JackBz's movie Reviews on Newgrounds

[Teaser: The Last of the Dashkin 2]

Your old flash cartoons are probably my favourite online shorts I've ever seen, and as a once huge fan who joined your forum and everything, this has me extremely excited all over again. Best of luck!

chluaid responds:

Hey dude I remember your username from the forums! Because in my head I always pronounced it JackBEEZ. Anyway thanks man!

[little boat]

Really excellently animated and captivating from start to finish, basically! Good job.

[Donut Quest]

Completely brilliantly animated, consistently entertaining and hilarious. I love how the touches of the animation made the guy walking into the donut shop with glee so funny in itself. This was both super excellent as both an animation showcase and a comedy.

Sexual-Lobster responds:

thanks!

[3-Day Flash Pass]

This confused me. How is it that a flash passed between many different authors who only had such a short time to work on their parts be 1: animated so well and 2: be more interesting than most other flash submissions I see on the front page? I really did find this pretty damn great. Good job, everyone involved. The ending + the sequence where he transforms into a giant devil of some sort were really great. I feel maybe the fact that this was transferred to so many people just really kept it fresh and exciting the whole way through.

[An Animation Revolution]

Good but I don't entirely agree with the message

First I want to say that 3D Movie Maker was the greatest thing. It taught me a lot about animation, I used the program on and off from age 4 to 14 and learnt just simple stuff like eases/squashing and stretching things without being taught. It had just the right balance between ease of use and enabling creativity (it had pre made scenes but you could still create your own scenes out of props/same with hand made characters you could animate freely) and then on top of that the small modding community behind it.

The problem with these programs are when they're marketed as an actual alternative animation program and purposely try to limit creativity in bad ways in favour of ease of use. The other problem with Go Animate specifically is that it looks like garbage. 3D Movie Maker at least looked like a pretty cutting edge videogame in 1995.

I laughed at this a lot, and agree if you're talking to people who consider it a long run alternative to flash. But I think having 3d Movie Maker as a kid benefited me more creatively than it would have to have had Flash at that age (I am talking strictly as a tool to get me into animation), and I can probably say the same for this program, and they shouldn't necessarialy be seen as useless just because they're not as good as the real programs. It makes it at least appear easy and fun, which is important.

But of course if you're above the age of 14, just get flash.

[The Northern Incident]

The most impressive thing about this

was EASILY the shot of the continuous zooms out of the forest. A single scene in a flash movie has not impressed me that much in a long time, it was awesome. But yeah...I really am not a fan of the ending. Honestly, I know it obviously wasn't and was planned from the start, but it just seemed like some weird culture reference was added in the last minute to make more potential for it to be more popular and widespread, or something. It just wasn't done in a funny way. I was just like "oh right, ok" y'know? But the movie looked really nice, and was pretty tense while it lasted. It's probably your best work in terms of animation/style. Really liked the character designs.

[LIFE + DEATH]

This was so good

And also just horrifying. Steven scares the shit out of me. I think the highlight for me was just the animation of Jerry swimming; it was so perfect.

[Zanta Claws III]

Best Eddsworld yet

I love how it just seemed so ambitious, the writing/animation/, having that musical segment towards the end, the actual length of the cartoon. It's just damn impressive, and I was surprised by how much I'd laughed before the opening credits had even started. Good job, Edd!

[WHOOKOS Beta: Halloween]

If you ask me

You're pumping these out too quickly. Each one hasn't improved at all in animation and some of the most persistent complaints such as the awful sound levels/quality. It's really frustrating to see that, since episode one, the lip syncing animation has pretty much just stayed as "open mouth > half open mouth > teeth clenched mouth" on a loop roughly timed to the speaking. And in pretty much every cartoon of yours, there's always weird subtitle errors that aren't exactly what the characters said, too. I know it's a small complaint but it'd be such an easy fix to just rewatch the cartoon and check for mistakes.

I know it must be a pain/seem exaggerated to be told to stop/slow down making cartoons until you have problems fixed that essentially have nothing to do with you, but it really is painting these episodes with a coat of mediocrity right from the get go. The thing is that not a lot of your voice actors are actually that good, and I think it would be a wise decisison to get different voice actors on board for some people. I know you're getting the people the characters are based off of to voice them, but I think that this really matters only to you as an author, but to the rest of the viewing public, no one could care if you replaced the voice actors with better ones/ones with better quality equipment even if it meant it wasn't their "real" voice. This is just something I think you should consider, or just buy everyone some decent recording equipment (hey, it's christmas soon!)

I think this is probably the most poorly paced/unfunniest episode of the lot, with the worst story. I mean it's almost like it just abandoned the main plot point of them finding a halloween costume for Rat about half way through, which was pretty bizarre. I think it's probably a good idea to not base your stuff on old comics from 2003, maybe. For a halloween special, it sure didn't feel like it was very much halloween related at all except for that zombie...and I really have no idea what that's about. Maybe you/your friends do because it's some weird kind of injoke, but as a viewer I just felt um...left out? Yeah, sure.

On another note, I find it confusing how you seem to value this series much more than AE Chronics, which is more original (though still seems overly silent hill inspired) and better paced/written than this. I honestly think humour isn't your strong point, at least not when it's based too much on insider jokes from years ago.

[Africa Dudes]

Christ, this was embarrassing

Just absolutely dreadful in every account, and so utterly pointless. I can't tell whether it was part of the collab rules to make every single person's entry unfunny, boring, poorly voiced, and unoriginal. Christ, how many iterations of a variation of a "hey...what if...what if african people talked about things we talk about in the western world?" Same constant angles, everyone wears masks to hide any trace of animation besides slight body movements, insanely repetetive jokes (probably because no one saw each other's entries, so didn't realise most of them were doing jokes on the same theme over and over again). It's got a pretty great pre loader though.

I can't really decide whether this is meant to be a "so bad it's good" kind of flash, because it borders on a pointless spam cartoon in everything but the artwork (which is very good most of the time). I'm leaning towards yes because of the quality + "DO NOT WATCH THIS COLLAB", and also the fact that you get a medal from even sitting through the thing, seems to point that it's all a big joke. But if so, it really means...nothing. Self awareness doesn't redeem anything/isn't an automatic "get out of jail free" card for making something terrible. If it was a serious effort at comedy, then well, god help us all.

I feel kind of bad about the 0, because I usually try and withhold from voting things 0 (I think I've given 4 in the 4 years I've had an account). But this. I actually think this might be the worst work of every single person involved. I wish having a list of superstar tag team flash authors would actually have made something halfway good.

Stamper responds:

good luck with 'alien potato', we're all waiting for it and can't wait to watch it