Score: 9

"Really great!"

submission: -hipsterween-

date: November 1, 2009

Wow, such a huge improvement in quality since the first Rocket Crotch! Every item from the ground up was drawn super well. My favs being the castle (geez look at all the brick work and shingles!), the portrait art on the walls (I saw a fanged Scrumptious Jack :D !), and the bathroom scene (the door, tiles, and the monster with a red Glowing line work and SO many details in the skin texture). I really liked how you used color and lighting to set up tones and atmosphere, like when they are in the car (all colored a blue hint) to indicate moon-night settings, or like when we go into a purple or green room the people in the back having a purple/green shading. The goblin and ghost duo had lots of personality, and you showed it without a single word! A staple to good character animation is if the audience can read a cartoon in pantomime and you did it great. You had their eyes look like they were thinking and scowling at the invitation, put postures of mischief in their bodies, and finally evil giggling grins to tell the story. Also like the picture with the girl smiling...when it goes back to the scene the picture is empty...then the sexy girl comes in mhhmm I get it ;] .

In the animation I still see a lot of panning of single frame images, but you blended them a lot better than in previous animations. I think it's because you mixed some fbf into them and used the bobs and tween-eases in a smart way by adding them to the beats of the music, so it made the viewer want to bob their heads right along with it :) or at least I did ha-ha! Especially loved the part where the pumpkin head guy is gnashing his teeth up and down to the music and when the skeleton took over the DJ board. That brings me to the music, which had a flow and rhythm just right for this nightclub party in a haunted mansion. You feel the heavy beat and that wisp sound like its traveling with the cartoon and accentuating scenes when they move with it. Also liked how it went muffled in the bathroom scene just like the music was coming from the party itself. So kudos to Shadowfox!

I had to replay this one at least 5-6 times because it was packed with so much eye candy and details that you could catch something new on every viewing! I caught a witch on a broom, a king Dedede face, Red M blood, a shout out to the Stray Targets as the best band in the universe (lol-isn't that your band!? XD), and of course a great number of cameos. I guess the only down side was its short length and the fast speed. There were many times I had wished you'd let the camera sit there for a sec or 2 longer so I could awe at the artwork before getting cut off. And then the cartoon was cut short in the end by the time they started killing... I thought those parts could have been built up more, but given the time constraints of making the Halloween deadline it looks like a hell of a LOT of work went into this baby and it had a solid evil ending (no survivors haha). Overall this was a really great polished (but short) cartoon that was a treat to watch, and worth re-watching. Keep it up man; you're improving a ton! :)

Score: 3

"Mediocre"

submission: Stamp on the Ground

date: September 12, 2009

Wow that was pretty weird. It felt like all the annoying things about Deviantart was barfed into one "kawaii gay dancing fest". I mean you had it all: The furries, the gay lovers, the "original" Pokemon characters derived from fan fictions, the pop culture icons, the video game guys who are then made into lovers because they are polar opposites so they have a "dominant and submissive" relationship. Not to mention you drew them all as anime characters with pointed chins, featureless faces and all the same body type (minus the accessories), which completely undermined the original designs into bland eyed copies of their real forms. The animation was 50/50. Some parts like the alien's hair moved nicely with fbf and some of the smaller characters really got down to the beat, but then the rest barely moved at all...you just drew them in one pose and then they landed into another static pose with almost no frames in-between to make it smooth, and then if they turned around it was the same drawing but flipped in the other direction. Or it was the same base drawing and then you erased an arm/leg and drew it in another bend...Also, the slow frame rate didn't help on this fast song, where they should really be bouncing and moving faster. I think if you really want to progress in animation, you should take a look at some real DDR videos online, (I'm sure YouTube has some), and watch the way bodies move as they dance. They have knees that bend, and pivot centers in the waist that show weight (all of your characters fat, skinny, big, or small jumped with the same space and weightless effort). Also, look at clothes and hair when it's moving in real. Every figure here had their clothes glues to their bodies or something...not a wrinkle or slack in them! It was a pretty long song, so I can see you have the effort and drive to produce an animation that can really shine, and that's probably why I think you can do better than this half-job riding on pop culture nostalgia (of course that's just imo). And look at the vast array of characters you did, it's like 20+ different people, animals, things, so you're not lazy to draw! You as an animator have potential to make something completely your own, but you won't be able to get there if you don't break from your comfort zone and rely on only fandom to make things. Anyways good luck! :)

Score: 7

"A Nice Cartoon"

submission: Tywo At Large Ep. #3

date: August 13, 2009

So, as I had said before, I finally got around to watching this cartoon. And I was pleasantly surprised by the attention to details that are found throughout the work. You can see the places where you went the extra mile in the background and scenes, for instance making the river animate in the stock shots, and having background students do things while the action is going on to the main story. I also saw a great blend between the brush tool and pencil tool to make many of the faces and props, and you did this so well that they complimented each other, (which is hard to do sometimes and can look very awkward), but you pulled it off. The way you had a consistent grasp of using the camera angles was just like what they teach in a traditional film school. You knew when an idea of importance or humor was to get the attention, you zoomed in on the subject, and on parts of action you had our eyes follow right with him (like as he went down the hall in the rocket) or was running from the vice principal. Another element of detail that was very nice was the use of lighting and effects....the smoke twisted and faded, and the part where the principal and that teacher are talking in the darker rooms had red/blue gradient tints to emphasize the mood. I was going to add that you over use the tweens, but then I noticed you DO use some fbf its just so subtle and smooth its overshadowed by the more obvious yanking of the tweens. For example, that part where the teacher in walking and drops his papers...I automatically notice the tween walks (not very good), but then you put all this effort into making the papers flip and float so well it's like "Oh that was done so nice I didn't even catch it...because it wasn't awkward heh". Hope that makes sense. So maybe you should cut down on the tweens and make more elements fbf so it balances out better....and don't get so lazy on the heads and feet haha, some people don't even have knees and I think some had heads bobbing a little too forced. Good character animation knows only to do that on occasion for emphasis of something ;). Design-wise I didn't really like the sharp angle mouths you do...you were definitely influenced by cartoons like Invader Zim, because those characters have the same kind of mouths, "square" heads, with a pointed anime-like chin. It's not bad to emulate a style and make it your own, but use it for a reason. Invader Zim was generally an anime-like sci-fi world fraught with futuristic mechanics so their designs complemented the city they lived in. Here, it doesn't do anything. The characters personality is, in a way, constricted to eye movement and a mouth sliding on a template head...you did a little more on the girl when she was moving her brows a bit, but all the screaming and expressions needed more than an open mouth and static bugged out eyes if you get what I'm saying. For an example, look at Roger Rabbit when he freaks out....his whole head and body get into the action! Try doing some of that next time. The humor was 50/50 hit and miss in my opinion, but that happens with a lot of comedies really...oh well you can't even try to please everyone, so please yourself first, right? :) And frankly the idea of kids hanging out at school and having "shenanigans" is a little on the stale side for me...but that's probably because of all those damn live action kids and school sitcoms that are killing cartoons and dominating the current channels . So no offense that I didn't really get into the series or anything and it's good for you to explore beyond it, because it will get you out of your comfort zone and you can only improve. But just know this; you have a lot of talent and passion to animate a cartoon of this caliber and length. And I can see that this was not some crap animation pulled out in a week. You really put dedication, quality, heart, and soul into what you create, and that's what makes good cartoons. So yeah, I look forward to seeing your next animation whatever it may be.

Score: 6

"Good but not great"

submission: Everything by Everyone

date: April 3, 2009

Congrats on the front page and stuff for your short. : ) It had a few good moments and a few bad moments though. The main issue for me was that the characters had a little too much "tracing" element to it. Some of those animations I've watched so many times that I could literally pick out the pose and frame from where it came from and I think it might have been nicer to see some leeway from their style while still keeping them recognizable. For example with the Bitey pose, rather than transcribing the actual pose he did with the one arm on the tree and the two legs spaced, you could have had him with a bent knee leaning in a different way and then it wouldn't have felt like you took it straight out of the cartoon, and instead made your own variations of what we remember..Actually I think a lot were attempted this way but I can't be sure and it needed more distinction. 2nd was that the animation was very limited. Seeing that I've watched your animations here and on DA, I know that for the most part you do tweens as a primary, so I have no qualm with that. But what I do know is that YOU can tween multiple elements in a better fashion then what I saw in this one. And I can only imagine the criticism you could receive from fans or otherwise of animations that pride themselves on NOT using tweens being suddenly transcribed into tween format for this piece. I'd be surprised if some haven't already hounded you for this, but I don't really know. Music is always subjective and although this song was not my taste (I like System of a Down and stuff ha-ha XD ), I still saw that you did put effort into making the transitions of the characters move from one verse to the next, and you did it very well. A few examples I saw was the way you made characters move up and down with the time of drums and beats, and had camera pans sway slower with the more flowy parts of the music. Also you did a pretty good job at keeping the coloring of each character correct and the shading was pretty much up to par; although near the end you were no longer putting detailed backgrounds and went for solid colors, instead of their own landscapes. Finally the fact that you did something that was not Sonic based was a little refreshing, because it's a tiny step into something that's outside your typical comfort zone and doing things like this are key to opening up creative juices. Making things that are not standard to your typical subject matter is a great way to become inspired when you go back to them. If anything, it was a departure from drawing a circle/oval based figure into drawing a huge array of other shapes to do the other characters in this short. The only place I saw some fbf was in the scarecrow's walking scene and just for the sake of it, I suggest you should TRY to do a little more fbf because it adds to the overall wholeness of an animation...or just practice it even if it's something you never plan on showing. Because in the end it [I]will[/I] effect how much better you get as you keep expanding and learning. Anyways I've talked for too long now lol and let me just say good job on this. It's not the best by any means, but being an animator myself, I know that you had to start this the same as everyone who opens Flash: One blank white square, one blank frame, and one blank layer. And it's up to you to make EVERYTHING else and make it work and it's NOT easy and it takes time from your life and your effort to complete a whole animation of this length. That is what validates this short for me despite its shortcomings and flaws. You made something that you enjoyed doing and it took some effort. :) Keep it up

Score: 7

"Good job!"

submission: Ducky and Plunger

date: October 10, 2008

Okay, I admit that sometimes a flash comes along that does things I don't like and yet I can't help but find some humble approval of it in the end. This has to be one of those cartoons. On one hand, I have a high standard on how good the quality of the drawings and animation are in a piece, and I don't like when things are overused like matrix music for action scenes and text words instead of voices. And this is normally reflected in the score. But on the other hand this cartoon was so non-sequitur it wouldn't have mattered much if the drawings had been better. I found something completely innocent in your story that doesn't seem to want to please anyone, just make something funny that you wanted to tell and it doesn't matter if it makes no sense. The whole concept of a plunger as a character is one example. Haha, he eats popcorn and sandwiches, he sits on the toilet (even though he's a tool that would normally be in the toilet) and he rides a wagon that propels on some invisible force. The duck has no feet and slides around, and has an obsession with toasters, and lives with a plunger in a house. It's true, some people will come in watching this and say "hey that can't happen!" or "wtf, this has no real plot" but to me, you set the standard of what I'm supposed to expect in the beginning with that bizarre TV show that starts it all. At that point I said, "I need to disband my logic and watch this cartoon open-minded". And I honestly liked this cartoon and laughed at the things they did and said. There were some lazy parts in the drawings and too much tweens, but there was also some real effort put into your cartoon's construction. You used close-up shots, and pan arounds, we get an x-ray view in the toaster, the shopping scene used good light effects and fade aways to show a passage of time in the toaster store. You made some okay backgrounds and even got a little creative by making a "Y-box" and putting little details like the personalized license plates haha those were great. I think you made a cartoon that only looks bad on the surface but actually is very good overall on the inside. Keep animating! You have the potential to get much better. Dedicate a little more effort to the art and the movement, but keep going. I would normally vote this as a 5, but I'll give you a 7 to be nice ;)

Score: 4

"A flash that tries, but fails in its execution."

submission: Meat

date: September 20, 2008

Completely uneventful. The style was crude and gave nothing to the viewer. The animation was lazy and consisted of simple tweens and solid black line appendages and mouths. You didn't even bother to give them proper expressions of fear or horror when they were being cooked. Only the swimming scene seems to have any real effort put into it with the splash effects and the underwater perspective. After a few seconds of this I knew it was going nowhere, but I gave you the benefit of the doubt and watched it to the very end in hopes that SOMETHING would throw this cartoon's purpose into perspective. But no, it's nothing more than a practice test at best of what you could do with jpegs of meat symbols and happy faces pasted on the top. The song was cute at first, but became repetitive and boring after the 5th verse of the same thing. And there are far better flashes about praising meat than this...for example "PORK"-by the Weebl. It you have to continue this type of animation work, use that flash as an example of how to get it right. Overall, this was a short waste of time but not even a GOOD waste of time.

Score: 6

"Disturbing but with a purpose..."

submission: Metal Gear Funnies

date: July 15, 2008

I'm surprised to see so many reviews did not understand that this was a satire of the MGS collab. They honestly voted and wrote reviews as if this was a flash with a goal of glorifying MGS based flashes and penis/porn humor for the most part. It's obvious that based on the traditional drawing style and solid attention made in the details of the artwork, that these artists could have done much better animation over the spammish style that is shown here, but they chose not to. (No doubt to exemplify the fact that they want to ridicule and mock the subject matter). I think my favorite parts were the parts that had a reoccurring idea. The way Bug's parts always ended with the joke being explained by a wiki article was pretty funny in my mind...and the way every character was so uniquely stylized was wonderfully executed. That Sonic was like he came from New Jersey haha. The interpreted Snake as a penis was also a great part because it flat-out stamped an opinion on MGS ideals and the low standards in humor (penis joke) that people will accept in a typical crude parody. I was surprised this part was not more readily accepted as funny by viewers. Instead it received outcries that you defiled Snake....haha very interesting considering that if it was in the real collab, I'm sure it would have been a hit. I think artistically I also liked the part with the bongo playing physiatrist just for all the wild and dramatic forms the artist put into the people and their twisted postures. One part also worth mentioning was the Seinfeld Snake and Newman metal gear, the joke was a real stretch but the main point about how the audience responses to a lame joke was well understood. (Loved that fat lady with the flabby arms!) The only part that dragged out too long was that porn/animal video clip part, and its purpose was the most cryptic to me so I clicked on past that one. Finally, the ending part with the devil fat kid was so-so. The animation and quality was the best bar-none, but it lacked the crude and overall vicious tongue that all the other parts carried. In fact, it was perhaps the nicest/gentlest one of all (Snake even got away scott free) and so it was not a very good finale. I think I would have preferred the Seinfeld scene to be last since it ends with both Snake and its catered audience blowing up. But that's only a minor nit pick. Overall, I was intrigued by all the scenes because I watched it knowing it was a satire and it was not meant to be a flash that entertains..aka (was it funny?), but rather speaks its own mind and opinion to the viewer. Good job, I think you got a lot of people to listen and evoke emotion, but sadly most did not grasp its inner concept and meaning...Or am I reading into something more than what was intended?

Score: 8

"Love it!"

submission: Big NG Package

date: May 7, 2008

Who says this is not animated?! lol You're just as animated as a cartoon character if not more. Its better then what some people can even produce in flash. Hahaha, although the whole concept of the clip was nice (getting a surprise in the mail), I think what sold this was your gestures, the passion, and (most of all to me) the improv. It's the same crazy-ness that made me love your animation invasion short. You really know personality and caricature...and honestly it's something that some of the greatest animators had. The best acted cartoon characters have the most eccentric animators, because they trans-scribe their own movements into the drawings. This video was an excellent example of that. Great job! You've only made me love your work even more.

Score: 9

"So, you finally show a method to your madness!"

submission: Alfred's Playhouse Pt. 3

date: January 9, 2008

Playhouse Part 3. This was, by far the best Alfred cartoon you've done. Parts 1 and 2 in my opinion where too messed up for their own good...but anyway, I loved this one for the following reasons:

1. You finally get to see more of the two self's understanding their places in this mind. And see a sort of master and slave theory arise. The master needs the slave because it assures he has power, while the slave needs the master because he feels sheltered/protected in some way from the dangers of the outside. At least that's what I read from their (eating the treat) actions.

2. For once, all the crazy stuff is not just for shock and spectacle; they have a lot more symbolic connotations. And I'm sorry if the parts 1+2 had those too, but they were far too cryptic (i.e. fornicating Littles?)...while this one was more focused, and thus more enjoyable for the audience to watch and study. Also, (thank god) it didn't have as many "so loud it broke my speakers" moments as the past cartoons did. So thanks, my ears are grateful.

3. The music was spot on to the scenes! My favorite being the music that plays as Dictator Alfred took control and raised his arms and the real Alfred ,(like a puppet being controlled), mimicked his movements to grab that blade. The cuts/transitions there where so smooth it made me grin, because it leaves us knowing "oh, yeah. That guy is dead!"

4. The conclusion was left open and we don't know what will become of Alfred now in the real world. I like that, because it leaves the audience believing what they want to believe happened, but to me it seems the Dictator has control now. Which only goes to show a moral for the happy Alfred (as he flies among the false rainbows), "It's hard to free a slave from his chains, if he reveres them".

Good work on this one! And I was happy to see more frame by frame, and less tweens...even if some parts where sloppy and missing some in-between frames from one pose to another.
Just on a little side note: Do you trace any of Alfred's animation movements from CatDog? It seems similar....

Score: 8

"Very Nice!"

submission: Rocket Crotch

date: November 27, 2007

Original and funny to the core! I really liked this! And it's going in my favs, but what's a critique without some real critique, huh? So here I go......

The animation is very stiff and over-tweened. It's most obvious when you imported a lot of drawings and then pan them around too much. But then you even make a note of that flaw in the robot scene, so I'm curious if you are making fun of the way your cartoon was handled or merely using that observation as an excuse to get away with the bad animation. It's strange because the drawings are so sloppy and loose it's like you drew everything only once and didn't bother to fix or re-draw it, but on the other hand, the whole cartoon looks that way...so it does seem consistent as a whole. I want to say it's like a cartoon come to life from a sketch book. And that's NOT a bad thing. It was a nice quality in some cartoons, like "What Ever Happened to Robot Jones?", so this cartoon may be read the same way.
Seeing as how the main focus was humor, I think it's a successful cartoon in that aspect. I admit I laughed really hard on some scenes because it was so "serious" in its silliness. For example, Dr. Mocha getting so insulted over his piercings or when Jezza seems to be experiencing a real state of inner mediation only to find its occupied by a gay record singer (whose face I might add was hilarious). If I could recommend some improvements, it would be these things:

1. Audio: The voices are great, but the quality sucked. One minute they are so low on the speakers they sound like whispers, and then the next scene they are blaring out their lines. It was such an obstacle, that it made watching your cartoon a hassle, as I needed to keep my hand on my volume knob as I watched it. If it hadn't been for the originality and story in the cartoon, I probably would have given up on watching the whole thing.

2. Animation: Just a little extra effort in this, can make all the difference. For example, when the shark went to eat the bait. You could have at least animated him biting the hook instead of sliding him behind it and moving his mouth to chews that don't affect the line at all. That just looks lazy. And more angles would have been nice. You throw a few in there, like the pan between villains and hero, but then when the fights really happen they are flat and one-dimensional. Think like how in a comic book we get a whole lot of angles of something coming at us or around the character. We see them from the back, top and sides.

3. Character: (not sure if this one can be changed much, since you probably already have their designs the way you like them but)....Jezza and Dr. Mocha and Kaz all look too similar in face. They dress differently enough to distinguish them, but they all have the same head and face. If you could draw them a little more different I think it would help keep them apart. Scrumptious Jack was perfect though! Hahaha!

Okay, so I think I've talked too much now, and I apologize for the long review, but I liked this cartoon a lot and where it could go in the future, so I hope this review is seen as being a little helpful and not bashing. Honestly, I can't wait for the next one! So I hope my critique is taken with a few grains of salt.