Bezman's movie Reviews on Newgrounds

[Spiderman vs. Pie]

Some great transitions

I thought this was excellent.

Spiderman and the pie forms a simple framework for a few surrealist twists. I liked the transitions with the images sliding in, the way images/sounds were intermingled without horrible seams... there was definitely some skill both in the image cropping and the audio engineering.

I felt some background would have made it graphically more interesting though and it was kinda low on actual jokes or forming many non-obvious connections. I did like the consumption bit (pie,cookie, beer).

I'm slightly shocked at the score, voted 5 and though this is yet far from perfect, I'm really looking forward to watching more from you.

-Review request Club-

SteamTusk responds:

I like consumption too. (drinks)

[- NGChat [Dot] Com -]

made me chuckle

I admit - I thought it would be a movie about someone visiting the NG irc channel or something. Or maybe a story inspired by the irc channel folk.

In any case, it was a cool animation, made me chuckle and I like how you used the NG bg.

I'd have suggested you cut out the ad though and the animation/cropping could have been better.

gumOnShoe responds:

I've been on IRC several times, but I don't make movies about scrabble. Yeah, it was sloppy fpf, but if it made you chuckle it was good enough for me.

[Imagination Ep.2]

Not as 'flowing' as #1.

The various sections did fit with the mood of the music - specially the rising angel.

Overall though, I felt this was weaker than the first. #1 was like a flowing stream of visual - pure stream of consciousness where nothing was 'held' for longer than a few seconds (other than the boy'devil).

In this, the slower start and end really weaken the whole animation.

And why have the music go on in its entirety after the animation? Yeah, it's a great piece of music but it feels sloppy. Instead, set it to stream, use a custom sound effect and have it fade out as the 'replay' bit appears.

The dynamite becoming a spider was kinda cool though.

_Review request Club_

VegetarianMeat responds:

To each his own I guess, I like it when the music continues on once a film finishes :P

Thank you for the review :D

[Imagination Ep.1]

Glad you made this. :-)

Looks like you weren't too happy when you made this. I mean you hold the shot of the bruised unhappy boy for a long while, then stop on an unhappy face...

The whole idea was pretty cool to watch. My favourite bit were the hoover sucking the tree and the dots moving round into the square that got cut.

The worm was drawn pretty well, but some of the 'literal' things you drew, like the boy/devil and the fly could have been more stylised maybe.

Fun to watch and I'm looking forward to the next.

_Review Request Club_

VegetarianMeat responds:

(The ending is the worst part of this one :P) I'm with you on the tree getting vacuumed up, that's my favourite part as well. I also had a good time animating it.

Thanks for the review :D

[Freddy]

didn't care for this (But freddy WAS nicely drawn)

Kinda confusing mostly.

I liked the spoken intro - it had a nice lyrical rhythm to it.

Freddy was drawn quite nicely - I liked all the angular lines. Sorta looked as if you'd used modify>simplify or something, to good effect.

I think your character would have looked good drawn similarly though and the single eye is too far forward - the character kinda looks as if he only has one eye.

The mouths were moving way too fast - certainly keep the open shapes open for longer and don't necessarily try to fit in every single phoenome. When folk speak, they don't instantly close their mouths after each word.

Anyways, the plot itself just seemed a bit disappointing to me. It seemed like the highlight was meant to be the song, but for me that section just really dragged on. The start before that and the bit after just didn't really have any impact on me at all.

It seemed like a lot of the interesting action happened off-screen. Maybe show us a silhouette of the body he's just killed?

And for me maybe a little more exploration of the characters would have helped it have an impact.

Sorry, didn't care for this much.

_Review Request Club_

ShortMonkey responds:

thanks for the review anyway :)

oh and with Freddy, I didn't use anything like Modify>Simplify or whatever - I drew it witha brush tool and tidied up the outline with the black arrow tool...

[You gonna drink that?]

I didn't celebrate Paddy's day today. :-(

I love this animation. The hand-drawn bitmaps look awesome (though in a few frames the purple guy has white bits around his eyes) and it all works really well.

I specially liked the animation for the liquid spewing out the planet - how did you do that? Is that animated in flash or is it hand-drawn?

Voices sound kinda like Weebl's... hmm...

I felt that the text (the Times-Roman-esque subtitles) looked kinda crappy and wasnt needed.

Otherwise, it looks way cool and is pretty funny too.

TheKingofSwing responds:

Well, glad all that did the trick for ya. The liquid part was just one drawing tweened over and over onto itself; it looks like it's pouring out cuz of how it was drawn and how it was tweened. And I honestly haven't watched anything by Weebl, but I'm sure there's similarity in it somewhere. And yeah, the text was half assed, but eh, something in this had to look like shit, so it might as well be that. Better it to be the text than the animation, eh? Eh.

[From Life to Death]

Just my opinion of course.

Great typography at the start.

I loved the moving lines you started with. (Brush strokes straightened?) The angular-wiggly look worked well.

I felt the straight lines and filled colours on the coffin didn't work too well given the style of everything else.

The pink/yellow/white characters were kinda hard to see against some backgrounds - specially the pink/yellow against the light pink.

The faded gradients worked wonderfully as did the relatively minimalistic animation. Though the characters didn't move much, the moving lines helped give it life.

The proportions were slightly out of whack - specially when the guy's holding the teddy bear. I understand cartoons don't need to be 'realistic', but the way the head expands slightly in that frame and the hand is so tiny looks wrong.

Seeing the lines, 'through' others didn't look too good in my opinion. A soft fill might have worked well.

Anyways, sorry to focus so much on the graphics, but despite your comments, I just didn't find an awful lot of emotional depth here. Sure, we can read messages into it - life is short, enjoy it; death comes to us all and other such things but to me it never seemed like you were telling a real story - it all just seemed sorta generic and I never really got swept up in it all like I thought I would shortly after it began.

I noticed that you had some parallels between his earlier life - when his father ignores him & the coffin - and later life. Is that meant to be the message? That life is cyclical? That we can get stuck in a rut?

Thing is, when I watch an animation like this, I don't want to be shown things I'm already aware of - I want to be offered an opinion, taken on a ride... essentially your animation didn't really 'speak' to me.

Sorry.

- review reQuest club -

ReklessCreati0n responds:

Yeah, I understand fully, not everyone will get the same reaction from this as the majority are. Its one of those things you can watch once, enjoy, and remember it for that. I know I really can't watch it anymore because it becomes boring and I made it.

thanks for the review!