Blessing's movie Reviews on Newgrounds

[Princess Ruto Didn't Forget the Promise]

Art is decent in some places and not so much in others. The audio is random and pretty dumb. You should really warn people in the title or at least the mini description thing if it's a Games Grump thing. I hate these and would have avoided it if I had known, rather than zero bombing you. Because that's what I did.

gamegrouches responds:

That sounds like a "You" problem

[Abo and Karo Mini Movie Kickstarter!]

The animation here is quality stuff, like all of your animations, however I'm not blind to the baby-kissing-politician tactic of having a child completely unrelated to the project sit next to you while you ask for money.

Now don't get me wrong, you're using your talents to present animations and honestly it wouldn't be wrong for you to look for compensation for your time and effort. People often forget that making art is a job and, at the very least, contributes as much to entertainment as a football player who gets paid insane amounts, sometimes just for warming a bench. So please don't think I'm saying your time and effort aren't worth anything, but this video has left me with some questions.

Well, one question really: What does that $75,000 go to?

Over on your Kickstarter page you somewhat vaguely address this question, but I was hoping to get more information. You repeatedly compare the animation you're hoping to make to animations on television. Is this animation you're hoping to make with $75,000 going to be on television somewhere? If it's just a thing for Youtube then your reasoning seems a little suspect. Also you go on to say you need money for a recording studio. Wouldn't it be faster, simpler, and potentially more effective to find voice actors online rather than taking local ones or whoever to a studio? The voice work in this animation is already high quality and doesn't really need improvement, so the studio would presumably be for someone else. I believe you could cut that cost altogether and then you'd be able to lower your goal, which would work out better for everyone other than the studio owner. Additionally, the animation in this video is already great. Are you planning to have the 11 minute animation in a different art style? In the time you've specified as your deadline you could complete the animation on your own without the aid of a studio, so if people end up seeing an 11 minute animation with an art style like this video, they would likely suspect that you just pocketed the money rather than hiring anyone. Which studio do you plan to use, by the way? I would like to check out their prices personally, just to satisfy my own curiosity. I get that you want to pay your voice actors which is admirable, but even if you paid them $50 per line in 11 minutes I can't see that costing you more than $8000. And you have character designers as a cost. That's another thing that you could probably eliminate and cut your goal down a bit in cost too. You seem creative, I believe you would be quite able to design your own characters.

Like I said before, if you were saying "making these animations for you guys takes time and in that time I'm not making any money at all, so I would appreciate anything you guys are willing to donate" then I would agree. It's work and it's not unreasonable for you to get a profit out of it. But since you're very clearly stating that none of this money will end up in your pocket, I would really like a more specific breakdown of where all this money is going and I think anyone preparing to send you money deserves that. So if you could be so kind as to explain how much, specifically, you're planning to put toward each cost (for example "$21,000 will go to licensing sound effects, $11,000 is set aside to pay 22 different voice actors, etc") I feel it would go a long way toward putting any potential investors at ease. Thank you and good luck!

Sykohyko responds:

thanks for the feedback @blessing! We just posted a pie chart of all the costs on our kickstarter page and facebook fan page https://www.facebook.com/moolt

[Pico's Average Day]

This is more of a gadget than a movie really. I'm guessing you wanted to be entered for the larger prize pool, eh?

That said, "nothing too new or interesting" is really rather accurate I think, so I'll vote 2. The voice acting is nice and the art isn't too bad (though I think you should dial back the lines a little, Pico looks wrinkly at times). The animation is smooth enough but it's kind of overdone, as in the gestures are.... Well... There's a lot of unnecessary movement. It's like watching someone pick a coin up off the ground, but first they whip their hand high above their head and then whiplash their face down in front of it and wiggle their hips as they crouch and hop clockwise around the coin and wiggle their mouth like they're chewing and.... See what I mean? It should be one simple motion, but there's so much unnecessary extra tacked on. That's how all of these gestures you animated look to me.

IvanAlmighty responds:

I didn't do this for the prizes, but I do agree with you that this isn't a movie, I had more scenes that would have created a story but I didn't have time to finish them unfortunately, I wanted to exaggerate the poses, but some of the scenes have unnecessary motions, though others still feel warranted to me. I tried animating the words rather than the sentence and it's feel, but I agree with you, there really isn't much to this cartoon.

[Hey I'm Spider-Man: 2]

This was so stupid that I'm in physical pain right now.

RyanStorm responds:

Why are you wasting your time commenting then? CALL 911!!! You need to get to the hospital ASAP!

[Madness Battle Generator]

Wow... Just... Wow. I read a review of yours elsewhere where you criticized someone for "crappy as possible, rudimentary animations and artwork". The irony is not wasted. You also criticized "rudimentary tweened static graphics", "bad animations", "Low keyframes per second", and "Some of the poses are awkward, which means you can't pose figures properly." It's unreal. I had no idea that you knew these things failed from personal experience, but now I see how embarrassingly bad these things turned out for you, leading to your "advice". Hypocrisy is hilarious and I thank you for a good laugh, but let's move on to your movie, shall we?

Now you've heavily insisted that we consider this a movie, not an interactive thing at all, so I'll review it as such. At the start of the movie we have three guys on the left and a single guy in green on the right. They're taking cover so clearly an awesome fight is about to break out (by awesome fight I mean overdone plotless rehashed tweenfest with forgettable characters cause, of course, it's a Madness flash). Sure enough, after a brief peek to steel his nerves, the green guy boldly charges out, guns blazing, hitting nothing. He runs straight toward the 3 better armed men... And right past them... And right off the screen. The enemy sniper moves out of cover and cautiously takes a few steps toward the right of the screen, still focused on the block that the guy in green clearly isn't hiding behind anymore. The others watch the block from the safety of their own block, which is providing no cover since the guy in green is behind them somewhere, off the screen to the left. After a long pause of nothing happening, one guy gets shot in the back by the green guy. The other guy comes out wiggling left and right as he dances over to a gun on the ground and dances back to cover the same way. The sniper is still eyeing that block that the green guy hasn't been behind since the first 3 seconds of the flash. Another pause. The green guy (still off screen) shoots the other guy who's hiding. This guy falls on his back and begins headbanging, an act he'll still be doing as I write this review, three minutes later. The sniper finally decides he sees something worthwhile and runs off screen to the right. The guy in green steps onto the left edge of the screen and stands there. For infinity.

This was not a good movie, not even by Madness standards.

kkots responds:

No, I will try to be nice.
Here we go: do not pick on people for writing reviews. I have the right to express my opinion, even in vulgar and abusive manner. You have no right to attack me for that.
Please, ignore things that annoy you, instead of fighting, as you may see it.

[The Man Who Won't Rhyme]

Everything before the introduction of Bro kind of confused me. Like... Why were the people telling him out of the blue not to be happy? And he became Eminem and went to a rap battle or something? Just the whole first bit of this flash before Bro confused me. My first impression was that you were going for a powerful statement about homophobia. I was ready to applaud what I thought was a message about the ugliness of blind hate. Then I took a closer look and realized I was overestimating the seriousness of this flash. I mean the characters are named Bro and Dude, and the tragedy of the story revolves around rhyming. Even the title is silly and then there's the main character gleefully leaping around with those few lines that repeat multiple times. And the fact that you used the word "chap" in the author's comments (come on, you can't say the word "chap" with a serious guy face). And there was that forced scene with the dildo that came out of nowhere. The more I thought about it it became clear that I was seeing something that wasn't there. In retrospect I can tell this was just meant to be another parody about how silly them wacky homosexuals are (and how they comically get what's coming to them in the end, right? herp derp).

Some of my friends growing up were gay and they were great people worthy of more than being the butt of jokes. Your belittling of them is mildly offensive, but I digress.

The music was very good, Tomamoto's voice acting was excellent, and I liked the art style. You have a lot of potential and I hope you make more flashes, though I'd like to request you don't tackle such controversial themes as if they were cheap punchlines in the future.

FrozenFire responds:

They were giving him problems for being super flamboyant. At that point he's not even sure what his sexuality is.

He just acted a lot like Freddie M from Queen and some parents got concerned

[Game Grumps: Toad's Voice]

This is easily the best Game Grumps flash I've ever seen, thus I will give it one star more than I would normally give any Game Grumps flash.

CarlDoonan responds:

Two stars are certainly better than one. Thanks for the rating!

[Superman V Goku]

Not bad.

Here's what I liked:
-The voice acting was good.
-The music was also good.
-The animation, again, good.
-The art was alright.

Here's what I didn't:
-All the extra anime characters you put in there would be dead just from standing so close to a clash between Goku and Superman. The idea that they could actually enter the battle without exploding is laughable.
-While the voice acting was pretty good, some of the audio quality of the lines was rough.
-The credits went on about 5 times as long as they needed to. I'm compelled to lower my score by one star for how agonizing that was alone.

Certainly a decent animation though and not bad for just being practice. Keep at it.

Kel-chan responds:

cmon really credits....usually I just move onto a new video once the credits roll unless im looking specifically for VAs or what they used to make it

[Drunk Batman and Robin 6]

I was pretty confused at first as to why Robin's voice kept changing. I read the author's comments though and that just raised other questions like why did the oldest Robin sound more childlike than the second Robin?

The art could use some work but at least it's consistent (I hate these flashes that try to be funny by using different art styles on every new camera angle). Some of the humor did make me laugh though, so kudos on that.

oldmanorange responds:

Thanks a bunch. And yah the Robin's looking practically identical is supposed to be kinda a joke to the older comics.

[Jurksons meet Floonstoons]

Eh...

Here's what I liked:
-The animation was pretty smooth.
-The audio was alright.

Here's what I didn't:
-It was really random. The writing didn't build toward a specific pun or anything it was just the casts of two cartoons spazzing out.
-The art was really inconsistent. The way people were drawn was changing so frequently it looked like 9 different people did the art for this flash. It was really distracting and bad.
-It was... This flash just sucked. I'm not even going to sugar coat it anymore. This was a really craptastic crap that prayed that a lot of loud, incoherent speech coupled with excessive blood would somehow make people laugh. No wit, no plot, no actual humor. This was just plain a turd. Don't bother replying, I don't read them. It would be the second biggest waste of time of your life. Guess what the first was.

YULFO83 responds:

The first one was the day you were conceived.