Cartoon boots for a cool 3d world. Cartoonishness is an abstraction that frees us from the constraints of reality. If you kick someone in these boots they go boing!
The aesthetic overton window continues to stretch open towards the unreal. Mcqueen’s armadillo heels tripped on the runway so that the brb could run to the corner store. The continued blending of virtual and irl aesthetics has us chasing supernormal stimuli. When half the sneakers we see on social media are renderings, we come to expect a baseline of unreality. Big red boots are vr chat boots.
Unreality achieves what cartoons have known for decades: abstracted forms convey their core idea with an immediacy that a fully realized form cannot. This is why animation can convey coherent motion in a fraction of the frames live action requires.
Hundreds of characters, from the mouse to the plumber to the hungry yellow circle, have conducted the same exercise: how do you make a shoe using as few geometric primitives as possible, and still have it read instantly? When a human hand had to draw hundreds of frames of footwear, this was a practical necessity. It has also produced a symbol. These shoe shapes become genericized in the audience’s memory, and all fulfill the same purpose: to instantly convey the idea of ‘boot.’
It’s a footwear design truism that the shape of a shoe is not the shape of a foot. Big red boots are really not shaped like feet, but they are extremely shaped like boots.
“Good Thinking Boots!”