Bezman's movie Reviews on Newgrounds

[The Walking Stickman ep.1]

joy to watch

Watched the flash to see how you used the tune, which I love.

The walking cycle was fairly good.

The first background was almost beautiful. I felt the green you used could have been better, but other than that the colours seemed perfect and I loved the shapes - the windmill, the trees and whatnot. If it were painted in, it could almost be a bg for one of the classic Hanna Barbera cartoons.

The spacecraft was also nicely drawn.

When we got to the ending, I felt really bad for the aliens.

I did feel the 'beaming up' distortion looked a bit cheap - would've been better maybe to just have them move up without scaling and maybe use a mask so they aren't visible behind the 'glass'.

Also, the city could have had some nicer colours maybe.

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Cool movie. A joy to watch with some fun touches. I was disappointed with the ending though - I was hoping it'd go on longer - but I'm glad you've got a sequel.

chinkeeyong responds:

Thanks Bezman, but it's getting really old and... lame. See my other submission for a 100x pwning better one.

[The Duders: Evolution]

enjoyable watch, though

I liked the way you just threw us straight into the animation without an 'intro'.

I didn't feel the art was a massive step up. Your hands were better and the sleeveless duder's lineless arms are definitely a nicer style. But it's only evolved as I'd hope to see over the course of a beginner's series. Hardly cause for a massive celebration.

I felt the backgrounds were a massive step up - nothing stood out as pretty and nothing complex was there to challenge you, but compared to last time - where elements of the barn stood out as ugly - it's a big improvement.

My only criticism graphically was the end-screen with the slightly sloppy white 'highlight' lines on the spiky thing.

Suggestions would be to try giving the guys shading, maybe try removing thin lines altogether... the usual. Experiment and continue trying out new styles until you decide on what works best for you.

The boobies made me smile.

The repeated breaks to flash up a word or two made me chuckle. I think you could have gone further, maybe repeating that joke a couple more times, to get it even more ridiculous.

==
Anyway, it was an enjoyable watch, though not quite as chucklesome as its predecessor. No real flaws, but the repeating flashing words just weren't as funny as the emo glasses.

TheCriminalDuder responds:

Hmmm, I'll try harder and think more on the jokes in future movies. Maybe I'll get a few poeple to watch it over before submitting to see if I can improve any jokes. Thanks.
I'll also add some shading to the characters for depth and stuff.

[The Duders: Emo Farm]

'emo glasses' really made the film for me

That loop at the start/end you're using is pretty funky. A good mix of techno and country vibe. But still... DON@T HAVE MUSIC ON THE PRE_LOADER! Why can't you authors realise that some folk will load something, watch something else, load a new thing, watch that thing that just finished loading and so on.

I guess only a minority actually just sit and watch every loading screen. Some like to engage in other things in the meantime and they don't want to have the audio disturbing them.

Anyway... with my connection it's not that big a deal, but it's just a minor irritation and I get annoyed after seeing that same problem so many times. To me it's just a lack of consideration for the audience.

Anyway...

The white line around the play/replay buttons was a tad ugly. Not a good use of the wacky line styles.

Amateur company logos are rarely entertaining and yours was no exception.

In the first scene, you had one set of subtitles that were cut short.

The poster was kinda cool.

Most backgrounds were kinda rough and could be improved a lot.

The characters were kinda cleanly drawn, though the tweening was a tad limited.

In the scenes with the bald guy, his subtitles were almost never on-screen for longer than a second.

When the duder turned emo, that was chucklesome. I also grinned at the "emo+dark room" equation and the duder's lust for hentai.

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The 'emo glasses' really made the film for me. Despite some weaknesses up to that point (specially the overlapping voices and overly quick subtitles), that just struck me as brilliant.

TheCriminalDuder responds:

Glad you liked it. Yeah, I'm trying much harder on my future submissions.

[Jim and Pals Shorts: Ep 1]

Chucklesome. Good work!

In chronological order:

Fairly nice loading screen.

I don't like your start button personally. I just don't think that buttons with radically different 'down' graphics look good - when you click quickly, it just looks glitchy.

The 2nd sentence - 'Now we've devised....' shouldn't start with the elipses as it should be a new sentence. Seems like a bitchy thing to say, but for me it really affected my understanding of it and seemed jarring.

The character bios were all amusing to read and it served as a great bit of simple exposition - I'd never really understood the relationships between them all.

I still think your graphics could be nicer. (Not that they're bad atm.) Maybe think about altering your colours slightly, adding textures, adding shading, removing the thin lines around everything, maybe thickening the lines up... just play around; experiment and try to hone your style further.

All the dancing amused, as did the emoriffic stuff (to a slightly lesser extent). Dancing was nicely drawn and the way those legs bend was pretty funny.

The ending got me chuckling.

Jim's swinging arms at the end were a tad slow for the tempo of the song though.

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Chucklesome. Good work!

Jimtopia responds:

Thank you for an in-depth review. I knew that my grammar had to be off somewhere in that intro, because when I read it, it was kinda confusing to me. I've been experimenting a lot with Jim and Co. designs and whatnot, it's hard to make such simplistic characters look... well, real. Yeah, I'm proud of Jim's dance. I laughed the first time I saw it. The reasons Jim's arms were slow at the end is because I just took the movie clip from the beginning when he swings his arms and put it at the end. So I didn't really attempt to time it up. Well, thanks for the review Bezman!