Kwing's movie Reviews on Newgrounds

[Snow Hare]

You've got some great graphical prowess going on here. The music and art style remind me a lot of the old Looney Toons. You also did an impressive job leaving out any dialogue and almost all sound effects.

The reason I'm docking a star is because I just don't feel much of an impact from watching this. In many ways this is a lot like the indie game Eternally Us, but it lacks the ability to communicate the very vivid and visceral feelings of grief, partially due to its lack of sound effects and partially due to the animation style. I've always had more of an eye for the macabre, so from a personal standpoint I found grotesque metaphors like Pyramid Head from Silent Hill to be stronger symbols of grief and pain.

If you're going to make an animation about grief, at least make it a little more... Painful?

[Stick Gladiator]

Decent for a stick figure animation. I like the music and sound effects, the backgrounds are also done quite well. It's strange that you used the line tool to animate your actual stick figures; I'm impressed that the animation was as smooth as it was given that you didn't just use the brush tool. To be honest, my animation would probably look about the same if I were to try and use the line tool too.

You could stand to have a bit more easing and frame-by-frame effects in your animation, but I've seen a lot worse on this site. I feel like you could be a legit animator if you just used the damned brush tool.

[true frozen bubble]

This actually wasn't too bad. Just a generic little bubble shooter. The collision isn't the greatest, and the gameplay is a little slow, but it's by no means bad. I'm also a little impressed that this game actually has level design instead of just randomly colored sheets of bubbles, which in many ways puts it above a lot of games of this type.

The graphics really aren't bad in my opinion. Not very colorful, but the bubbles themselves look... Different. I like the style, it's unique. The music is rather dull and would probably kill you if you listened to it for too long.

The only huge bug I noticed was that if you shoot horizontally your ball will go back and forth (almost) indefinitely, creeping forward at the slowest goddamned pace ever. You could have made the minimum angle a little higher.

[Social Media Generation]

You've got a good start here, but there's so much missing. I like your voice actor and your dialogue. Your art and animation is even pretty good - not perfect, but for the style you're going for I like it the way it is. My biggest issue is that it ends too soon. You talk about only one small segment of what social media has done, when your animation is just opening up for an entire slew of commentaries on the way we live.

You're also only covering one small demographic of people who use social media constantly. To be fair, I don't use Facebook frequently, nor do I bother keeping connecting with people for the most part, but there are a large amount of people already aware at how pointless social media has become.

This needs to be a lot longer.

[Broken Saints CH 24 ACT 5]

After purchasing the DVD from Newgrounds and watching the whole series, I've decided to write a review on everything I've seen. Keep in mind I watched the version with voice acting and all the fancy gimmicks.

Broken Saints. What to say? Well, first off, the visuals are amazing. Everything is very well drawn and the comic book style really works. In the end, it's just as easy to watch as a movie, and it has a unique stylization to it. The small bits of animation that are included are done very well, although I feel like some of the tweens for walking should have included a little up and down bobbing to simulate footsteps.

Sound: You did really well, the soundtrack is really great, sounding atmospheric while covering a handful of genres to fit whatever mood was right for the scene. The sound effects are also quite good, and helped with immersion a lot. The voice acting was hit-and-miss for me; the biggest issues here are Shandala and Kamimura. Shandala's voice actress is way over the top. Nobody talks like that. At some points, the incredibly slow tempo at which the characters spoke made Shandala's voice actress sound almost as if she was moaning into her microphone. It almost bordered on poor taste. Kamimura's issue was his accent, which was inconsistent and tacky at times, though this wasn't a huge issue.

Getting into the meat of it, Broken Saints starts very, very slowly. Without voice acting, I wouldn't have lasted through the whole series. When writing a quick summary before reviewing this, I managed to condense the entire plot into 21 sentences. The entire first disc of the set can be summarized in five of them. The biggest issue here is that so much of the screen-time is taken up by people speaking way too slowly, or with people getting overly poetic and contrived in their dialogue. Perhaps the biggest issue with these is that characters spend the first few chapters thinking to themselves in order to deliver boring monologues. Scenes like those of Kamimura meeting the egg farmer or Raimi tricking Sandra into letting him use her computer were well-written and worth the time to watch, and more scenes like those would have been better for setting the exposition to the story and introducing the characters to the viewer.

As the characters met up, I found the story to be much more interesting, although in some ways it was kind of predictable. None of the characters have very intense personalities, although I do like that you put in a little bit of Oran and Kamimura butting heads - at least it did something to fill empty space.

When it came to Lear, I felt like the story went from giving too little information to giving too much. It was a little boggling taking in so much information after so much needless buildup, and I think having introduced Lear's characterization earlier would have made it easier to digest. All of the talking he does really amounts to him wanting power over people in order to impose his personal judgment on the world to remake it as he sees fit. All of his monologues can be summed up in one word: Hubris. Yes, his speech was good, and it was interesting, but it was scattered, nonsensical, and throws the viewer off for a bit before they realize that his motive is really not that complex at all. It makes the aftertaste of the series underwhelming.

Shandala's true nature seemed to come out of nowhere, although I suppose it did factor into the plot and wasn't too big of an issue for me. Still, I couldn't help feeling like it was a hastily constructed excuse to justify some plot hole.

The ending was pretty good, and I felt like it thoroughly put the narrative to a close. The whole thing with Shandala was kind of cool, and I can't help feeling like there wouldn't have been a better way to end the series. My only complaint here is that the ending is a little bit plain, and the only real reward or takeaway for having put up with ten hours of buildup is Lear's monologue, which was good, but not spectacular.

Ultimately, the length of Broken Saints is understandable, given that it was written as a comic. I can see why it's as ongoing as it is. However, for all intents and purposes as a film or animated series, I think this could have been condensed into a six-hour twelve-episode series, like a single anime season, or even a two to three hour movie. Much of what happens seems completely unnecessary, and too many things drag out the plot to keep it interesting all the way through. Your ending is solid, but much of what comes before it is simply boring.

[The Sculpture]

Nice animation, I feel like it was pretty well animated, although it really doesn't stand alone as an animation. Maybe if this were in some kind of SCP collab it would have worked better? I think the main thing is that the SCP articles are made specifically to be written the way they are, and an animation really doesn't make for a good story. You could also try animating the Incident articles described on the Foundation website.

Also there was one voice clip that was way louder than the rest, and it stood out as a major flaw in the animation.

[Skin : A Pixel Nightmare]

It's not too bad, but it's not great either. I think it's most likely all of the shitty screamers on Newgrounds were what had me on edge as I watched, but other than that it wasn't really scary or even interesting. The game-to-movie concept just didn't do it for me; perhaps allowing the viewer to see what was happening to the real-world player would have made it interesting. As it is, I would have rather played an actual game.

The graphics and sound are modest, and the Earthbound reference is lame. The stereotypical creepy things that tend to happen in creepypastas or dramatic RPG Maker games are all there, but fail to immerse the viewer.

Honestly I think the concept was just bad from the beginning.

ClockworkPixel responds:

To each their own. Thanks for the review

[Xbox One Reveal]

I actually liked this a lot. The voice acting really sounds great, especially because the voices really sound like they're in a big hall full of people. The 'Game requires activation' part really made me laugh, although otherwise the comedy just seemed kind of incomplete. The animation was really simple, but I really felt like the focus was more on the ideas than the graphics, and your animating skills, while not the best, don't get in the way of the animation as a whole.

Just needs a little more material in my opinion.

Rustikit responds:

Thanks but this wasn't actually voiced acted; I just took the audio from the actual reveal and edited it against them!

[60 Frame Collab 5]

Pretty good. Again, it's hard reviewing collabs because it's a bunch of different people, but overall I felt like this was really well done. Some of the earlier ones had sketchy or choppy animation, but this wasn't a huge issue. I also felt like there were a lot of animations that were under 60 frames that just looped until they hit the right number. Seems kind of like cheating if you ask me. The frame by frame animations were typically the best, a few of them really blowing me away. The skateboard one in particular just left me in awe.