jthrash's movie Reviews on Newgrounds

[The LAST SODA on Earth: Strange Scavenger]

Another day, another brilliant animated pilot with a genuinely original art and rendering style that makes me wonder why I still bother to expect even a fraction of that same creativity from risk-averse animation industries, when I could just get it free here and sometimes on YouTube!

...Well, it's not quite "free" for me since I'm a monthly financial Supporter of Newgrounds, but you get the idea.

The pacing could have been a smidge quicker and snappier, especially during the silly/jokey scenes, but overall this is one of the more polished pilots featured on NG as of late! I have to ask for those of us inevitably willing to pursue our own longer animations after being inspired by this--how long did it take for you to complete this whole 15-minute animation from concept to final post-processing and compositing? 2 years? 3 years? MORE??

[Hagniss Wakes Up]

I genuinely like this better than the previous Hagniss video just because it had a ton of ACTUAL animation combined with the slapstick visual humor that usually comes with much more expressive animation. As this year's animated Oscar Award winners (Flow and Shadow of the Cypress) aptly demonstrated, excessive dialogue is overrated and limitations really do breed creativity--in this case, I got a better vibe of Hagniss's personality just from how she carried herself throughout this short!

I understand this is based on a more-complex and fairly dialogue-heavy comic series of yours and you probably can't do dialogue-less animations all the time, but it's definitely something to consider whenever you get another idea for animation. The medium is uniquely suited for communicating most, if not all things, through body language alone.

[Burning Ranger Silikon]

Okay, first off, I absolutely ADORE the animation in this, it's the perfect example of not letting "perfect" be the enemy of "good." It is unpolished, even a bit sloppy at times, but clearly the all-important trade-off is that the animation overall is far more expressive and loose than if the animators had spent an excessive amount of time making everything look cleaner and more "on-model." It results in the art style having some bizarre-but-unique vibe cross between Getter Robo, the original Mobile Suit Gundam movies, and even Peanuts or Rocky and Bullwinkle.

I have mixed feelings about the voice acting. Sometimes it's too monotone, sometimes it fits the emotion the animation and movements are clearly going for, and either way the sound mixing overall makes the voices sound way too quiet compared to the background music or even sound effects, similar to the infamous sound mixing in Sonic Adventure 2. That's par for the course for most Newgrounds pilots made with smaller budgets and less polish than, say, Monkey Wrench, but considering how easy and cheap it is to get a decent microphone + edit sounds in Audacity or a free video editor, it would be nice if this pleasantly surprised me on the sound editing and voice acting front. The "FIXit" mechanic guy probably had the best and most consistent voice acting, kind of sounded like Tomar.

Speaking of "pilots"...THE ROBOT FIGHTS ARE SO COOOOOOL PLEASE MAKE MORE OF THESE EPISODES!!!

[Ape Escape 3 (NTSC)]

That Abe Mon joke was too soon. AND you had to follow it up with a Kamala Harris Mon! How did you know needlessly-controversial jokes are my favorite??

...That PlayStation Studios Japan Mon joke, though. That went too far. Apologize to my feelings now.

[Taj's Helpful Wisdom]

Conker could have saved himself the trip to Taj's place and gotten similar levels of demotivation and depression if he just woke up in the morning and checked gaming news on his phone, in the naive hopes it would be about cool new games, instead of increasingly-absurd studio layoffs from both misguided and otherwise-wildly-successful AAA game publishers.

[Kingdom Farts]

This obvious "Old-school Disney was racist" joke kind of takes on a new meaning now that Disney just killed off its DEI initiatives to appease the Trump administration. Never have I had such mixed feelings about the end of a corporate decision that gave us Frozen, Strange World, and whatever the heck they turned Star Wars into now--but also much better stuff like Zootopia and The Princess and the Frog.

[MY GREATEST CREATION]

That ending hit like a truck as a fellow independent 3D artist who destroys his eyeballs and spine just to make a (hopefully) high-quality shitpost.

[Are you into fitness?]

I like how the other two co-workers are just weird, simple blob guys while the guy with the one hair strand sticking out is much more detailed and rendered.

[John's Glasses]

Great caricatures of Paul, John, and Conan O'Brien!

[Metroid... i think]

Ridley's shit-eating grin during the majority of this animation is the best part.