine Crater, which just debuted in May and is already in my personal Top 10 for this year, and the Turkish original cartoon service King Shakir Recycle, which debuted in January. They also cut the lively, upbeat doc series More Than Robots. 

Those cuts come on top of a much bigger slicing that took place at the end of May, including more than 100 shows and movies, many of which I've watched and/or reviewed, here or at ScreenAnarchy.com, including the Cheaper By the Dozen remake, the very good coming-of-age tale Hollywood Stargirl, the even better original Stargirl, the saucy Rosaline, the somewhat decent The Right Stuff, the very dog-friendly Turner and Hooch series, and the less successful Willow, as well as titles that were on my watch list: The Mysterious Benedict Society, Timmy Failure: Mistakes Were Made and the documentary Wolfgang. 

It's a cost-cutting measure by the worldwide leader in family entertainment. Someone studied the ledgers and decided that the viewing numbers did not justify the expense (perhaps residual payments to the creative talents involved or the server costs of keeping the "content" on computers.) It's a numbers game, and I'm familiar -- and sensitive to it -- because this year I lost my primary source of income due to someone studying the ledgers and deciding that my contributions did not justify the expense of, you know, paying me. 

Disney is not alone among large corporations that operate worldwide and have cut streaming "content" for financial reasons, since Warner Bros. Discovery did this to their Max streaming service not too long ago. 

We're a long way from Disney's launch announcement in November 2019, when it stated the service as "Disney+ has been designed to provide subscribers a best-in-class experience that is available anywhere, anytime." Actually, we're not even four years into the experience, and at least one title touted at that time, including The World According to Jeff Goldblum, got cut at the end of May. 

Some of us who have long advocated for streaming services have focused on the advantages. Especially since my stroke in November 2020, streaming services have become a reasonably-priced monthly source of new and original programming, a sort of home video store whose collective catalog kept growing more expansive, a valuable tool to discover movies and televisions I'd never seen before. 

With Disney Plus, for example, I've savored the opportunity to explore animated shorts from the earliest days of the studio, steadily making my way from the 1930s into the late 1940s so far; to revisit movies I haven't seen in years, sometimes in 4K, like Who Framed Roger Rabbit and The Sword in the Stone; and to discover movies and shows that I heard about but had never seen. 

I didn't realize, however, that a ticking time clock appears for each show, a mechanism that records which shows and movies are being watched, and a ledger that determines how long that show or movie will remain on the service. It's a cold, calculating business, after all, where families are welcome, as long as they don't interefere with what Daddy is doing behind closed doors, throwing out beloved titles that haven't gained sufficient traction to please Daddy's blessed bottom line.