very important mental image: sometime after everything starts to settle down, steven pulls out his guitar and asks greg if he’d mind another duet, since the first one was “kind of tainted from the end of the world.” greg just laughs and says ‘of course’ and they re-fuse, and this time he’s a little quieter but he sings to just himself and knows everything will be okay because they’ll always have each other.
they both have a lot of respect for and confidence in each other and it helps steven relax for a little while, like a regular old jam session but better and closer. connie comes by and joins them with her violin and jokes about steven being able to get beer now, and steg just sticks his tongue out. “ugh, it’s not worth it, trust me.” they both laugh. it’s nice.
Aside from being just a really neat animation style, I definitely see there being a metaphor in Spinel’s old school rubber hose animation aesthetic. Like, it’s very representative of the past, of childhood even, of the abandonment and burying of old things and people from your past. If just leaving these old things that used to make you happy to rot back in the past instead of bringing them along with you to grow and change too
Like, Pink’s whole ambition at that time was to be seen as serious and as important as the other Diamonds. She hated being treated like a child (we really see this in “Jungle Moon”) and wanted a colony to prove her worth, to be seen as equal among the other Diamonds.
In the scene in the movie where Pink is granted a colony and she’s on the Diamond phone thing to Yellow and Blue, Spinel is bouncing around and goofing off and Pink clearly looks embarrassed, hurriedly shoving Spinel out of the way so Yellow and Blue don’t see. Pink doesn’t want to bring Spinel along because Pink’s embarrassed by her, afraid she’ll make Pink look like a foolish little kid and not the grown up responsible Gem she’s trying to prove she is to Yellow and Blue.
And it’s really not unlike how tweens and teens stop watching cartoons because they get teased and how it’s seen as childish to watch cartoons, that it’s a thing babies do and if you want to be a grown up, if you want to be respected, you better leave that cartoon stuff in the past. I’m sure this still happens today but it was definitely a prevalent mindset when many of the crewniverse were kids.
And I think the crew have a love of old animation and maybe a desire to fish it up out of the past and bring it to today instead of just leaving it back there with forgotten memories of childish things. Like, the idea some people have that really toony toons can’t be taken seriously (a criticism lobbed at SU quite a few times!) and the crew wanting to push against that and say you can still have goofy, fun, toony cartoons and give them modern deep plots and heavy emotion, that the two together are not a contradiction
Anyway, yeah, I definitely feel Spinel’s animation style was a super deliberate choice for the overarching theme of her character
