So right now I'm about 5 days into a nasty flu (not COVID-19, mercifully)--or as I like to call it, my "Biannual Reminder That I am But a Mere Mortal Who Shall Know Mine Insignificant Place." Can't really do anything remotely resembling work right now because it could prolong the time it takes me to recover, but at the same time I'm bored out of my mind the few times I'm awake right now, so now I thought it would be a good time to set up an AMA (Ask Me Anything) Blog post to pass the time.

Any burning questions weighing you down, lay it on me! You can ask me anything...ANYTHING! I will answer any time I happen to awake and on Newgrounds, until I feel all better and can go back to my day job + working on my next idea for a Punk n' Gunk cartoon episode!

...I will be rating this blog post "M for Mature," just in case.

I swear, I don't need drugs to come up with this stuff, it's just how my brain naturally works!

"I'm not Clifford the Big Red Dog! I'm Blifford, the Big Green SNOT!! HA-CHOO!! HA-CHOO!!"

Random animal sketches. I think I channeled my inner Shel Silverman (Fairly OddParents, Kim Possible, Danny Phantom) with the shape language. Don't get used to it, but it was a fun one-time experiment.

"Roronoa Zoro" Donald Duck came out looking way more "badass" than he had any right to look. Also, realistically he probably should have played a Marine character, not a pirate.

I think I meant Daisy Duck to cosplay as Nico Robin here, but coincidentally she looks more like Magica De Spell from DuckTales--like, how that character actually looks in the proper Disney show. Daisy would probably be more fitting as Princess Vivi, or possibly Boa Hancock.

You have no idea how hard it was to come up with a "Mickey Mouse character" equivalent of Sanji. I eventually settled on Mortimer Mouse, who I think tried to steal Minnie away from Mickey in one old Disney short. Naturally I had to mock the butchered 4Kids dub while I was at it, too--Mortimer Sanji has a funny lollipop hanging out of his mouth, not a cigarette. Coincidentally, Mortimer was also known to have a huge Cuban cigar perpetually hanging off the side of his mouth, too.

I should have used Buzz Lightyear as Frankie, not Baymax. I could not care less about Disney after 1999's Tarzan (I was 4 when I saw that in theaters). MAYBE the original 2001(?) Lilo and Stitch if I'm being generous. But at least Baymax is still a "Walt Disney Animation Studios" OC, not from some other studio Disney bought (Pixar in Lightyear's case).

For more proof I kind of rushed this and don't really care to polish this up in the future (eyes Disney's lawyers getting ready to break my knees), I should have done the bare minimum "Google Image" research on how both Pete and Jimbei are typically supposed to look. Or at least Roxanne. That is supposed to be Roxanne next to Max at the bottom of the image, by the way. Also, that is supposed to be Max next to her, dying of embarrassment because his Boomer father is trying SO hard "get" anime.

Naturally, I have other ideas of similar Disney and One Piece characters:

• Piglet would be Koby (at least in the earlier episodes)
• Whinnie the Pooh would be Beppo
• Uncle Scrooge would be Admiral Garp
• Current Disney CEO Bob Iger would be Buggy the Clown
• Big Mama from The Fox and the Hound would be Big Mama from One Piece
• Elsa would, of course, be that psycho J-Pop girl from One Piece Red
• Jimmy Neutron would be Dr. Vegapunk (Stella). Wait, Jimmy Neutron is Nickelodeon...
• Patrick Star would be that one angry pink starfish with the Bob Marley hat...
• Gregorio from Punk n' Gunk: Gregorio the Has-Been would be Helmeppo many years later, after retiring from the Marines and putting on like 500 pounds.

I uploaded a "Making Of" for my latest little animation on YouTube:

In case you are wondering what software I used, I basically used IbisPaintX for the whole thing (it has basic looping GIF animation capabilities) on my iPhone 14, I used the watercolor brush for coloring all on one layer, and I painted with my thumb+used HEAVY line smoothing features in IbisPaintX because I'm too cheap to even get a disposal stylus for drawing on my phone.

For anyone with about an hour to spare, I did download the impressive, unofficial Sonic Unleashed PC port (Sonic Unleashed: Recompiled) and even some mods to make the game a bit more pleasant to re-experience in 2025 as well as a tad ...sillier...

Watch my first almost-hour-long gameplay here, where I showcase the unofficial PC port and various mods at maximum graphical settings:

The Nintendo Switch 2 Direct was the definition of a "mixed bag" for me. The new Donkey Kong game looks kind of awesome (and unpopular opinion, I like how dopey and stupid his redesign looks, sort of like that one Neanderthal version of Patrick Star), and as someone whose first true gaming memories started on the Nintendo GameCube, FINALLY getting to officially emulate games from that underappreciated era of Nintendo, on a handheld no less, is quite a treat!

The downsides did sort of seem to add up as the presentation went on, though. I couldn't care less about third party games like Elden Ring and Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade re-releasing on Switch 2 when I literally played slightly-smoother-running versions of those exact two games on my Steam Deck already, and I think I counted a total 4 first-party Nintendo games--you know, the only reason to buy Nintendo's underpowered hardware while you (hopefully) play 3rd-party games on a more powerful console or PC--with that Donkey Kong one being the only one I'm (mildly) interested in.

The biggest red flag seems to be how Nintendo seems to plan on financially gouging Switch 2 owners for all they're worth. I'm sure some of the price hikes, like the price of the console itself ($450 in the US) and the fact that physical games will cost quite a bit more than their digital download counterparts, are just an unavoidable result of a majority of Americans gravely misjudging the the Annoying Orange, back in November of 2024, as someone who would reduce prices, not arbitrarily inflate them with tariffs that don't accomplish anything, and said Annoying Orange's uncanny ability to make the United States' problems the entire world's problems (The US Switch 2 is STILL more reasonably-priced than the European equivalent, somehow). But then there's all these little things, like making it so we have to buy a unique (and more expensive) SD memory card that only works with the Switch 2 just to store more games, or locking all its most interesting features behind a yearly subscription fee, or making us buy all these Switch 1 games like Breath of the Wild AGAIN to take advantage of the Switch 2's higher framerates, or charging $80 for an obligatory Mario Kart sequel that makes me think Nintendo just got a swelled head after the Switch 1's success and the higher prices overall are their doing, not random dumb politicians around the world.

So yeah, little underwhelmed by the whole thing, looks like a PS3 or Wii U situation unfortunately with the overly-high prices for more casual gamers (like the PS3 when it first launched) plus the lack of any one thing that WOWED me (the Wii U), might actually pass on the Switch 2 and do all my handheld gaming on my existing Steam Deck instead. Which cost WAY less than $450 when I first got it back in 2023.

You know what WILL live up to the hype, though? My upcoming cartoon coming this Saturday on the NG Movie Portal (9:00 AM EST) and YouTube (12:00 PM PST), called Punk n' Gunk: Gregorio the Has-Been! Shameless plug, ahoy!!

Punk n' Gunk: Gregorio the Has-Been will finally premiere on the Newgrounds Movie Portal and YouTube on April 5th, 2025!

I would like to thank all of you that followed me, were patient in waiting for this (outside of some sound effects I got from the SoundBible website, I made everything by myself, even the background music), and gave me helpful feedback when I showed work-in-progress animation previews on YouTube and the BlenderArtists blog to ensure I would produce a passion project I would be proud of! This will be the first of many Punk n' Gunk animations I will make, as it has been a series I've been planning on making pretty much since my high school years, and I hope you enjoy when the pilot episode here finally comes out!

I would also like to thank the independent animation culture both here on Newgrounds and increasingly on YouTube for encouraging me to stop waiting for perfect conditions, like having literally anyone else to help me produce these shorts and especially waiting for validation from the disturbingly and increasingly risk-averse American animation industry, before even attempting to make my animated ambitions come true (though of course, building a bit of a following and working on the fundamentals, figuring out what works and what doesn't simply by sharing shorter, less-ambitious animations and getting feedback from the Movie Portal, is a good way to prepare).

I've held myself back for too long thinking the older methods to breaking into the industry that worked (initially) for childhood heroes, such as Genndy Tartakovsky and Stephen Hillenburg--the idea of going to an animation college, working your way up on other established directors' projects, and MAYBE getting to make something of your own as a director in my 50s or 60s--was the ONLY way to get my original ideas off the ground. However, seeing the likes of Vivienne Medrano (Hazbin Hotel), Zach Hadel (Smiling Friends) and Gooseworx (The Amazing Digital Circus, which simulcasts on Netflix, now) prove themselves to big companies simply by making cool, silly cartoons on the Internet, and building a following that ensures their stuff gets enough views to get noticed by the major studios, shows this way of thinking is so 1995. The world is constantly changing, so I must be willing to adapt, too!

I hope you're excited about this finally coming to fruition as I am, and I'll see you all again on April 5th!

"Tigger Needs a Tune-Up"

This is how my brain just works sometimes, especially when I'm otherwise making a tame and "marketable" drawing like Disney' Tigger. Fun Fact: Not Disney's version of Tigger, obviously, but A. A. Milne's version of Tigger from the 1920's went into the public domain last year along with "Steamboat Willie" Mickey, Minnie, and Pete. Pooh and all the other characters were introduced earlier in the original books, which is why they entered the public domain even earlier in 2022. Anyway, if you think what I did to Disney's Tigger here is bad, imagine what I could do with the public domain version of him (once I do the bare minimum of research and look up what A. A. Milne Tigger even looks like, too lazy and unmotivated at the moment)!

Also, for those that might be concerned, yes I'm still working on my Punk n' Gunk animation I've been talking about, and I only make these dumb doodles on days where I have no access to my computer and Blender at all, but must release some pent-up "artistic depravity" anyway. In fact, I am probably one or two weekends away from being done with the animation (I finally wrapped up all animation for Punk, the angry pink guy, and just have to wrap up lip sync animation for Gunk and Gregorio) and its just a simple matter of hitting Render, then video editing adding additional sound effects, music, and a Nickelodeon cartoon-style title card, like what I did for my Keister Bunny animation. The render will take longer because I unsurprisingly decided Cycles produced a superior image quality than even Eevee with ray tracing on (while also figuring out a way to optimize it so that it will render about 1,500 frames of animation within our lifetimes), but I believe it will be worth it and either way, I'll FINALLY have this wrapped up long before my original pessimistic deadline of late June or July.

Stay tuned! Also, stay tuned up, don't want to end up like Tigger, here...

I don't blame you if you're not aware there's a new Looney Tunes movie currently out in theaters, especially given Warner Bros-Discovery's current leadership, but there's a new Looney Tunes movie currently out in theaters. It's technically published by Ketchup Entertainment in North America, not Warner Bros-Discovery, and it seems to have basically no marketing budget, so the only reason I know it exists is because of animation enthusiast websites like Cartoon Brew and Animation World Network (similar to how I found about Flow and Memoir of a Snail). It also doesn't help that, outside of Space Jam: A New Legacy and that soon-to-be-shuttered Multiversus video game, I'm not sure if younger generations even really recognize the likes of Porky Pig or Daffy Duck anymore.

It certainly doesn't help that the media tends to portray any and all cartoons as problematic and avoided at all costs, as if some World War II-era cartoon's poorly-aged jokes is that much more racist than what kids today are exposed to on right-wing social media and the current President + the elongated muskrat. I think the only reason we're not allowed to watch Pepe Le Pew cartoons anymore is because some old dude at the New York Times said so--not a feminist group or women in general, just some guy at some old corporate news conglomerate that now owns the rights to Wordle.

Anyway, my Dad (who of course grew up adoring these slapstick classics on TV) and I (who technically grew up with classic Looney Tunes too, via re-runs on Cartoon Network in the '90's) saw The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie, and it was pretty good. Now, as a movie that presumably started out as a made-for-streaming movie for Max that was unceremoniously cancelled as a tax write-off, then picked up by a virtually-unknown distributor with apparently ZERO marketing and advertising money (Ketchup Entertainment), and based on a classic cartoon franchise where the flimsy "story" was just an excuse for hilariously-violent cartoon shenanigans, you shouldn't go in expecting some life-changing theatrical masterpiece in the same league as Oscar-winning movies like Flow or Del Toro's Pinocchio.

However, as a "Looney Tunes" comedy, The Day the Earth Blew Up is a glorious return to form. For one thing, could you imagine an almost-purely 2D-animated film coming out in major theaters in 2025?? Seriously, outside of a couple of vehicles in the movie (which obviously are not supposed to squash and stretch like the characters do) the entire movie seems hand-drawn in a similar fashion to Bob Clampett and Tex Avery's shorts of old! Seeing all these people in 1940's-like suits and dresses wandering around with smartphones while licensed music from R.E.M. is playing in the background is weirdly charming.

It's also a great little parody of cheesy B-movies of the 1950s and '60s like Manos: Hands of Fate or Warner Bros' own Catalina Capers (if you've ever watched Mystery Science Theater 3000, you'd know what I'm talking about). The evil villain plot is silly, the twists are contrived, and the acting is melodramatic, and I'm not just talking about the obvious cartoon characters of Daffy Duck, Porky Pig and Petunia Pig. Again, it's essentially just an excuse for cartoon characters to engage in some silly slapstick comedy and make ridiculous faces for 90 minutes straight, so as long as you're not expecting to hear about this movie at next year's Oscars Awards ceremony, you should enjoy it just fine.

That doesn't mean the writers didn't try at all to give Porky, Daffy and Petunia more interesting character arcs, though. There's a basic-but-moving message about brotherly love as the timid, stuttering Porky tries to get along with "looney" conspiracy theorist Daffy (this Daffy is based on the more popular "crazy" Daffy of the oldest cartoons, not the "greedy miser" Daffy in later cartoons), while Daffy tries to be a good wingman in Porky's attempts to woo Petunia. Petunia is one of the better-written female protagonists, in that she's a strong character that just so happens to be of the feminine persuasion, not some checkmark on a "diversity" checklist that no longer exists in Hollywood because of the Annoying Orange, and the fact that Hollywood never REALLY cared about social issues, they just cared about the money of people who do care about social issues. I think it helps that she is not depicted as a perfect "Mary Sue"--best emphasized when Porky first sees her--he certainly sees her as a beautiful, perfect, competent supermodel because he's in love, but then it snaps back to reality and Petunia is actually a messy dork who does weird things like taste-test dishwasher sponges in public (there's a method to her madness).

Overall, it's the 90-minute (mostly) 2D-animated slapstick Looney Tunes movie we've all been secretly hoping since we first saw one of the "good" Looney Tunes shorts growing up. It's always been a bit frustrating that these classic cartoon-to-movie adaptations have felt the need to give these inherently-basic characters contrived Pixar-like character arcs, as if a movie can't be carried by comedy and escapist entertainment alone. This is especially felt in the 1992 and 2021 Tom and Jerry movies. The 1992 one ("We've Got to Have...MONEY") is at least a bit of a guilty pleasure nowadays, though I remember hating it even as a wee babby and particularly finding the voice they gave Tom really grating, but the 2021 version is just "How Do You Do, Fellow Kids": the Motion Picture. I never want to see Tom FLOSS again. But this movie here is just unpretentious classic cartoon slapstick inspired particularly by Bob Clampett's wacky style, nothing more, nothing less. Probably helped it was originally just supposed to be some made-for-streaming movie (WB's straight-to-video/TV/streaming movies are sometimes better than they sound--ever watched Tom and Jerry Meet Johnny Quest?).

And hopefully now that we live in a world where Latvia's Flow proved a feature-length movie devoid of dialogue can work, Tom and Jerry will finally get the movie they deserve, too, Zaslav willing.

BONUS: Because this was technically published by the small Ketchup Entertainment, not Warner Bros, the previews before the movie were mostly for other extremely niche movies with almost no marketing budget. Unfortunately, none of them looked worth watching, and had me worried for a second that The Day the Earth Blew Up would be equally as bad and hokey-looking (it wasn't).

There was some surprisingly-unoriginal movie trailer from A24 (the boutique studio known for Marcell the Shell with Shoes On plus Hazbin Hotel) where some girl is tasked with hunting a mythical monster, but it turns out the mythical monster is really cute or something, so she protects it from those that want to kill it. So far, so E.T. I think they're trying to go for a Jim Henson puppet-like look with the monster, but the wannabe-Baby-Yoda freak of nature just looks like badly-composited CGi from the early 1990s. That must be why the movie also looks like it will only be 4:3 aspect ratio and somewhat blurry, like an old childhood VHS tape, either that or the simple fact that nearly every movie A24 publishes seems to have to make a pretentious, misguided stylistic choice that Disney and Dreamworks would never do (for good reason).

Probably the only other really notable animated movie coming out this month is Sneaks, about some designer shoes a kid wins, but then they get separated out in the city and one gets abducted by an evil shoe collector. So far, so Secret Life of Pets-meets-Toy Story 2. My Dad commented on one scene he felt was racial stereotyping, specifically where the protagonist shoe (a white shoe) is being a sissy out in the "Bronx" and a street-wise pair of shoes (black shoes) helps him out. Frankly the entire movie comes across as some weird modern-day equivalent to "Blaxxpoitation" movies, with both the kid that wins the shoes and the evil shoe collector being black, implying that only black boys and men care for designer shoes, and as a (half) white boy who still searches in vain to this day for the "SOAP" shoes Sonic wore in Sonic Adventure 2 (apparently they were a real brand that helped Sonic Team raise enough money to get the Dreamcast version of that game out, even when the Dreamcast itself was discontinued), I kind of take issue with that. The most offensive thing, though, is the janky 3D animation, made worse by Sneaks seemingly trying to imitate the "low framerate" look popularized by the Spider-verse movies, but ultimately ending up with what looks like a poorly-optimized Nintendo Switch port. Expect the likes of Saperspark to milk this mediocre-looking movie for YouTube content once it inevitably flops.

Sadly, these previews of lower-budget movies made the trailers for upcoming safe-but-polished Hollywood movies look more bearable in comparison. I'd be lying if the live-action Lilo and Stitch trailer didn't make me chuckle at least once, although I'm pretty sure that one joke already exists in the original that I could just re-watch now. Nani (or Nami, or whatever Lilo's adult sister's name was, though I'm fairly certain she's not Nami from One Piece), as usual, looks to be played by some skinny little actress with no GYATT like in the animated original, which I'm sure is going to piss off the "body positivity" crowd and those awakened by the original animated design (like me), but otherwise it's just yet another Disney remake nobody asked for but everybody is going to watch anyway.

Minecraft still looks like pure nightmare fuel that will scare small children (for comparison, when I was little, early PS1/N64 graphics and particularly Wallace and Gromit was all it took for my parents to get me a nightlight to deal with the nightmares). However, it looks like it will at least please its target audience of young Minecraft addicts, have the usual cheesy-but-somewhat-charming humor that, let's be honest, has been in kiddie movies since at least the 1980's, and even have a good (if basic) message about the virtues of creativity (the good guys encourage it, the bad guys denounce it). Maybe it will even become some sort of nostalgic guilty pleasure for today's children the same way I'm nostalgic for Pokemon the Movie: Mewtwo Strikes Back, while fully acknowledge it was a crap, glorified toy commercial for Pokemon merchandise. But seriously, what were they THINKING giving the villagers these weird, fleshy, overly-realistic skin textures, while also making the Creepers unintentionally adorable?

If you somehow read ALL of this...I love you. ^3^<3

I am about 2/3rds of the way done with the entire animation, but like I said before, I am slowing down to ensure the animation is more polished than if I rushed through it every weekend, so it will still be a few months before I even finish the animation, let alone call it "done" and upload it to the Movie Portal and my YouTube. Being able to render this close to real-time, with ray tracing on and all, has certainly helped me be able to self-critique myself and hopefully figure out ways to work out obvious animation errors BEFORE I upload the video and get critiques on the Movie Portal (so that I get more helpful feedback on storytelling and camera composition, rather than point out obvious mistakes I should have fixed sooner).

In all seriousness, the past week was an awful, no good, very bad week for the Western indie and gaming industries (Technicolor shutting down and taking down once-great VFX studios like The Mill with it; Zaslav continuing his reign of terror on WB-Discovery by shutting down Monolith, hoarding the patent to their innovative "Nemesis" system, plus other gaming studios in favor of doubling down on Suicide-Squad-like live service flops; Companies like Disney and Nickelodeon stroking the Annoying Orange's ego by removing their diverse hiring initiatives, even as Trump loses court cases left and right and proves once again he is nowhere near competent enough to be an actual dictator; and of course, countless layoffs on any day ending in "y," even on otherwise-wildly-teams like the Marvel Rivals team in the US). Flow winning the Oscar for Best Animated Feature over far more well-funded and mainstream movies like Inside Out 2, WIld Robot and Wallace and Gromit: A Vengeance Most Fowl (not to say any of them are bad, you should watch all those + Memoir of a Snail in addition to Flow) was some much needed motivation after all the other, more negative events last week made me question whether I could ever still have a future in animation beyond spending way too long making too-short animations for the Movie Portal that only get 3.4 stars out of 5 at best.

The director, Gints Zilbalodis, is the same age as me, 30 years old on the dot, and, with the help of his friends, Blender, Blender's Eevee render engine, and later on French studios who clearly believed in his movie idea, proved once and for all you don't need to be part of a massive, greedy corporation or even rent overpriced "industry-standard" software like Maya, ZBrush, Adobe Creative Cloud and/or VRay in order to make a multi-award-winning CG masterpiece--you and your relatively-small team just needs to become damn good at fundamentals like emotional storytelling and effective use of animation principles. No AI required, either! No more lame excuses for me, just gotta work on my fundamentals, improve in Blender, and most importantly, improve in my cinematography and storytelling.

Special mention should go to another underdog win, Iran's "In the Shadow of the Cypress," managing to win in the Animated Shorts category, despite nobody even really knowing of this short's existence until yesterday, due to immigration troubles between war-torn Iran and anti-immigrant US meaning they could only get their visas and make it to the big show at the literal last minute, meaning they could not spend time and money throughout the Awards Season advertising their work. Yet apparently the once-seemingly-clueless Academy (at least in regards to animation as an art form) is so tired of automatically giving such awards to Disney, Pixar and Dreamwork's uncontroversial kiddie fare, they simply decided this troubled Iranian production told a short-form story more effectively than the rest of the competition. So between Latvia's first Oscar win with Flow and Iran's first win with In the Shadow of the Cypress--if you feel you may not amount to much as an animator due to living in a country without much of an animation industry, don't worry about it and push through the anxiety. This proves people (at least Americans) crave actual diverse storytelling from countries they may not have even heard of, and are not bound by or overly-familiar with tired storytelling tropes and cliches that have long defined either Hollywood animation or Japanese anime.

As Charles Dicken's A Tale of Two Cities famously once said, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." Clearly the future of successful animation, the way I see it, is not sacrificing your social life and well-being for crotchety old corporations like Disney or Warner Bros only to fire you like the worthless cog in the machine they see you as when their latest remake only makes billions of dollars instead of bajillions of dollars--it's forming your own teams, using affordable software like Blender or Krita, and making stuff that audiences and, more importantly, YOU want to see in entertainment! Don't let this opportunity pass you by!