jthrash's movie Reviews on Newgrounds

[EOFS - Super Trouble]

Call me a simple man, but it cracks me up how mean-spirited everyone is to each other in EOFS. And of course the littlest green-haired girl with the deepest, most monstrous voice, that never gets old.

It kind of reminds me of early Adult Swim or even early 2000’s Newgrounds in all the best ways! One small critique—is there any way you can make the subtitles much bigger? Basically, you can check if the subtitles could be seen on even small screens by standing as far away from the computer monitor as possible and trying to read from it (or just download the video on your phone). Other than straining my eyes a bit watching this from a phone, this episode was so much fun!

TheMiamiDeSantos responds:

haha thanks! Mean-spirited good one! Gutemberg the green haired little girl i will make a drawing of her calling you senpai. About the subtitles it was one thing i got worried "maybe it's too small", so i did watch it with the smaller screen on youtube, then watched it on my phone then watched it on the cheap ass little phone of the pizza parlor, well i could see it. Some people did said the color shades were dark and would be hard to read subtitles but i'm gonna ask for people opinion about the size of the subtitles, my vision is bad for distant things but good for near things, i can see the subtitles fine but i will ask people about it. Anyway thanks jeffrey my boy, you're awesome, hails from brazil!

[Gym Confrontation]

I remember showing my Dad one of your cartoons and his response was simply “this is the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen!” Let’s see if he still thinks that after watching this one.

The guy’s friend is sort of a babe, though…

Potatoman responds:

Damn, yo daddy has good taste

[Caffeine & Anxiety - TFPS Shorts]

I get plenty of anxiety without drinking coffee, thanks.

Cute little animation, and I may be alone in this, but I’m still not tired of this meme!

HOwLiNG-MAdFoxHatter responds:

Glad you like it ^u^

Will say is impressive the meme lasted as long as it did, AND got a bunch of people to brave animating walk cycles xD

[D R E [A] M [I] N G]

The guy’s voice really sells this one! The male character definitely comes across as the sort of guy who could date any woman he wants so long as he grew the confidence to ask someone out and laid off the DeviantArt fetish art on lonely Friday nights.

DeltaVoice responds:

BAHAHAHA thank you!!!

[A Den for Sick Moths]

Okay, now you’re just showing off with this year’s animation. Incredible work!

This kind of reminds me of the giant moth boss fight from the first Silent Hill. That boss was pitifully easy once you knew what you were doing (or used a strategy guide), but I dunno, something about the atmosphere surrounding that particular fight sends chills down my spine. Your version of the giant moth certainly put up more of a fight!

AntonM responds:

thank you! yeah i love that boss, climbing up the rusty steps to get to it with a black sky and the siren sounding when you beat it, crazy good atmosphere

[The castle sitting on top of the clouds]

Interesting...it didn't loop on my computer, though, it just ended. Maybe I'll try it on my phone or iPad later. I don't know how well the Movie Portal crowd will respond to short animations with no stories like these, as usual. Have you tried uploading this on TikTok or YouTube Shorts? It would be perfect there!

monkeygods responds:

Yeah I uploaded it there but algorithms are so broken these days and so it doesn’t get the attention I want. It’s more or less just a barely animated picture, however the feeling behind is what I want to share most.
People on tik tok do not care about anything, so I thought I would post it here, so like minded people can observe it.
That’s part of why I put it into experimental.

[Pinocchio]

For better or worse, this reminds me of the time I watched all those Family Guy cutaway gags. But with more passionate voice-acting than those gags, at least, especially compared to more recent episodes.

YULFO83 responds:

Aw, Thanks! Funny you mentioned family guy,I remember Seth Macfarlan posted some shorts that were separate from family guy a few years ago. After working on this it remind me of those. But definitely a cutaway gag as well

[EOFS - Pilot Demo (2020)]

I liked how raw this was, especially with the background ambient audio (was that a scream I heard at a certain point? Or some kind of parrot squawking?) But yeah, clearly you've improved since this was made and it's just a curio now. The jokes involving a lot of people's names (the roll call at the beginning and all the rat people as the rat girl was dying) went on WAY too long, although I suppose early Family Guy got away with similar jokes that went on long after they were funny.

I've mentioned it elsewhere, but while I enjoy how shocking and mean-spirited the dialogue can be, a series as insanely-offensive as this would be a very tough sell in my country, the United States. Everyone's just too sensitive to fictional media here, and I do have a theory that may be due to how surprisingly dangerous real-life can be here due to guns being protected by the US Constitution and setbacks to the rights of women. Maybe if it weren't so easy for obviously-ill people to get military-grade weaponry and shoot up all these innocent children just living their lives, we could still see, say, Looney Tune's Elmer Fudd wielding a realistic gun without fear that any child watching that could easily go out and buy a real one after watching cartoons. Or maybe women here would be more likely to just brush off sexist jokes in media (rather be outright threatened by it) if they still had control over their own body regarding abortions and sex and they weren't hit on as much by sexually-repressed men and boys of all ages due to it being less taboo for men to get their worst urges out by watching porn (responsibly and in moderation) like in practically every other country on Earth. On the other political extreme on the right, maybe if Republicans weren't so obsessed with starting "culture wars" against everything the younger and more socially-conscious generations like and automatically seeing the mere sight of a gay couple or an outspoken woman on TV as an attack against their way of life, then we could have some actual diversity from passionate and talented artists (as opposed to corporations like Disney just paying lip-service to social issues for money, or untalented writers using politics as an excuse to demonize every critic as "bigots"). And of course we could have more candid conversations about religion and Christianity. I don't know.

Point is, though, if you want to succeed in more prudish countries like the US, you will have to make much cleaner and inoffensive content, even for supposedly-adult-oriented channels like Adult Swim and Fox Animation. Still, I find this kind of dark humor kind of cathartic and I'm glad that at least the American Newgrounds community is far more tolerant of this type of content.

TheMiamiDeSantos responds:

yeah, thanks a lot!!!! Some people say i got reduce the "intense content", "it's too heavy", "too offensive", some other says it's great because it's very heavy. But i think yeah, for the most of the people the content is too intense. My inspirations for the writing are the heaviest metal bands i listen to like Carcass, Napalm Death, Mortician, Slayer, Torsofuck, Dismember, Nihilist, Macabre, Blasphemy, Gut, etc, etc, i tried to translate the heaviness of their lyrics and sound as an animated series, but it looks like it won't work 30 years late. Things have changed a lot since that time. But i will be molding the series according to what the audience think about it. Great review! Thank you a lot!!

[EOFS - Flatulette and the Children of the Orphanage]

This was interesting. I like how the characters are both attractive and hideous at the same time (i.e. curvy, exaggerated bodies and "sparkly eyes" combined with pimply faces and bad teeth). I kind of wish the actual Japanese anime industry was less afraid to make less attractive and "marketable" characters, but I could say the same about American animation too after the 1990's. It's like some bizarre combination of Shin-Chan with raunchy children in seemingly-innocent and childlike conversations and situations, Pop Team Epic in that they're basically foul-mouthed teenage girls who are DEFINITELY not old enough to drink and smoke yet, and '90's Nickelodeon (Ren and Stimpy, Ahh! Real Monsters, etc) because again, the characters are some amusing combination of cute and repulsive.

The green-haired girl with the deepest, most demonic voice was amazing.

I also like how the subtitles followed the standard of some of the best fan-subs of classic Japanese anime, in that it has footnotes at the top of the screen explaining cultural puns that outsiders like me wouldn't pick up on and allows the subtitles to otherwise be completely uncensored, unlike so many subbed anime in the US version of Netflix (and the less said about English dubs from 4Kids and Funimation, the better).

One more positive thing, I like how you handled the concept of limited animation here--yes, the characters are mostly just flapping their lips (although it looks like they have proper lip synching instead of just opening and closing constantly), but there are fun moments where they make gloriously stupid faces and body language, and it happens infrequently enough that it is funny and a shock every time it happens--not like, say, the most recent episodes of SpongeBob where the constant funny drawings are seen as a crutch for how boring the writing and jokes have gotten due to being on the air too long.

Perhaps you could get more experimental with the animation, though, if the episodes were shorter? Perhaps the standard (in the US, at least) 22 minutes long at most? I admit that I almost had a heart attack seeing that I had to sit through this for 45+ minutes just to give a proper review, although I'm sure I'm coming across as a hypocrite with this review dragging on.

Finally, though, you've mentioned that you've been trying to turn this into an actual TV series? Can you elaborate on that in a blog post on Newgrounds or something, like, are you making this specifically for Brazil's audience or do you plan on this being released worldwide? I can't speak for Brazil's TV standards, but as much as I personally enjoyed as an American watching something so unabashedly-offensive to both extremes of US politics (the left would not take kindly to the sexist stuff or even the big breasts, while the right would have been triggered by the latter half making fun of the Christian Bible, and both would be absolute prudes about anything sexual in general), I don't know how much success you would have pitching this to a country as notoriously-over-sensitive as the United States. But again, I don't really know your future plans with this series, maybe that last part was a moot point and again, as someone so accustomed to heavily-censored English dubs of anime and "adult" animation mostly just being a lot of gross-out humor I outgrew by my 17th birthday, I did enjoy the unfiltered grossness of this series once I turned off my own sensitive 'Murican part of my brain.

I know you wanted a more candid review from me, so hopefully this gives you some more direction on where to take this series next!

TheMiamiDeSantos responds:

wow, great review, thank you a lot! At first it was meant to be a tv show, i did show it to tv broadcasters here on brazil as well other countries like usa, canada, mexico, ireland, etc, etc... but no one wanted lol. It has a lot of brazilian stuff but i always thought that the americans and europeans would enjoy it more (like they watch animes, a lot of japanese stuff, but americans enjoy it a lot, so i tried it but with brazilian stuff). It has a lot of american and european culture elements since most of my favorites things are american and european movies, series and music especially rock/metal. The very long episodes gimmick ain't doing very well, so i will write the future episodes with shorter length.
People here in brazil are very sensitive to those content too, i ain't left nor a right. The media is already full of politically correct cartoons, and few crazy stuff like South Park, so i think we need some more daring content like that. Once again, thanks for the review!!! that was awesome!!!

[Nude Model]

I know it takes so much longer, but I kind of prefer the art style and detailed backgrounds of the previous video (The Longest Popsicle). But if you feel you can be more creative with your ideas with a simpler artstyle that is faster to produce, then you do you.

MojoMontebon responds:

I guess what I'm really trying to accomplish was I wanna have more fun animating. Last video, the animation was almost not present for me and felt a little boring or I don't know maybe I just hate myself xd But I prefer to have fun on what I'm doing rather than doing things I'm not usually good at.