zlxq3000's movie Reviews on Newgrounds

[Korean Missile Crisis]

Wow, fucking hilarious.

The animation was a little bit lacking, but it was so funny; the best part was the end with America being all buff and flipping off the entire world while sitting on a throne surrounded by money. Cuz we ARE just that awesome. XP

Good work.

Sh0T-D0wN responds:

XP.

[- Rain -]

Pretty good...

I really loved the intro with the drops being animated in-tune with the music. The backgrounds were really well-done, and the character was designed pretty well. However, like plasticmanticor said, the girl did look sort of weird when you first drew her; she only has one eye and her head is a weird blob, as is the main character's head in the next shot of him, but then it goes back to 3/4 and looks fine. Also, the walking was sort of awkward-looking; the fact that he'd stop after every step was very unnatural. You could easily work on that a little bit. The dragon train thing flying up into the sky looked strange, too (the one where it's off in the distance, I mean); try using more than two frames of animation to make it more fluid. The light hitting him when the train is pulling into the station was really well-done.

There really is a lot of potential here. Just keep at it and I'm sure that you'll do great.

Clarevoyant responds:

Ahh! I see what y'all are talking about now. At those moments you are seeing their faces from the side. I didn't want to go completely anime when working with this.. but maybe I should have.

[Black Wizard]

Really freakin' awesome

It looks amazing. If it's supposed to be an animated series, try to make it not so two-dimensional and side-scrolling-platformer-y. That's the only problem I had with it; it looked too much like a trailer for a 2D Flash game and not enough like an animated series. If it is a game, that's cool, too, but it looked... too much like an animated series, in that there weren't really very many characters (enemies). If it is a game, shadow-y monster people could be cool enemies, but you only showed them for about two seconds in the entire thing, which is what makes me think that this is an animated series and not a game.

tl;dr-If you're making this a series, make it more 3D-looking. If you're making a game, make a trailer showing more than just four characters.

If you did the 2D-looking animation because of time restraints, I can understand that. It looks awesome regardless of what I say. XP

Ventor33 responds:

Well, it's game with 4 characters >.> It's based on those 4 characters.

[Brawl Funnies [dick 3]]

Great speech...

Kinda wish it wasn't connected to a 'Brawl Funnies' cartoon, since the exact people you talk about who would watch one of these are the same kind of people who'd ignore the wall of text and go straight down here after watching the video to say it sucks because Fox wasn't in it. But it's still a very true statement. The art of parody on NG has been somewhat tainted by Awesome, but at the same time, I haven't seen much by EgoRaptor in the past few months; the only thing I've seen by him recently was that Girlchan thing. I have seen a lot of original content on the frontpage, too, however; look at the Castle: Reprecussions or Escape From Nevara series, for example. They've both been frontpaged with every submission because of their original content and excellent animation. Movies like those are the reason I come on here, but that doesn't mean I don't enjoy Egoraptor or Kirbopher (although I am starting to hate the Brawl Taunts movies; it's been a year and a half, it isn't funny anymore). I'm happy to see them starting to come up with more original content than video game parodies (Kirb's "There Was This One Time", I think it was called, was on the frontpage until today, and Ego... well, he hasn't done anything since Girlchan, which despite being a parody, was still pretty good in my book; it shows that he's sort of going away from video games, although anime's not a very big leap, but I'd be willing to bet that eventually he'll get into more serious animation).

But on the other hand, there is the fact that if you were to take away all of the 'unoriginal' content and replace it with the original content, what would you be left with? I've seen periods of time when Fulp would say "NO!" to Awesome-type things and put things on the frontpage that I would've rather preferred one there. The 'unoriginal' content may appear half-assed, but most of the time (lately, anyway), it's halfway-decent animation-wise. I've seen so much stuff go on the frontpage that shouldn't have been there, but I believe was put there by the Fulpster to showcase new, original content. However, when that new, original content looks like it was animated by someone who just learned how to draw in Flash, it shouldn't be put on the frontpage, imo. The frontpage should only be for the best new content, and unfortunately, good new content takes a long time to produce, so what do we have up there in the meantime? Awesome cartoons, Brawl Taunts, and other crappy video game parodies or slice-of-life-but-not-really animations. It's just the way life works; you wade through a lot of crap to get to gold... and some of us, as intelligent as we may be, enjoy crap from time to time...

dreftclub responds:

A few months ago ashford pride made a movie with a foreboding title. It was called "Awesome Grounds".

Well ladies and gentlemen, that's might as well what this site should be called (at least right now), with the top row on the front page slot dedicated to an "awesome" movie and an "awesome" parody, an "awesome" t-shirt in the newgrounds store, and pretty much every "awesome" movie in the top 100, along with han's "awesome's creed".

I can't go to newgrounds with seeing something not about egoraptor or his coveted video game parody series. It makes me wonder sometimes if pursuing anything but half-assed cartoons making mildly funny observations about video games laced with profanity is even worth it. Truly, they are what bring the masses of 13-year olds to this site, and thus increases traffic and competition in the internet world. But you have to ask yourself, with this sort of two-bit audience increasing in numbers, are they really interested in watching anything else?

I understand that it's a dog eat dog world in the online entertainment business, and to compete you have to pretty much put up content that a majority of internet browsers would click on. This includes either women or video games. Things they already know they want. And that's all they want. They sign up, watch more, and come back and do it again later. They're trained to know that what they want is easily accessible and is promoted all over the site.

Original content is often shuffled off to the bottom of the page, or never gets any attention to begin with. Now comes into play the whole 'they won't click on it unless there's a boob for the icon', etc etc. That's because they've been fashioned to think that way.

I'm not saying i have all the mysterious answers to the way people's minds work. But this much is true - if all people click on are breasts and video game icons, and you give them breasts and video game icons, you're not pushing the envelope.

Newgrounds is the epitome of user-generated content. We already have a massive advantage over youtube in the fact that making a cartoon involves so much more creativity than snappily editing your webcam footage. So instead of 200 cartoons coming out every minute, we have 200 cartoons coming out every day. That gives someone a better chance of breaking out and being discovered for his hard work, and a reward for a job well done.

But in the same way that viewers are trained that they don't have to go out of their way to avoid original content they would otherwise enjoy, authors are becoming more and more disenchanted with their personal creations and are turning to nerd culture icons and cheap tactics to get viewers.

I can't tell you how many animators I have spoken to that have shunned their own creations in favor of sub-pop culture parody and disjointed scripts sprinkled with toilet humor and profanity. a cartoon catering to everyone who's forgotten what cartoons are all about. And here we are shoving away everything about cartoons that was originally appealing and magical, because we're pretty much forced to.

I'm not pointing the finger at any one person here. I think it's part of the bigger picture - bigger than Newgrounds, too. But if people really care about the future of cartoons and animation, we wouldn't be seeing this kind of blatant favoritism.

People will find what they want if they want it. They don't need to be spoon fed it all.

For thirty years animators who strive to create something genuinely unique have gotten nothing but a slap in the face. It's sickening and it has to stop someday, before they all disappear.

Lastly, this post is not about me. I'm not writing this out of self-pity, bitterness or spite. I'm being honest. I care a lot about the future of animation, and what I see around me is very troubling. The industry is bad enough, but where the future lies is in the small corners of the animation world. Newgrounds is one of them. I spend a lot of time trying to encourage and teach frame-by-frame animation, and creating your own characters and scripts. That is what is important

[fight_or_die]

Aww, dude...

That was really good; I hope you can get your hands on a new computer and finish this...

shiguy-master responds:

thanks man :)

[PG: Animation History]

Good, from what I saw...

Your animation skill shows a lot of promise, but I couldn't sit through it all. It just got kind of boring after a little bit, and listening to Chad mispronounce words no one's ever heard before got kind of annoying after a little while. I'm just curious why it seems like you guys did all your recording in one take; if you mess up on recording, you can always just rerecord things. One or two mistakes is alright and even funny sometimes, but when they're every other line, it just gets annoying.

What animation there was was really good. You're really good at doing a simple walk cycle. Just work on the recording. Get your own mic if you don't already have one; they're not very expensive, and recording software is free if you know where to look. That's the only thing I can think of is that you were borrowing a mic or using a school's mic or something; that's the only reason I can think of that you'd have limited time to use recording equipment, which it seemed like the case was.

MrMacro responds:

I'm going to work on the audio problems, but for now I'm glad you enjoyed the animation. Thanks!

[The big heads episode 1]

Ummm...

Was alright, I guess, for something done in a week... But I agree with HSD; look into older VAs, or at least work on making your voice sound more different when doing different characters (of course, considering that you sound like you're 12, that might be a challenge; you see, you're body's going through changes, birds n' bees, etc. etc., and your voice WILL be different soon, so training it before it gets deeper might be hard/worthless)... But it was... cute, I guess. Could've been a little more creative with it, but you've got a pretty decent start for something here.

oldlyshapedchris responds:

thanks i guess. but dont think im stupid cuz im 13 >:I

[Avatar Boredom Dub 3]

Never seen Avatar...

But funny nonetheless. I only gave it a 6 cuz it was only vocalwork; if it'd been your own animation as well, it probably would've been, like, an 8 or 9...

TomaMoto responds:

That's cool. I just hope that you also give low scores to people who use other people's audio and animate over it... and people who use sprite animations...

[Rats on Cocaine - Ep # 8]

Good news for Rats On Cocaine...

That was really good; I think the only episode that can top that was the one with that weird god-bug. But this one was good because it was nice and short; sometimes things can drag out forever; as an example, the only part of this that I thought wasn't good was the beginning, cuz all those sound effects hurt my ears and took way too long. But the ending was terrific.

"Tiny devils!"

ApocalypseCartoons responds:

"i am claus!! i am prankster bug!!!!!!!"

[Smoking ad]

Kind of a weird one...

Weird in that in the movie, it's not smoking that kills him; rather, it's people watching him smoke that do so. I understand the message you're trying to send out, but it wasn't put out in the best way. The commercial isn't saying "smoking kills" so much as it's saying "If you smoke, people will murder you." Good animation, though.

North-Chain responds:

I just thought it would make the ending less obvious.