it was, in short, nice. everything had such a sense of softness to it. the story, while simple and a little shallow, was right where it needed to be. it wasn't anything more than that, and it succeeded in what it set out to do. i did think the whole "it was all a dream" concept kinda took away from the whole experience, but it was nice regardless of that tired cliche.
the animation is where i would normally tear into it, but because it was very self aware, and it was obviously not from a seasoned animator, its quite good. the proportions on the human characters was pretty awkward though, and i would definitely work on that, but for the bear, i rather liked the design and the direction you went with it. i did notice most of the flash is 1 walking animation that you just made a new movieclip for every time a new event took place, and the reuse of the looking up animation, but i wont hold that against you. for what the story needed to be, it told it well, and you framed the shots very nicely (especially the underwater scene. it was a fantastic shot).
i don't think there's much else here to say. some choppy animation, but it held together, and it did what it needed to. i guess the song was a little mediocre for my taste, but it again worked in this. pretty nice job.
PS: yes. the only reason i found this and am reviewing it is because of your comment on my newspost. i honestly wasn't expecting to give this an entirely positive review, but here ya go
i dont write negative reviews just to be writing them. at this point i'm not even sure you understand how funny generally works. in fact i'm not really sure you knew what this flash was or why you were making it. i'm not sure if you were going for a satire of the unnatural "silly" faces and yelling or you were indulging upon them because you wrote "lol get it" or something to that effect by the end, and it was pointing towards it being a satire, but without any of the elements of satire.
it was a very empty flash in writing terms. what do i mean by this? well, lets think of a joke. a joke has a set up, occasionally a trial period through the joke, and a pay off. you set the stage by having about 5 loud, obnoxious faces that didn't matter or mean anything. they weren't a part of the joke delivery because there was no set up, and the pay off was really just showing how pacman looks in the game itself. i then ask why did you choose to make that a pay off at all if its all very obvious and had nothing to do with the silly obnoxious faces. the faces cannot be the pay off of a joke because its like if i showed you a picture of a flower and you laughed hysterically at it, considering it a pay off for a joke when nothing was established ahead of time to set up the joke. objects themselves aren't funny alone, and a face that you normally don't see is not a joke.
now for the other element: yelling. yelling is another tool you can use for a pay off, but when used without a set up, it is also not funny. "BALLS" isn't funny because it wasn't a part of something. it is a word that you yelled. you have these ghosts just standing around and then they start yelling. that's it. then you have them screaming and jittering around in reaction to a death. that's the closest this came to having a joke because the yelling was about something. the only problem with that implementation is that its not really anything new. its just a glorified amount of violence that really didn't mean anything. the shaking visuals in response to it are just annoying and pointless.
ok, now for what i originally said about the unsure nature of this flash. were you aware that saying "lol get it" or whatever you wrote is entirely contradictory to what a parody is? a satire would have benefited from that ending, but you put effort towards a bunch of things that someone would satire in the effort to parody. do you even know what setting out to do a certain thing is? if you were setting out to make this a parody, i wouldn't really bother writing this huge block of text, but this is just mind boggling. who was this flash for? was this made to make fun of a certain audience or appeal to one, because the amount of effort towards the latter tells me that you really didn't know if you were making fun of the audience or giving something to them. you don't seem to have goals for your flashes, but at least the others kind of knew what they were.
in the long awaited closing, let me just say that you definitely need to think ahead. you need to find some overall goal for your flash. you need to go all the way in one direction or the other. you do animate well, but you lack any sort of creative vision from this material. maybe stop making obnoxiousness the goal and slow down your material. don't stubbornly fight against progress and fall blindly into an audience that likes things that are loud and pointless. you have the ability to be better, and this flash is like an insult to yourself and your audience. it shows how ignorant and juvenile they are, and i think you should turn yourself around instead of bathing in their very pathetic praise.
stop pandering for your own sake. you're better than that
one time i was walking out of a bar. it was a nice steel structured bar artisan crafted for the most perfect of factory uses. upon walking out i saw 2 genies who had stolen eachother's lamps. i asked them: "who are you both and why are you both not having sexual intercourse in public?". they, instead of answering, began to have sexual intercourse. i started singing as loudly and as unapologetically as i could. a soft breeze filled the air and i knew the world was spinning. i needed to get off of it or else i would succumb to motion sickness and vomit in my lap. i tried and tried to get off but i couldn't and i ended up vomiting all over my lap.
i'm really not looking forward to another one of these... i always give them lukewarm reviews for trying to be too large for simply unnecessary things and characters who are all involved in a video game that i consider a canvas instead of a video game, and its really an empty shell of a series as of now (to me at least). can this turn it around? i pray for that. i pray for a turn around in both scope and content.
after watching it:
it didn't turn things around, but i realized something... this isn't supposed to be funny. its like its written as just a simple little character narrative of getting from point a to point b, but there are no jokes that work. there are some character quirks that i would have giggled at regardless of the implementation of jokes, but now... i cant review this as a comedy, despite it being listed as one. if i did, i would immediately say "this has been going in the wrong direction for so long. it has been unfunny jokes slathered with some mixed bag voice acting since the beginning". i feel like reviewing this not as a comedy, for what it should and would be and probably is trying to be, but as a serious little adventure saga episode. for what it is, i didn't find it awful. the characters played off eachother well, there were some genuine moments with the villain and the brooklyn styled adventurer that i found both intriguing and well written. i like the animation even if it is a load of tweens, because it was consistent with source material, and despite me not liking the diamond armored guy's voice at all, the rest was either well done or so cheesy that it made me really enjoy it. if i mentioned any of the jokes i would be much more depressed about this, but... honestly, for what i got, the rest was pretty decent.
so honestly, if you tone down the attempts at humor next time, i would have to say that you would be going in a genuinely good direction. kudos on helping me realize that =)
little late to the mark CW, but here we go as if this had come out back then:
i laughed. this was a simple amalgam of jokes, but it was all designed to be through delivery. the delivery of the voice acting was simply the show stealer. topped with some simple but nice moving animation with the pretty much standard carbon water style, everything melded very well and it fits in perfectly with the rest of the MvC3 flashes, and is one of the very few that had a delivery that made me laugh. good show
ok screw the objectivity for this one. its a factual rant. thats all the objective things out of the way. now lets begin why this was pretty good but missed the mark for me just a tad:
the rant does drag slightly early on with the entire backstory and character listing to a show we all know and mostly all love doggy exempted, but everything is factual, pretty well acted, and given the actual events of the programming decisions of nickelodeon, very relevant and agreeable, but sadly that's all the rant really led to. "nickelodeon has become the spongebob channel" was the one real rant topic that was interesting to me as someone who watched the ol' sponge. that's another misfire: the basis of a rant on a character choice. now, i have done this before on incoming and early series popping up, but for a decade old character who has influenced pop culture, i don't think thats the most relevant or smart aspect of it to rant about, especially when marketing, the established merchandising, the parody movement, the constant rip offs it spawned through many different mediums, etc. would all have been more interesting things he could have touched on. as a rant, it was a little unfocused, and the ending i felt was just filler jokes, but whatever.
there were good things here. quite a few actually. the animation was nice, simple, straightforward, and it was applicable to the show as a whole. the voice acting was again, solid, the drawings for the spongebob characters was nice and stylized, the rant didn't feel too long, and it brought up some things that fans of the show would probably agree on in retrospect, and it wasn't trying to be more than what it is, and i love that.
you did pretty good here, but just try and get a little more interesting of points down next time.
zach, we talked about this. we talked in depth about this. you haven't learned from your writing mistakes, nor pushed your actual funny ideas onto paper in a positive way. i don't know if this was chris's fault or what, but my god nothing about this was funny in any thought provoking or interesting way. but i'll get more into that in a bit.
ok, so lets look at this objectively:
its a very fast paced flash with decent frame by frame animation, use of quick cutting and editing tricks in place of jokes, yelling and loud noise in place of jokes, exaggerated faces and expressions replacing both punchlines and entire jokes, and concepts that really don't go anywhere and never established why any of it matterred, if it did at all. effectively playing a song "saved" christmas somehow and then jesus wanted zach for no reason but then doesn't get him. in the end, nothing really matterred and nothing really happenned. i guess they were better off in the end, but it didn't really say how.
ok, now for some opinions:
this was simply a bore. loud noises and quick cutting in order to try and illicit a laugh from an audience is the same as dangling keys in front of a baby in order to keep their attention. the animation, while above average, pulled this back from being what the humor was trying to make it. had the animation been worse and you two not as well known as you are, i would have rated this a little higher, explaining that you could improve, but as far as this being a better looking flash goes, the humor was pathetic. i don't know who did most of the writing here, but i do know zach has been funny and said funny things directly to me. where was that zach? where were the jokes, concepts, and self awareness?
the verdict:
no. no you two. this is not a good sign. giving you 3 1st awards in different areas seems to communicate to you that newgrounds and effectively all of its users want this. i call this the avatar effect; where something gets successful that is far less than deserving of that success and communicates to producers that the public wants more mediocre shlock. now i'm not saying your artistic effort is going to waste, but i'm saying that your humor is. you need to work on developing set-ups, pay-offs, situations that make some sense, and then you can throw these characters on top. it would give the overall experience some sort of memorability and charm. as it stands however, this is pretty bad.
oh wait no i actually meant to write LOL SO RANDUM 10/10 BEST FLASHE EVER WOULD BANG BRO
Since you didn't want to talk about it via Skype, I'll say it here.
I went to another front paged cartoon and saw your review for it, and you said you found it funny. I went through some of your other reviews, and was more astounded.
Your sense of humor is absolutely atrocious. I'm extremely happy this didn't make you laugh, because apparently what makes you laugh is some of the least funny things I've ever watched. Watching your own work showcases your non existent "sense of humor", and your Sprite a Day cartoons display your work ethic and inability to apply your own ideas to your own work.
If you cherish these ideas you preach, why not apply them? As I've said before to you, it's like your father walking in with five cigarettes in this mouth and telling you not to smoke. You retorted with, "Roger Ebert doesn't have to make a movie to review something", and, no, you're absolutely right.
It isn't about that, I'm not saying you need to be better than me to review my work. There are a plethora of more funny, talented artists, far better than I am, and most likely will ever be. I take their words and listen to them and apply them to my work, though. I respect them and what they say, because they know what they're talking about. Your opinion and taste of humor is utter garbage, your sense of direction for what would be a good idea is nonsense, cheesy, one dimensional shit, and everything you say to myself or any other artist on this site should be laughed at.
Your words are meaningless, you're a hypocrite, and you have no idea what you're talking about. You have no sense of humor, no sense of how to structure a story that isn't spam cartoons, and again, should be laughed at when you try to form a coherent critique, because clearly your idea of good and funny are my definition of unfunny corny diarrhea.
I more than welcome any other reviewer to give me negative feedback. If you didn't like the cartoon I made, I really would like to hear it, and why. I'll listen, I want to be better. If I didn't want to be better I'd ignore it. If people aren't honest with me and kiss my ass it upsets me more than people giving me a zero. In fact, I'd MUCH rather receive a zero star review, someone vote zero, and then give a really long, well thought, coherent review that means something.
The next time you consider reviewing anyone's submissions, whether positive or negative, please remember your opinion is a joke. I'm not saying that to be an asshole, but everything you like, every thought you've uttered in the form of speech or text on this website is laughable, and I don't respect your words. No one I respect respects your words. Again, I'm not saying this to hurt you, although it might. I'm saying this from an honest stand point.
I appreciate that you didn't like this submission, and I appreciate you cared enough to review it, I really do. I care enough to let you know from the bottom of my heart, that you have one of the worst overall opinions I've ever seen. You are NOT a reviewer who knows what he's talking about. You think you do, and you think I want to follow your vision.
If you actually want to earn some respect, and have people respect you as an artist and a person, stop being a joke. Stop reviewing one cartoon and bashing it for X, and then reviewing another and praising it for doing the exact same thing you previously critiqued and bashed. If you want respect to your name, make something that isn't spam cartoons. You've been submitting to and using this site for quite a while now with nearly no improvement. If you want respect, improve. Do these great ideas you talk to me about all of the time. Make a well structured concept with three dimensional characters and good pay off to the story, with an interesting arc.
I gave you the benefit of the doubt previously and took your words and pretended you knew what you were talking about. I was wrong. If I took your advice, my work would be cliched, unfunny sprite movies that only you would LOL at.
Please listen to my words, as I listened to yours.
St. Stephen 
PACMAN DIES AAAH 
Canned's Sad Birthday 
Oney In a Nutshell 
Hopped off the plane 
The Noob Adventures Episode 13 
UMvC3: Spider-Man 
Toons These Days: Ep 17 
A Hellbenders Christmas 
