Coop's movie Reviews on Newgrounds

[Mario Battle Bros. ep 6.1]

You know, referring to a piece of your own making as "whity" (I suppose you meant witty) does sound a little arrogant. I'd suggest that you don't do that in future, particularly as I didn't find it all that witty.

Now, the piece seems to be descending into a massive Nintendo / Sega fight, which is strange, given the two companies' relationships with one another these days. Mind you, the world loves a cliche and you've certainly given them that.

The combat was louder than ever and that caused a few issues, with the volume "topping out" on my speakers and half of my time was spent reaching for the volume controls, as opposed to paying attention.

I wasn't the world's most massive fan of the speech bubbles sliding in from the top of the screen - I'd have preferred a simple black bar at the base of the screen, which all characters can talk on and thus saving a little on the actual animation - give them all the same font, changing the colours for each character, as and when required.

I think that it's getting better, but I'll have to see a few more episodes, to be totally sure.

[Review Request Club]

SuperMarioFan9000 responds:

Wow thanks man
I am adding Voice-actors for them talking there.
Again, thanks for reviewing! :3
(lol short response)

[Mario Battle Bros. ep 5.2]

A little short this time... Perhaps next time that you split an epsode into two pieces, you will try to get them both about the same length? 5.1 was huge and this one seemed a lot shorter, by comparison.

Right, some of the same issues cropped up again, with some of the animations sequences seeming a little jerky and slightly out of sync with the sounds. Some of the sounds were too loud and they even seemed to have static from "topping out" my speakers here - that's an indication that things needed to be turned down slightly, to give a better impression.

Less text to read in this one meant that the flow was better, but that I suspect was more by luck than judgement. The blend of some voices and other text with the voice omitted just doesn't work for me - there are good voice actors out there, that would be able to supply you with Mario and Luigi impersonations, with varying degrees of success. See what you can find and run with it, trust me.

I'll still give it a shot and say that by and large, this is good. Converting some of the latent potential to actual plus points is where you need to focus your efforts for episode 6.

[Review Request Club]

SuperMarioFan9000 responds:

Cool, thanks! :D

[Mario Battle Bros ep.5.1]

It's good, but there are one or two issues that need ironing out.

I think that the plot is nicely detailed, though having some areas where there are vocal lines and others which are the text box did interrupt the flow for me. One or the other, but not both should be the rule of thumb. Since you used te sound effects quite well, I'd suggest progressing to full vocal.

Staying with sound, some of the effects are a little quiet, while others are rather loud - I would suggest that you work a little more on making them balanced and allowing your viewers to concentrate on the plot, as opposed to having to adjust their volume all of the time.

Some of the text boxes seemed over full with words - a smaller font would not have hurt, neither would a black strip at the bottom of the frame, to take the subtitles. Some of the animation was a little out of time and untidy, which was a shame. Given that there is so much plot in one of these episodes, the final edit is the key here, getting everything just right, so that it's as impressive as possible.

[Review Request Club]

SuperMarioFan9000 responds:

Final touch and editing. Will do. Thanks!

[Demo Reel 2012]

Nice work.

Some of the pieces look better than others, but the slow running sketch looked weird - the additional parts to the legs may have looked better, had you sped the animation up a little, so that the "blur" was more pronounced.

The few animations that you did on the traditional stop motion with paper were fantastic. I love the look of the Pink Panther, but sometimes you drew the detail of his underbelly patch, while others it was missing, so that hurt the presentation.

A good choice of music to accompany the piece, followed up with some great pieces of animation - I'd love to see you put some more effort in and develop one or two of these pieces, to see how far they can be taken. The surrealist stick figure vs the scenery thing was one that I took some interest in, for example. How far could that one go?

[Review Request Club]

DillonBrannick responds:

"Nice Work" I'm happy. Thanks for the review. Whatch for detail more closely, don't get lazy, put more effort in. Yeah I was planning to make sequel to that stickfigure one, but sadly lost inspiration and thought I should better spend my time by getting better at full body animations instead.

[Adrellia Village #15]

I just get the feeling that you're going backwards here. I don't mean to offend, but the voice acting is getting worse and throwing the words at the screen in a poor version of "Dot Dot Dot..." doesn't work for this piece. Not unless you can make the animation of these words and letters a lot more all singing and dancing.

It's filler material that distracts us from the main plot and the whole impression is like a game that I play, when the person running it keep on derailing to head off on some surreal ramble, with no consequence. Editing is usually a brutal process, but you need to become more acquainted with it, when the writing has been finished. That's where you've been let down. Stop mentioning the place names so much and head for something that flows better. The narrator seems to struggle reading this, which is the first indicator that there's an issue, so look at a rewrite there. I've never heard of a cellar being anywhere but underground, so that's something that you're trying to drag out, as it seems from here.

Yes, the idea that Brutus has unleashed some sort of Pandora's Box upon Medralia is plausible, but did we really need to waste an episode on the back story? I don't think so, as it doesn't seem related to the story at all. With better writing later on in the series, perhaps you will actually make it relevant?

[Review Request Club]

MistyE responds:

Thank you for your in-depth review! Scenes like these won't drag on too long and will be portrayed in a much better fashion later, so it gets better!

[Adrellia Village #13]

Christ, more filler.

I'm not sure I can take much more of this - the substandard voice acting, where everyone sounds the same, but just subtly different. The plot being exposed through characters talking to themselves. Eluding to an Oubliette, which is a form of dungeon, only accessible through a hatch high in the ceiling - why don't you just use the word "dungeon"?!

I know that this sort of thing needs to be done, to add some sort of continuity to the piece and give you the foundations for the next episode, but if you're going to have a monologue, perhaps have it read by a narrator. This can either be a third person (someone completely neutral to the plot; an additional character, for example) or be in the first person (since it's Drake's story, why not have him tell it?), because then the voices wouldn't be such a problem. You could have had Brutus dispatching the assassin personally, or getting a secretary to do it for him and saved a lot of issue there, for example. Sort the writing out and the rest of this would fall into place, for the most part.

[Review Request Club]

MistyE responds:

Thank you for your review! This will be taken into considerationn.

[Adrellia Village #11]

Nothing overly spectacular here, just a situation of having your two dimensional "cut outs" waving at one another. That's not animation any more than shadow puppetry is high budget special effects. You need to work more on motion tweens and work out how things would look when the model turns in three dimensions, as opposed to flicking from facing one way to the other, as it looks amateurish here.

If you're going to say that we must watch the previous episode beforehand, perhaps a link would help? At least give us a number to add to the nav bar to look at.

I was unimpressed by the lives that Darrell had - it took me a while to comprehend that they were lives and each time his health went down to zero, he carried straight on with another life. It just wouldn't work in gameplay, I feel. Perhaps making a "real time" battle from Fanal Fantasy was the wrong way, so you should have parodied Mortal Kombat (Soul Caliber may have been better, since they use weapons).

Crediting a voice actor, when no actual voices were used was lame - there were even blocks of text that we had to read to carry on the story (they were up for way too long as well). There are so many issues here and I really hope that these reviews are making an impression, because they need to, else you will keep making the same mistakes.

[Review Request Club]

MistyE responds:

Thank you for your review! They are, and episode 39 will be a good improvement!

[1 Take 1 Loop]

Very clever.

I love the way that this piece progresses through the loop, developing from one scene to another and back again, without seeming to have gone very far at all. The fact that each frame is hand drawn makes it even better and the music integrates with it very cleverly.

You've clearly worked a lot on the story, moving from one scene to the other, which really helps the layout. his is one of the more detailed pieces of frame-by-frame animation that I've ever seen, yet it still looks a little weird in places, which is the curse of FBF - the nose on the initial character is strange, but not insurmountable. Little touches make all the difference and the quirky look of the clown's nose as it changes shape is brilliant.

You chose a great track for it, though give credit where it's due in the credits section, since this piece loops, not having an end, where you can show this. You've not put a comment about it or anything, so even if it is you, more kudos can b obtained.

[Review Request Club]

Carr77 responds:

Thanks man, I'm glad you liked it :D
The credits are in the menu, and it do say the name of the song, and who made it :)

[Papers]

Like the main character of the piece, this whole presentation seems quite disjointed. I can see from the movements of Papers, that he is supposed to move like that, but the plot flowing in the same sort of way is not what should be put across, I feel. Try putting subtitles in and when there are breaks in the narrative, you need to move quickly and seamlessly to the next part. This can be achieved by either aggressively cutting the piece, or more probably by adding narrative lines, to drag that side out.

The different characters that you have there are great, with the mugger and the landlord. The landlord would benefit from the subtitles the most, as I thought he was saying "rape", as opposed to "rent".

Giving a little more to this piece, you could certainly have been set for the first part of a potentially successful series. I was hoping it wasn't Clock Crew, when I heard the narrative from Speakonia and I was pleasantly surprised. I wonder what else you can have happen to Papers. Why not work on something good happening, rather than all being bad?

[Review Request Club]

Surn responds:

Well I'm glad you found the cartoon enjoyable. Overall, the depressingness would seem to be the most common complaint and you would seem to be right about too many bad things and not enough good things happening to Papers. As for subtitles, I'll probably pass on that unless I have a character speak in a foreign language. Thanks for your input.