Apropos of nothing...

The Dark Crystal made a huge impression on me as a kid.

I think part of why is that it had such a weirdly encouraging feel of "you can do this." Here was this weird story - some of it's familiar archetype story stuff, and then it completely goes off in odd directions and there are no humans in it at all, and it's pretty obviously a film intended for children and yet they didn't even halfway try making things stupid or safe at all (except for Kira coming back to life). And yet people were able to make it,someone actually paid these guys money to make this bizarre thing. And the puppetry and matte painting aspects felt accessible somehow - like maybe you couldn't make something that big, but you could make a smaller scale version of the same thing.

And I think because so much of my life has been spent around the message "nobody is interested in that/most projects are too elaborate to be feasible," that any alternate would be really memorable.