JazLyte's movie Reviews on Newgrounds

[HONK]

What? Why the hell is that bum so ultimate? Beautiful in every way.

[Universe Matt Miles: EP0]

Not bad, great effort. But I can't help but get the feeling that a lot of things were intentionally dragged out to make it longer, which isn't necessary in a cartoon like this. Some gags were really funny because they got to the point, others seemed like they made perfect sense on paper, but had this odd "warning" as if you were saying, "here's the part where you're going to laugh" by adding in a really long setup to the jokes with this wacky royalty-free music that's been used in a lot of cartoons. Don't try so hard, let the humor flow naturally, I'm sure you'll find you have a better product at 1/3 the runtime of this one.

Curlypanda responds:

Most of the gags were timed to the music, which is why it feels dragged out. A example of that is the Turtle gag, the entire gag was originally 15 seconds long, but I wanted it to be in time with the song, so it ended up being dragged out to over half the time necessary.
I'll defiantly work on timing for next time, maybe get an actual sound designer to work around the animation, rather than work to animation to the sound.

[Cheap Joke]

Hey, so you've made it to Newgrounds, awesome. One of my favorite web toons; great voice acting, sexy, smooth animation, creepy and hilarious character designs, can't think of an complaints honestly, everything's airtight. That score disgusts me though, 3.79? That isn't even remotely fair. Keep up the awesome work, and upload the Mack cartoons, I know they're old but they're pretty fuckin' great.

[Ninja Action]

HO. LY. SHIT. You just took me back to my childhood, Xiao Xiao, Killer Kazuki, Madness, all that mindless action Flash I used to drown myself after school, everything good about them just wrapped up into one burrito, WITH frame by frame. I love it. Not even mad. There is an insane amount of effort here. One continuous 13-minute shot spanning a ridiculous amount of scenes blended seamlessly together. The scenes themselves and the 3D all came together great. The car junkyard was the craziest scene, all of this was just fucking nuts.

Of course I'm not a kid anymore though, I have my pretentious criticisms. One of the main ones is that it was super obvious when you "borrowed" animation from a video game or a movie, kinda took me out of it a little. Also, the proportions and character shape changed a lot when there was heavy fBf, and it would have been better for there to have been less framerate and more volume/gravity to the animation in some places. But other than that, I loved it. My god, how long did that take you? I'm hoping that (2003-2012) isn't 9 years you spent on this one project. I will cry.

[Renegade eps 1]

This is so the fuckin' Newgrounds I grew up with. Pure high-octane 80's action with mullets and car chases and machine guns. That's all you had to fuckin' say. Graphics get kind of odd with the character anatomy and the lineart, but shit, not nearly enough to get rid of this big stupid orangutan grin I have right now. MORE.

[Kaigan: SC -- Episode 1]

This is JUST an American attempt at lukewarm mediocre anime. There is literally nothing here I haven't seen before story and character-wise, which makes me wonder why it was made in the first place. I can appreciate being inspired by anime, many of us were including myself, but choosing to just BE the anime you like without any aspirations to do anything personal to you or beyond just doesn't make sense to me.

The finalizing was nice and clean, but not particularly anything unique or well-thought out, and the animation was incredibly minimal. If you're going to "do anime," at least follow sakuga rules and animate the fuck out of the important parts. The character designs were blah. The writing was blah. The story is blah. We've seen a girl with a mystical or half-______ friend a million times, and they haven't seen each other in years a million times, there's a mystical friend heirloom a million times, and the character interactions were really difficult to watch. There was literally no effort to make anything other than "anime," which is never a good thing in such broad terms, because anime that is JUST ANIME is never good. You really aimed for the D-material anime with this one too.

The problem here definitely isn't skill limitation, there's potential here in that department, it's that you aimed so goddamn low and went as far as to actually copy shitty D-list anime "comedy" tropes like eye-lighting and sweat explosions complete with a dumb, mindlessly modest main character that would only exist in some ridiculously conservative Middle Eastern country where women are treated like shit.

Also, I have to bring up the fact too that you chose a REALLY bad cutoff point. Nothing in the story was accomplished, and "showing us the characters" doesn't count. Cartoons should have punchlines/climaxes/pop points regardless of what type of series this is. Please, for the love of god don't approach this series with the mindset of relying on future episodes for the interesting parts, that will rob you of any and all rewatch value; this isn't fair to anyone, especially you as the artist putting so much work into these cartoons.

Please, for the love of god give me something I haven't seen before. Now. Not NEXT EPISODE, not in the FINALE which for most quantity-focussed web toon series' doesn't happen. Nothing in this series matters until we've seen it on screen. It's inappropriate to call this episode an Action cartoon when you haven't given us any.

[Shadow Hunter Trailer]

I do believe that this is the sexiest fucking thing I have seen on here in years. I can't say much for the story from this trailer, which does bother me a little, but dear sweet jesus those visuals. Monochromatic neo-noir horror story on NG? That's all you had to say, I'm fuckin' sold. Good luck on the project, I'm so hard right now.

[The Guardian]

Good intentions, but misplaced effort. Most of the story was in the author comments, I got none of that watching the film itself. Biggest suggestion I'd make is to pretend you have no author comments and that there will be no sequels if you want people to really grasp what's going on. Putting everything you want the audience to know INTO the film's key. If I were you I'd practice a little more gesture and motion than detail/shading, the animation could use some work. Keep it up though, always excited to see a series with an actual story here.

[Animation Reel 2012-13]

Seems like the skill's there, but a lot of this stuff's pretty undercooked, the really animated stuff is unfinished, and a lot of it isn't exactly what I'd call presentable yet. I'd suggest making a short you can use instead with fully fleshed out animation, even if it's only 30-60 seconds. I like the Japanese sakuga inspiration in the fights though.

Mackswell responds:

thanks, and totally valid advice. I'm dealing with crunch time at school but I'm graduating in a month and I'm looking to rededicate myself to animation and definitely intend to commit myself to projects

[The Fizzy Drink.]

This cartoon's more for you than it is for us, which isn't a bad thing, but it's still pretty obvious. Assume I've never seen any of your previous work, and author comments don't exist, all that's left is the movie; that's where all your information should come from, all your exposition, and unless it has a number on it, we shouldn't have to watch something else to understand or care. Here you have where most of us are coming from, we're here to watch a movie, that's it. I bring this up because these characters are written and behave like we know them already, and that's something that tends to happen when an artist is writing for a character they themselves focus on a lot. This isn't a bad thing, but you're going to have to work a little harder to make a lot of us care.

I don't care about this woman ranting. It comes off like she's just a drunk bartender venting to her friend about nothing. The punchline is that she throws the bottle and he friend is surprised, then the film ends. I'm just never particularly sure why I'm watching this. To go for a more downbeat, "classier" type of comedy, you may want to consider introducing the characters in some fashion to us first so when they do something that's breaking the rules (where we're supposed to laugh), we'll have a reason to laugh, but right now this just comes off like a piece of something much, much larger than this film, which I'm sure it is, for you. You probably have tons of art and stories with these characters that you have and haven't released; It's clear by the character designs, they're very nice and well-developed.

Food for thought. I didn't laugh, and this might be why many people are using the word "pointless," this just feels like a clip from feature-length film no one will ever see, and with no character context here where we're expected to react emotionally, it's hard to care. Also, I saw you started a response with "If you read my author comments." I don't think there's a worse thing you could ever say in defense of your own work, your work should speak for itself. Just food.

TaraGraphika responds:

1. WAAASSSUUPP!! JazLyte! Welcome and Thank you for dropping by:D Love your work:)
2. You are correct. This cartoon is actually more to myself, which what you said, isn't a bad thing at all, but, I need to bring them up to your (the Viewers) Understanding. Right?:)
3. I like it, when people are trying to figure what is happening in a scene...makes them think and wonder...and the results, I could tell you are really fascinating. Some, say are pointless, some say they thought something up with their on mind, some don't care, some say they know there's a punchline somewhere around...I like these..stuff. Yes, You probably came here to watch a movie, and think to yourself, a punchline will happen, or something funny is definitely is up,etc. Evidently the minds of a human being think like that. We love to assume something gonna happen, then after the film is done we think,"Damn, I got ripped off". But, see, some start to think. You might think that it's supposed to be a well build film, that people should be laughing at. But surely this could be something else entirely. Why stick to the same old gag again and again? Know what I mean?
4. Yes, thank you for observing the character designs. You got a good eye:)
5. Probably you won't react emotionally towards the characters for who are they but just a bunch of people talking? It's weird, but this new thing happen. It's like an example of me sitting in a bar looking at them. I don't care much, for I have never met them. But how they act in the scene is something different which makes me intrigue. Maybe this doesn't apply to everyone, but there's always something you GET. And that thing could be entirely anything. Not just emotional reaction. Probably, something that just pop out of your head...like saying that "this film has character that are not dwelled in nicely, that we couldn't achieve emotional reaction to them." That's something that will help me in my animations:) That's something that I get from the interactions from viewers.
6. I'm not defending my own work:) I'm giving them what's needed to be corrected. There's nothing wrong in correcting those who are confused, right? Did you read all of it? He was saying that she was drinking alcohol...Usually, for simplification, the drink that we saw her drinking was in the blue tin can. Why did I color it blue? Cause if I had it to it green, most of you will commonly assume it is beer. Of course tin cans color could be any color. For that, I made it blue. Now, Like you said my video speaks for itself. Probably most people assume it's beer. But here's the fun part. They THINK. Yeah, Firstly people think she acts drunk because of the beer. But than they think again, hold on. Why is she drinking in a tin can while there are a bunch of bottles behind her? But wait, there's more; The Title itself is called The Fizzy Drink. Why is the title called that since she is drunk? Only beer could make one drunk. But you might think, Beer could also be Fizzy. But after you saw the color of the tin can (Blue) and the human mind automatically think. Oh..she's drinking....

Now, you said my video should speak for itself:)
A food indeed:)