"See, the rub is that Cuphead is retro-style, but not in the usual sense, i.e., pixels the size of Plymouth; it's deliberately fashioning itself after retro animation, in the style of Max Fleischer or very early Disney, and pulls that off with quite remarkable success! The film grain, the scratchy audio, the big brass band soundtrack, the fluid, exaggerated animation where characters all move like warmed-up gummy worms caught in the spokes of a bike; it all feels so bloody authentic! And most importantly, what a lot of people forget about early cartoons — here, we very unsubtly waggle our eyebrows at Epic Mickeys forgotten grave-site — is that they could be really fucking dark. See, back then, it wasn't generally understood that kids needed to have their delicate sensibilities protected, as odds were pretty good they were all going to die in a European trench war before they turned eighteen, anyway. So thematically, cartoons were lighter on wholesome lessons about friendship and heavier on skeletons and racism. So there's something overtly sinister about Cuphead, which might be from subtly wrong things like the drinking straw in our character's head — I mean, the teacup-head thing I'd buy, but who the fuck drinks from a teacup with a straw? That's just pushing it. But I think it's the overall scratchy look and feel that makes me think the little girl from The Ring could push out of the screen at any moment and start making comical trombone noises."