Blessing's movie Reviews on Newgrounds

[ZTV News Episode 7]

This series is brilliant. You make 3 motion-tweened animations, copy and paste them over a 5 minute video, and with 20 minutes worth of "animation" work you've got a 4+ star video. Very clever. Even the writing is just a lifeless odd-looking woman thanking her fans and swearing. Probably finished in one trip to the toilet. This is arguably the most efficient flash series on the internet. Minimum effort with maximum returns. Kudos.

[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.

[Smash Bros Christmas!]

"As usual we created this cartoon in only 48 hours. Al thought it took us some extra days to polish the whole thing and work in the sound design."

Lol?

Then it was created in more than 48 hours. Is there something confusing about what that means? By your definition I created a flash in 20 seconds, but it's taken me a few weeks to draw the rest of the frames, put audio in it, and decide to someday submit it. But I can still claim it was created in only 20 seconds, right?

I wanted to like this flash. It's rather funny and well animated, but having both the author's comments and an in-flash voice lie to me about it taking only 48 hours (which would NOT include "some extra days") has influenced my vote.

[The fall of sonic]

This is so well done and SOOOOOOO accurate. I voted 5.

[A Kickstarter Video]

Interesting.

Here's what I liked:
-The animation was exceptionally smooth. I rarely see anything so smooth. Good work.
-The audio was really solid. Both the voicework and the music were really good.

Here's what I didn't:
-This wasn't very original. This joke's been done to death. I can even remember seeing the whole "with your help I can be rich" thing way back on In Living Color like two decades ago. This video didn't bring anything new to the joke other than screaming.
-The screaming. Humor comes in many forms. Sometimes humor comes from complete stupid nonsense (which makes me laugh), sometimes it comes from excessive amounts of violence or swearing (which makes me laugh), and sometimes it comes from clever wit (which makes me laugh). This attempt at humor comes from volume, in the vein of Chris Farley for example. Some people, apparently including yourself, believe that the louder someone gets the funnier they become. That doesn't do it for me though.
-The art was inconsistent. While the animation was great, when the talking guy started to scream the art style drastically changed. Ren and Stimpy did this well, but all of the imitators (such as this flash) just end up looking rather ugly.

Overall, this wasn't a bad flash, though it wasn't groundbreaking either. Above average.

[SpongeMen SquareWatch]

I hate Watchmen and I hate Spongebob, but there's no denying that you did a wonderful job combining them with this animation. The creativity, animation, even the voices were all spectacularly done. Great job, dude.

[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!

[Staven Universe]

I'm extremely confused. The art looks right, but no one acts or sounds how they would in the cartoon. Your author's comments make it sound like you're a fan, but then nothing anyone says or does is even close to what they'd say or do in the show. The closest thing this reminds me of is when you're in 4th grade and you like a show/game/movie/whatever but you know that most people don't so you make fun of it and act like you don't know anything about it in order to fit in.

A parody is defined as "an imitation of the style of a particular writer, artist, or genre with deliberate exaggeration for comic effect."

I suppose you imitated the artist nicely enough, but didn't really exaggerate the art. You didn't exaggerate the writing because you didn't imitate it in the first place. That would mean that by definition this isn't really a parody...