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People Are Getting Through Quarantine By Recreating Movie Scenes In 'Animal Crossing: New Horizons'

animal crossing movie scenes
By Hoai-Tran Bui

We're a couple weeks into practicing self-quarantine to curb the spread of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and the boredom may be beginning to set in. But not for the players of the newly released Animal Crossing: New Horizons, the wholesome Nintendo Switch game in which players spend their days catching fish, building houses, and paying off loans. But most importantly, they're recreating movie scenes.

Scenes from films like The Lighthouse, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, and Howl's Moving Castle have become popular to parody or pay homage to, with many players sharing their nifty custom designs of beloved characters on social media, to the joy of their anxious followers. Because in a time like this, what better than to celebrate cinema with chibi versions of beloved movie characters?

The Lighthouse has become the movie du jour to reference in the time of coronavirus — its tale of two lighthouse keepers who are driven mad by isolation, and each other, ringing a little too true — and players of Animal Crossing are no exception. One of the key moments in the film, in which Willem Dafoe's character warns Robert Pattinson's character that it's "bad luck to kill a seabird" (which he of course does, kicking off a slew of bad events) has become widely parodied in the game.

In the early days of the Nintendo Switch game, players come across a seagull character named Gulliver who washes up on the players' beaches. Many couldn't resist taking a photo of the moment, in the same black-and-white color scheme as Robert Eggers' 2019 film. Others even went so far as to recreate scenes from the movie itself.

The other popular arthouse film to pay homage to is Celine Sciamma's gorgeous lesbian romance Portrait of a Lady on Fire, which players recreated in amazing detail. NEON, the studio behind Portrait of a Lady on Fire, even shared the design of one player.

But players mostly delighted in recreating their favorite characters, like Florence Pugh's May Queen in Midsommar, Lena Headey's Cersei in Game of Thrones, both versions of Sophie in Hayao Miyazaki's fantasy film Howl's Moving Castle, and — an ever-popular one, Ash Ketchum in Pokemon. And of course, there is many a Jedi roaming the shores of Animal Crossing.

Are you playing Animal Crossing? What movie or TV show character or scene have you recreated?

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