MRat's movie Reviews on Newgrounds

[Smash Kingdom Melee]

I sure didn't like this!

I admit, I shouldn't be watching this at all, because I hate Flash with stolen art and stolen characters, but oh well, I watch everything JUST IN CASE I'm surprised and like it.

I wasn't though, sadly. First off these ridiculous ripped-off sprites have to go. If you MUST use sprites, please for the love of God at least make your own. Blurry highly pixelated images of someone else's copyrighted work simply don't do a thing for me. SORRY!

Secondly, the voice acting was terrible. It all just sounded like some teenager in his room trying so hard to be wacky and cool. It sounded like acting, instead of sounding like an actual person, which is how it should sound.

Finally, the jokes, none of them, were new, unique, creative, or funny in the slightest. I wouldn't say any of them were "bad" but if I wanted these kinds of jokes I'd just subject myself to the torture of watching Wild Hogs again.

Alvin-Earthworm was already blacklisted for me because of his absolute garbage Mario Bros Z series, but now I'm going to be skeptical about clicking on Andrew Raskin and Patrick TeNyenhuis' future cartoons as well.

I guess this just wasn't for me. I prefer quality, I suppose, over being a prostitute and whoring myself out through video game references to get a high score.

This is Ryan Carell, SIGNING OUT!

[NGTTXII Failed Edition]

Pretty cool!

I enjoyed it quite a bit. Neat, trippy, strange, weird and fun. There were alot of good entries for that Trial, so it was tough, but this is awesome all the same.

Topcatyo responds:

Thanks :D

[Surface]

I think that I just watched the worst thing on NG.

I can honestly say that this is the worst submission I have ever seen on this website. I'd rather watch an hour long sprite movie of Mario farting than watch this again.

Breakdown:

Art: It was generic, boring, and poorly rendered. This is was the most bland and blatantly unoriginal Anime attemp I've yet seen. It's like you didn't even try at all to draw from yourself. Every one of these looked like they could be traces directly from some terrible 4Kids Anime import. Pokemon and so forth. The worst possible Anime drawing style, and even worse than that, it wasn't even your own. The shading was sloppy and gray and lacked any point of interest. It'd didn't pop, it didn't add to the volume of the drawings; it was just there, horrifying my eyes.

Advice: Stop animating for a while. I mean a long time here. Buy a sketchbook, and go out into the world and just draw. Draw everything you see. Draw people, draw buildings, draw you room, draw fruit in your kitchen. Start going to lifedrawing classes and sessions. Go to art classes and learn some advanced colour theory. Just take some time to learn what art is all about. Right now it looks like you saw some show on TV and then jumped right onto your PC and mimiced with without any thought.

Animation: Well, to be honest, there was none. Everything I saw was just a bunch of still images floating around the screen without any weight or physical presence at all. It was like you just drew a background, then drew a character and went. "Welp. my work is done here. Next scene!" If you're going to get into animation like this, at least do some ANIMATING.

Advice: Hop around the internet a bit and look at some in depth animation tutorials. Learn about stretch and squash. Exaggeration. Inbetweening. Posing. It's right now that you haven't got a clue what actual animation is. Or if you do, then you ignored all the principles in favour of being lazy.

Direction: This was a step up from the rest at least. I'm glad that you at least tried to be interesting with your 'camera' work. Unfortunately, all the angles felt forced and were jarring rather then helpful to the atmosphere. You looked like you couldn't make up your mind where to put the camera so even couple seconds you'd suddenly switch to some brand new angle where the proportions of the room and character would completely change.

Advice: Keep it simple for now. You don't need to be David Fincher here. Insanity in the way your present your scenes isn't mandatory. John Singleton directs movies just fine and his camera work is totally pedestrian. Learn how to make a simple and plain scene interesting first. Start with the basics, and don't get ahead of yourself.

Story: It was mildly interesting, and I like that you didn't reveal it all at once. The mystery was nice. But it also felt like you were trying way to hard to be mysterious and you forgot that your characters are people that need to exist as something more than a simple place holder to further the plot.

Advice: Take some time to plan out your entire story, for every episode, from beginning to end. Work out all the kinks in the plot. Then develop all your characters fully. I mean it all. Backgrounds, attitudes. Determine how they would all react in any possible situation. If it helps, draw sheet after sheet filled with your characters in all sort of dramatic poses with all sort of expressions. Really explore who they all are as people.

Dialogue: This was the worst part about this submission for me. Ever single line was just plain stupid and unrealistic. No one talks the way you wrote these lines. They all sound like robots desperately grasping at some futile attempt to be human. It makes no sense. The situations in the film are absurd and the writing should reflect it.

Advice: Get someone else to write the dialogue, you're sadly no good at it, and I don't think any amount of practice will help.

Music: It was fine. Suiting and built a nice atmosphere. No complaints.

Voice Acting: This was horrifying. The second worst part. No a single well delivered line.

Advice: Recast totally

[[fishes]]

Flawed, but very engaging.

There are alot of tiny details that I got wrapped up in/were distracted by, but in the grand scheme of things this was a fantastic attempt at breaking the mold and you succeeded in making something very atmosphere heavy.

I'll start with what I loved. T
he music and your voice overs were the top of my list with this. So brilliant and the were definitely the basis for the world I stepped into when I watched this.

Second is the colour palette. It's perfect. The colours are pastel and dreamy, and at moments border nightmarish and layered on your video they make reality seem spaced farther apart.

Third would be your poetry/text. It was cryptic, and yet entirely self-fulfilling without the need for advanced analysis. The word choice was awkward at bits, and splendidly spot on for the majority. It told a bleak tale of what it is the wake up to yesterday. As someone who writes alot of poetry myself, it was nice to see someone present some of my own thoughts in their own unique way.

What I liked least was the art. Rotoscoping is a fine technique that was deliver some fantastic effects, but it is a specific talent of it's own, and I just don't think you you're quite practiced enough at it. The wobbly lines are nice, but the volume of the subjects varied in strange way that might have been surreal but sadly weren't. You're drawings, though the got the point across, lack technical knowledge enough to really stand out. I did like their simplicity though.

The big issues: Sometimes the text blended to well with the rest of what was in frame and ended up being too hard to read. This suddenly snapped me awake a couple times and killed the mood, which is why I can't quite give this a ten.

Overall, I loved it though. Keep up the fantastic work.

notorious responds:

well there's no way to get better at rotoscoping if ya don't practice sillY!

thanks for the good review

[My Mummy Says I'm Funny]

I think you're funny too!

I have to say, the badness of the jokes was hilariously great!

Art as gardbage, animation too. BUT IT WAS FUNNY AS SHIT!

[ScientLOLojyuuichi!!]

Hi Andrew Kepple!

How's it going?

This was rather awesome, I have to say.

[Valhalla Knights 2]

Voice acting killed it for me...

I enjoy your work well enough. Don't much like The Real Legend of Zelda, but that's irrelevant.

One thing MUST be said though, consistently, your voice acting murders the atmosphere of your work by being thoroughly laughable. I don't want to be harsh about it, but simply put, aside from the female voice actress, the voice acting in this turned the entire movie into a joke for me.

Still, fantastic work with those action sequences. I have only two critiques OF THE WHOLE ANIMATION in terms of the animating itself. One, when the sword contacts with someone, I'd like to see more resistance and he slices through. Some anticipation and some squash and stretch on it maybe. SECOND that weird thing were his face turned red and his nose bled when he saw the girl was pretty lame and cliched from anime.

K, well for you hard work I'm still dropping a 7.

[Wii Are Sold Out]

LMFAO!

Holy shit! Ahahaahaha! I don't even WORK at the EB-Games I frequent and I want to do this when people ask the clerks. OR ASK ME EVEN!

I'm in there soooooooooooo often and I'm always chatting with the staff, so people assume I work there, and they ask.

Anyway, your voice acting is what made this. When you went berserk, I nearly pissed myself laughing at the noises you made!