marchohare's movie Reviews on Newgrounds

[The Fear Hole 6 - Part II]

Great! Just great!

I waited until seeing all six episodes (or seven if I count each half of this two-parter separately) before writing a review, and all I can say in summation is great! Just great!

Your comedic timing has really developed since the first episode. Your writing has always been good (regardless of what you think of it), and has gotten even better. You have an amazing flair for creating monsters that are funny and creepy at the same time. Obviously you know quite a bit about anatomy and weird zoological specimens (including housefly mouthparts and Surinam toads... YUCK!) Your character designs are first rate.

If I have any negative criticism at all (and I don't really, but I've seen where someone else mentioned this and I agree) it has to do with your preload. You need a status bar, a start button (on which the frame should freeze after fully loading), and a replay button at the end. At one point I had to check something in the kitchen while an episode loaded. I didn't know how long to expect it to take, it started automatically while I was fussing with dinner, and since there was no replay button at the end I had to reload the whole thing while I sat here watching the screen. But that's technical stuff. It doesn't affect the quality of the 'toons themselves, which is first rate.

You're excellent at this. Personally, I liked this last, more story-driven episode. Not everything has to be a laff-a-second. I've even tried doing drama in Flash, but I can't say I've been successful at it yet. Flash seems to lend itself better to comedy or surrealism than to serious storytelling, but that's an inherent limitation of the style the software produces. I thought you handled it well.

Your funniest moments, however, definitely involved the adorable little Lovecraftian horror: "I love you." About him, I probably agree with the mainstream. I was literally laughing out loud during parts of that episode.

Excellent! 10/10

Scythemantis responds:

It's great to get a long and detailed review!
Yeah I know very little about setting up things like buttons and links, I know there's lots of pre-made loaders floating about though so I'll give one a try for the next episode.

Everyone wants to see Blorgulotch again, and I'm sure he'll crop up somewhere but I don't want to be one of those cartoons with too many callbacks. Even when I find something that seems to work, I always let it rest to try something new :)

[LL - The Ring]

Pretty Cute

I liked it. The comedy was quite good (especially the "Skip that, they never put anything uselful there") and the characters, while simple, were compellingly random and bizarre and for once weren't stick figures. I loved the goofy-looking raster-based guy (the animation's creator?) coming out of the well. That was unexpected.

The reason I didn't give it a "Ten" was that it ended with a character shooting itself. In "The Ring" (if memory serves) victims tended to die in more creative ways, not by their own hand, although it's been years since I saw it. Didn't they simply die of fright? Anyway, everything here on Newgrounds tends to involve shooting, stabbing, or flying kicks. Far as I'm concerned, Dave Lovelace's "Retarded Animal Babies" owns the violent payoff (and some would say he stole it from "Happy Tree Friends," which stole it from "Bambi Meets Godzilla," which stole it from...)

Anyway, violent payoffs have been done... and done... and done. Still, not bad!

Krebskopf responds:

that was a picture of me (;

[City Royale I]

Somebody Please Explain

Let me start by saying I don't want to single this Flash animator out. This submission was simply the top good score on the list. I've looked at others over the last 24 hours, and all the high-scoring animations seem to be the same: stick figures (or in one case, low-res refugees from a video game) kicking the shit out of each other. No story. No plot. Just the simplest possible characters (unless they were simply a circle, like "Jot" or "Blode") fighting to Heavy Metal music.

Constructive criticism? Try something that doesn't involve fighting stick figures. It's been done to death.

I'll admit, I've got a bad taste in my mouth right now, because I just had a Flash presentation sink off the list without a trace, ending with a 2.8 score. Most of the reviewers slammed me (most reviews gave me a "3" or a "4") which is okay--that's subjective--but what burned me was the content of the reviews. They said there was no story (there's no story to fighting stick figures either). They didn't like the raster-based images (which are vastly more artistic than these vector doodles: artists who can do strong vector work--Dave Lovelace comes immediately to mind--are the exception, not the rule), and they didn't understand that it was a PREVIEW, even though I said so in the description. A preview is not supposed to give the whole story away, but even so, it told more of a story than this does.

But I'm guessing the slow music I used, and edited to, is what really shot me in the foot. However, at least one reviewer specifically said he didn't like the high-res raster work.

This isn't so much a review of this piece, but of Newgrounds content--and the gamers that seem to dictate it--in general. If I knew of a better place to put this, I would. My distaste is not so much for the creator of this piece, who only appears to be supplying the same-old, same-old that is in demand, but of the AUDIENCE.

What's up with you people? Do you spend all your time in front of a screen stoked to the eyeballs on black-market Ritalin or crystal meth?

I don't get it. Perhaps this is only the bitching of one over-the-hill artist, but damn! If this is the kind of product that sells these daze, I'm glad my work is outdated.

Dossfilm responds:

I know how you feel.
The problem with newgrounds, and submitting flash pieces is that since this site is a complete democracy, your rank all depends on whos on at the time. It sucks. I've put out submissions that i thought were top notch (well at the time I did, it's that narcisism in me.) Anyhow, they would either get blammed or would get a really low score.

Anyway this review is a bit malicious, but i'll keep it anyway. This long thought out message should have been somewhere for the whole world to see, like on the forums. But you had to fuck up my review score. Oh well.

Thanks for taking the time to review. I'll try not to make the next one quite so much an instant fight animation, but instead have real substance.

[mr.Twister]

Ten out of Ten.

Why the highest possible score? Especially when I just gave the latest Retarded Animal Babies a 9 out of 10?

Because peerless Dave Lovelace is competing with himself, and frankly he's done better.

Because the ending of "Mr. Twister" surprised me, and I'm not easily surprised.

But mostly, because I just learned a lot from this. I tried submitting one earlier this morning with elaborate raster-based images, and it took forever to do, and it was heavy on bandwidth usage, and it was too short, and its "story" (if you could call it that) was about as complex as "Bambi vs. Godzilla," and most people found it pointless regardless of the beautiful, time-consuming illustration.

These little bullet-shaped people are just as aesthetically pleasing in their own surreal, stylized way, consume little bandwidth, animate easily via tweening, and can tell a more elaborate story.

I learned a lot from "Mr. Twister."

[Retarded Animal Babies 20]

Dave, if you're not rich by now, you oughta be.

Time travel. Carnage. Childish vulgarity. Only more tits could have made it better than it is!

Dave responds:

I ate ramen noodles for lunch today. So no, not rich... :-)