Kwing's movie Reviews on Newgrounds

[Rat's Christmas (Goth and Ellie SHORT FILM)]

The grainy texture on the images looks great and makes this really feel like a pre-Flash cartoon of the 90s or earlier. You also really nailed the art style, and it really makes the animation pleasant to the eye.

Humor-wise I didn't find this especially entertaining, but it's only 2 minutes so the unfunny-ness isn't that painful to sit through, especially when the aesthetic makes up for it a lot.

There are two main hiccups that I think drags this down considerably. First, some of the animation is just way too simple. Some of the really simple stuff (like the camera pan in the beginning) have a low framerate and look jerky. The two frame loop of the rat digging through boxes looks really crude, and it wouldn't have taken THAT many more frames to create a loop (even a low framerate one) that looked less sloppy. The screen shake at the very end is another example of this - just a few more frames to slow this down would make it look more like something that might actually air on Cartoon Network.

The second issue is the timing. Not just comedic timing, but the timing of the shots as well. It's a short animation (under 2 minutes) yet panning and fading transitions are all we see for the first 30 seconds of it. Some of the relatively short shots should be even shorter, like the rat tearing apart the box, or the first shot of him reaching into it (you play the same loop later and that time it's shown for the right amount of time.) Similarly, both shots of the rat holding the snow globe are just a little too long, as well as the still shot of the mess the rat made. All of these things might seem like nitpicks, but if you imagine how awkward it might be to talk to someone that randomly inserted... half second pauses while speaking... to you, it makes sense how not only these small differences of a fraction of a second can create a disruptive experience, but how a bunch of them back to back make the final product look unpolished.

E-Nat responds:

Thanks for your feedback! I'll improve my short films better in the future 💖

[Madness Combat 12: Contravention]

A bit of a mixed bag here. Despite looking great visually, I don't think this installment is the best in any one category. While the animation is ultra smooth, in terms of choreography it doesn't have the interesting teamwork of 5.5/6.5, it doesn't have quite as fast-paced action as Antipathy, it doesn't have as deep a plot as Inundation, and it doesn't have the particle effects of Abrogation. Similar to Abrogation, the plot is basically the main cast trying to survive in the Auditor's world. It's not really clear where Hank is, since he didn't die in Expurgation (perhaps I need to play Project Nexus, as it's not really clear what the difference is between Nevada and Occurrent Nevada,) though teasing Deimos coming back is a definite point of intrigue.

Adding in some slight green tones to some of the scenes looks great and adds to the grungy tone that's gradually increased throughout the series. It's refreshing to see Sanford fight with a hook again, but the actual combos he does aren't much different from what we've seen before.

Hopefully we get to see something actually happen with the Auditor soon.

[NEW OFICIAL SPOOKY MONTH MERCH!]

The voice acting and linework are really good and the humor is decent but this feels more like an animatic than a completed animation. Flesh out the linework and add in some more frames.

[Dreamy Collide (Oneshot) Movie]

The length of this animation is pretty impressive, but it's flawed several times over. The dialogue is pretty broken in terms of grammar and it's not especially clear what the plot is. The subtitles and pauses also slow the animation way down and make it a bit tedious (some voice acting, even Speakonia, would have made this feel a bit faster.) At the same time, a lot of the animation loops (like the wings flapping) happen way too fast and the quality of animation just isn't there. Especially for a looping animation the audience will see over and over, it would be a good idea to put some more time (and frames) into loops like these even if you have to cut corners on other parts.

HantomPro responds:

yeah,i can see,in episode 2 i can get better to give a good explanation in things to happen in animation,and make a storyboard,improve the fluidity and everything,about the possible voice acting,my preference was to do something that reminds me of undertale.

[School Dayz]

The animation is really well done but I can barely understand what the characters are saying so I can't even begin to understand the jokes. As a quick tip, this is how you can keep Flash from compressing your audio:

Publish -> Publish Settings -> Audio event/stream -> Higher bitrate and "Override sound settings"

A couple things like the dick cutting gag weren't unfunny in the sense that they were offensive but rather that they just felt boring. I'm not sure if it's just that the joke was fundamentally unfunny or if a difference in timing could have sold it a bit better.

RagingStreetTaco responds:

Thanks for the critique. Yeah, I sort of kept the default audio settings to mask my terrible on-the-spot voice work, especially for Hellanna's voice. The modifier made some distortions that can be heard when streaming the raw audio.
As for everything else, you're right. You would not believe how unhappy I was with how it turned out. When testing the movie, I felt a very strong emotion. My friend called it duress, I'm not entirely sure about that. Frankly, I hated most of it.
The dick gag was really off due to the fact that it was literally made an hour before submission. It was supposed to be a main part of the movie and have an actual payoff later. A lot in this movie are artifacts from when it was a bigger project. I really just want to overhaul everything and make it less awkward and more coherent. Trust me bro, it would've been g8.
If you want to know more, just hit me up. I'd be happy to elaborate on everything.

[The 10 Plagues of Egypt]

The art style for this is REALLY good. These are decently funny, with a few being a little too short (death of firstborn) and a couple being really entertaining (I liked how the livestock keeled over so suddenly, same with how abrupt darkness was.) Couldn't ask for too much more for an interactive movie, this is great.

[Catch that Goblin]

I actually found this looking for the music from Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, only to find the guy that made Castle used it in a 2005 animation? Wow!

The cinematography and timing of the audio is really fantastic here. The art and animation are serviceable but look almost more like an animatic than a finished product. Then again, for over 3 minutes of animation it would have taken forever for something like this to be as fleshed out as a more polished product, and that's not taking into account that even the very best Flash animations in 2005 didn't look much better than this. A few sequences feel drawn out when it's obvious you were trying to get later sections to sync with the music but overall this looks great.

[Sonic Bowls in Hell]

This reminds me a lot of Jehtt's redubs, although a bit more shitposty of a vibe with the intentionally bad animations, graphical glitches, and random swearing.

I like Sonic shitposts in general (the "plus I'm in hell" really got me) but this is really too short for the humor contained within it. Bare minimum I think the audience should have at least seen the aftermath of the his bowl.

ZabuJard responds:

i hate all e stars including jehtt, thnx for review, the point of this (side point) where the humor is for me is that u dont SEE the climax, u totally miss the ending, the taking away of thw whole point of the cartoon is like a funny spit in the face of the v iewer, it comes out of nowhere, and ends nowhere, imo

[Artifacts]

I really liked the comment you made to the effect of new tools not being made to solve old problems, it's a really compelling argument for Flash as an artistic medium being impossible to replace (even if the technology is.)

Putting that aside, the visual effects are really cool and trippy (sometimes painful on the eyes) but what I really liked was the moment I realized that the visual effects and what you were saying were related - there really are a ton of things going on here that would be difficult or impossible to recreate with other software, and the smorgasbord of frame by frame animations piled on top of the effects helped to give context to what you were talking about (though I wish you had included more of them.)

My only real criticism is that one of the voices toward the end of the animation had such poor audio quality I struggled to understand it.

[INVADA]

My first time watching this I wasn't a fan, but on second watch I realized you actually told the whole story of a first date and then the two characters getting sick of each other. Syncing up with the music also works quite well.

The animation style is a little simple but it's not bad, and there are a few cute creative decisions (like how the sprites are dragged onto the map for the first date.)

I wish it was a bit longer, since there's no way the actual song is this short and it has the feel of a music video.