Coop's movie Reviews on Newgrounds

[Chrismissed DE]

More than a little weird

Well, I wish that you'd used more musical cues, as you demonstrated with the end joke that a few different tunes do make a difference to a piece like this and that's all for the good.

The animation is nice and while I'm not exactly sure why the jacket disappears in the first place, it's clearly for a higher purpose later in the piece. The music in my eyes doesn't fit with what you're animating, but that's possibly something to do with the character himself, as opposed to anything else out there.

I feel that the jokes are a little short and there's not much for the characters themselves - it's almost like you've previously established them and we know who they (or in this case he) are (is). You've got some good animation skills and I like the flow of the piece, with the exception of the bloodstains after the main punchline has been delivered.

I've watched it a couple of times and I'm still not sure why a lawnmower would get thrown at the guy - is he really that annoying? The Xmas gag would be one hell of a way to ruin someone's day, as they sit on the doorstep of the pearly gates, looking back at their life alone, not able to sleep, nor eat, despite the fact that the Xmas dinner smells so good. See, I've written two more jokes for you, without a lot of thought. There's a simple chance to get more body in the piece.

[Review Request Club]

ToonCastleTV responds:

Haha thanks. Also It's a snowblower not a lawnmower. Why? because I wanted to do an extreme pose of the boy "Chris", and I'm a cartoon violence loving Punk >:D Yea man, I had a script written with more jokes dude for when he got to heaven's gates but I didn't have enough time to do it. What was going to happen was God was going to freak at him basiclaly for interrupting jesus's birthday party but O well! Maybe next year! And yeah, I'm a lot happier with the character animation in this one than last years. Really goes to show puting an ease to an action shows. The jacket disapering was a originally a fuck up when i was posing it out and i did a bunch of poses later without him having it and was like fuck it ill cover it up somehow =P Thanks for the feedback!

[B-Lated ClockDay Post-It]

Broken preloader, doesn't really recover

Well, this piece isn't the best, not by a long shot. I like the way that you've decided to make it around the size of a Post It! note and ran wih the idea of it. For reference, you may wish to scale the size of the piece up to actual, or even slightly bigger - you're probably 33% smaller than a Post It! note.

The preloader got stuck on a loop and I had to right click and play to get into the piece, which didn't help, though once it got started, we could see what was what.

I think that the various themes that you used here were nice and things like StrawberryClock doing backflips was a great idea. With the break piece between the two, perhaps you could have had an animated Strawberry flicking through the pad, with a Giant animated "HAPPY CLOCK DAY" being picked out on the pages, as he watches, may have been a better idea.

Some of the image quality was sacrificed, either by the quality of the original drawings, the scanner / photograph definition, or even struggles to align the images in each instance. These little details can make all the difference, so please take the time to get them right, as they do pay dividends.

[Review Request Club]

ToonCastleTV responds:

Yea, I dont know why he preloader did that... I didn't engineer it! =/
Lol and yea the strawberry flicking through is a good idea.
I tried my best man with my camera to take the best pictures I could, and used photoshop the best I could throughout, and tried the best I could to align this. The animations are all on scale just not the post it's through out. If I had been able to get into my school and scan them this may have turned out cleaner for sure, but alias I did what I could in August. I still have the post-its I drew on, so maybe I will re configure this and add more to it but this was soley for fun more or less, and it was! I did all the drawing in my basment window on a sunny days =)

[Adrellia Village #34]

Audio let it down

I like this piece and the plot being exposed quickly, with little fuss, though the audio was one big carbuncle, which sapped the enjoyment from me, during this piece.

For the audio quality, I'd suggest that you start by either getting better recording equipment (I'm not sure this is an issue), or recording a little further from the microphone and spending some time equalising it, to get the most from it.

I think that the plot is good, as are some of the jokes. I would have preferred the guys to walk in the opposite direction of the arrow and then come back past it, heading where the arrow points, with the wizard saying "What do you know, he must be smarter than he looks."

There is a good chance to take this further and I'd like to see that done, but I'll reserve judgement, until I've seen a little more of the series itself, as I'm still relatively new to this.

[Review Request Club]

MistyE responds:

Thank you! The "he's smarter than he looks" suggestion will work great actually. I appreciate your review, and to grasp the entire plotline, watching the previous episodes is important. From episodes 1-12 I recapped all of the important parts but then I trashed that idea for some reason.

[Adrellia Village #12]

Not your finest hour

I think that the lack of previous episodes in this particular case has cost me, because I suffer, watching without context and while the plot moves forward, it wasn't as enjoyable as one of your other pieces.

The awkward silence was awkward, but it's not supposed to be awkward for those watching it. Perhaps have the King break the silence, so you can actually have some dialogue, such as demanding to be untied and Drake saying that he's almost got it, while the mooks behind him idle about awkwardly.

The video has been compressed to such a state that the quality is severely compromised. I'd rather see it take a lot longer to load and be a much better quality, overall.

Not that it's put me off the series, but please request them in order, so we can see what the hell is going on!

[Review Request Club]

MistyE responds:

Interesting review. I'll be sure to request them in order, though expect the first few requests - the first episodes - not to be as good.

[Adrellia Village #3]

Setting the stage

I think that this is the sort of thing that we can enjoy seeing more of. The jokes involved with other's misfortunes in every walk of life are quite something, being that everyone likes in some small way to laugh at them, even if it is just inwardly.

The animation style is basic, but now that you've set the benchmark with the earlier episodes, there is little that you can do to change it up, aside from minor tweaks to how everything flows.

I would have made one major change - not using the Kill Bill target cue the second time around. Perhaps play some other piece from the film, while Drake leaves and stop it with the record scratching noise, before quickly panning to the frozen soldier in the ice cube. Yes, he has been hit by the spell bouncing off and it's a nice closure / call back gag, though I'd have maybe had an ice amulet lying in the floor next to him, for double the laughs.

And haven't we all met someone like that, for giving us directions. You always get either the really smart one, or a village idiot, so no moderation at all. I'll be interested to see how that pans out in the next episode.

[Review Request Club]

MistyE responds:

Thank you for your review! I'm glad you got the frozen soldier joke along with the other reviews - half of the people I showed it to didn't understand it.

The next episode is another episode that sets the characters up. More for humor, though since the series doesn't focus on the other characters until episode 38 and up.

[Adrellia Village #38.1]

Poor quality

Sorry, not really the humour I was expecting and the whole effect seemed to be somewhat dimmed by the lack of "finish" to the piece. The converter program that you use to make it into an .swf file seems to have taken the quality down quite a bit by compressing it. If you have issues with the 10Mb file size limit, perhaps contact Tom, as the limit is easily changeable to a size which more befits your animation.

Right, the sound needs some work, as with the scream, you've just looped part of it to make it sound longer. It may not sound this way to the untrained ear, but this didn't sound right to me. The sound samples for the crashes, explosion and so forth seemed to work well, so maybe it's the voice acting / recording that needs some work.

On top of that, your animations style is decent, but not exactly pushing the boat out. It reminds me of Cyanide and Happiness, though the backgrounds aren't as pleasing on the eye. The bookcase which fell over, for example is an horrendous example of perspective gone wrong. More time and effort into that aspect would stop you from tapering two parallel lines together on a cubic piece of furniture.

There is hope, as you create so many of these, but as with anything, it's a learning curve and as you advance, you'll learn more techniques and you'll not make the same mistakes.

[Review Request Club]

MistyE responds:

Part of the reason this scene was removed was its heavily reliance on slapstick humour (as you addressed in your review) and its failure to progress the story. I simply uploaded this here as a "special feature" of Adrellia Village #38.

I didn't notice the bookcase until you pointed it out, and I will make sure mistakes like that aren't present in future eousides,

I used to pump Adrellia Village episodes every few days, but now, I've slowed down so that the animation will look nicer and the writing will be better.

[2birds1stone]

Disappointing

I think that there was something in there that I wanted to see you do, but never got the chance to see it. With the type of flash cartoons you see on Newgrounds these days, you tend to expect the violence, the blood, gore and all the trimmings, to shock, possibly even to offend, but at worst, to showcase the artist's ability. Here, we see your drawing skills and a limited expose on your ability to animate:

Taking the birds as they are, with various themes of having both of them killed by one stone, you need to take it one stop further and actually animate the consequences of them getting hit by the stone. You could play dodgeball with them and have one die, before picking up the stone and trying again. There is a lot of scope for the plot of this and stopping at three occurrences just seems to be selling you a little short, in all honesty.

Good potential with the piece all told and I love the way that you've made the preloader - I'd perhaps consider a lorry delivering stones to the set and one bird writing up a long number of takes on a clapper board, though that's just my sense of occasion.

[Review Request Club]

evanarmagast responds:

something about animating the cute birds brutally destroying each other seemed warped to me. like, it would ruin the whole lighthearted sense of it. i personally felt that showing everything but kind of gave it a sense that it was a kids cartoon. although, i guess i could take a happy tree friends approach. completely brutal murders of adorable woodland creatures by other adorable woodland creatures. they may be a sequel idea now, thank you for your input and for the review.

[The Movie Movie]

Clever, surreal and funny

Well, the plot is never short of surprises in your films, I can say that for sure. I think that with the way that the interpretation of the whole film idea became a mime session really was where it took off, since you were building it up nicely, then added the forcefield gag, which still gets me in stitches. Given that you probably brainstorm your productions like this anyway, when one of you dies on the X360 and you have to take a few minute break. Perhaps a beer or other beverage was called for during this interlude, so Nick could question "Is this stuff stronger than usual?"

Right, little hints and tips aside, it seems like the video quality is better - better hardware, or bigger filesizes to blame for this? I think that it enables you to come up with much better pieces and of course, this was the sort of thing that led on to the Pyroscape saga, so hopefully it shows that you were improving at the time.

Keep it up, yada yada ya.

[Review Request Club]

Fro responds:

I believe when we made this we couldn't legally drink. :P

[BTS 2 Trailer]

Chilling

Ah, the suspense that was the teaser trailer for Beneath the Sheets 2. I remember it well, with all of the shit - use a Thesaurus, to come up with other synonyms, for the love of god! Okay, my Thesaurus doesn't have an entry for shit, so try my own abridged version:

Shit - Crap, poop, turd, faeces, skidmark, dump and so forth.

Right, the quality is a little low, but I'm sure that's down to filesize restrictions and YouTube or other specialist video hosting site would be better for this. I'd love to see medals again, but it's not really possible with teaser trailers, though it has been done before. Something like a tag for candid camera, when Nick is driving, for example.

Why were the shorts that disgusting? I'm not sure I really want to know, but I needed some filler text to make this review look worthwhile and meaningful. I certainly agree with your policy of resubmitting all of your old works, since we need to keep reviewing these, to make up the old deficit to my review and responses score that you caused all of that time ago. I'm not bitter, honest.

Looking forward to the real thing... Oh, wait.

[Review Request Club]

Fro responds:

We actually made a script for a movie once where we were trying to think of funny words to describe someone going to the bathroom. Ha, good times. We thought of about 20 different lines.

The shorts had a scene of their own, but we found it made the movie too long and it really didn't help. It involved Nick washing his shorts after shitting them in the first episode of Beneath the Sheets.

[Super Mario 3D Land in 2D]

Yeah, that's about right

My god, those things are annoying - having to keep your head perfectly still and aligned with the DS to get the 3D effect and then when you put it down after 2 minutes, your neck feel like you've been in a headlock for a few days with a rather burly rugby player.

Clever animation, hot topic, great use of 3D to actually get the point across and one of the most harrowing screams that you'll ever hear come from the lips of Mario, to my knowledge really does make this short fantastic, but you could have done more.

Luigi could have come along wearing silly 3D glasses and saying how it all looks so realistic and then spot Mario lying on the floor, burst eyes bleeding everywhere. This could end in various ways, so I'll leave that there as a plot hook for you to say "It was a good idea, but..." to later.

[Review Request Club]

Zictor responds:

Yeah I could have done more but it was the main gag I wanted to get across... that and showing off some of my skills. Got an Xmas animation in the works and I wanted something to bridge the gap between Halloween and Xmas...

I also have a new Mario animation in the works, it'll be 2 minutes long as opposed to this 20 seconds... Hopefully that'll be the January animation!

Also it's Dave from the NG meetup if you didn't know :P