AtomicAstro's movie Reviews on Newgrounds

[Pokemon Go-Go]

Horribly underwhelming. It feels like you've actually gotten a lot worse. Compared to your previous cartoons, such as Pikachu on Acid, the animation and artwork are a huge downgrade. It's almost as though you actually stopped animating for years and have just recently gotten back into it. Either that or you rushed the hell out of it to make sure Pokemon Go is still popular when you release it. The animation looks too choppy in plenty of instances. There are even instances in which you literally switch from pose to pose with no inbetweens whatsoever, not even a frame of bounce or anything, just awkwardly switching from pose to pose. Other times it was horrible tweens with no easing. Why does every single person in this have a circular head? It just looks cheap and lazy. Most of the time the colors sucked, they look too muted, and they looked very ugly and unappealing. Also, in multiple instances the backgrounds had ugly gradients making the already awful colors even worse to look at. Speaking of the backgrounds, most of them were horrible. They were flat and unappealing with disgusting colors, some were better than others, but most of them looked like they were drawn by someone who's never drawn a background in their life. And some of the lineart in this looked bad, it looks like you had Flash's smoothing too high. Most animators usually have their smoothing at 40 or 41, that's usually the best option because it isn't too much or too little. (granted, Flash's brush sucks anyway, but it takes effort to make it look good, which I'm guessing is why you made it look terrible here) If this was made by some random novice I'd probably be easier on this, but this was made by the maker of Pikachu on Acid. The same guy who makes that, makes this. You would think, you would legitimately think, that someone who has made stuff that was already really good in the past would make something even more amazing now. But it looks like you just didn't want to try this time around. If it weren't for the fact that Newgrounds specifies the author of this submission as "high5toons" I wouldn't even know that it was made by you.

[We Hope To See You Again]

I mean the animation was okay I guess but it looked to be reliant on just moving the same drawing across the screen at times, never do that. If you're doing frame by frame then unless only one part of the character is moving or something then it's best you just redraw the whole character for every frame. I feel like all these kind of "Pokemon has stupid logic lol" jokes have been made a million times already. I feel like it would have been funnier if the part where Nurse Joy was creepy was possibly more over the top and less slow paced, and why did she suddenly have a man voice? It made no sense. If the voice was creepy then I guess it could have made sense but it wasn't. But I mean I guess it wasn't the worst thing ever.

TheIYouMe responds:

For the trainer character I never just moved the drawings across the screen, I redraw him every time he moved. With Nurse Joy, not as much, because she had very limited movements anyway.

I don't doubt that there have been a million similar type of jokes made, but that doesn't change that I felt like doing this one. I thought it would be a fun idea to do, so I did it. I don't really think too much about whether or not similar jokes have been made before, because everything has been done before anyway.

I guess that part could have been more over the top, not sure how though? I suppose it is kinda slow paced, but then again, it's like 6 seconds or something? I didn't specifically have a man's voice in mind, but I did want it to be very deep, as I thought that could be kinda creepy and out of nowhere (element of surprise, the unexpected and all that). What would be a way to make it creepier? I genuinely would like to know.

But thanks for saying the animation's okay, I know very well that I'm far from the best around, but I like doing these, and I think I'm getting decent at it.

[lost pause neptune adventure]

I mean the art was pretty good but there was pretty much no animation. It was mostly lip syncing on top of still imagery and occasional tweens, very little animation was in this. I mean if you're gonna animate something at least put some animation in it. 2 stars for the artwork.

[soundjam]

I mean the actual motion and artwork look pretty good, but it's so unfinished. I understand that you needed to cut corners in order to get it out on time but at least finish it and release it as something that isn't sound jam or just don't finish it but don't release it like this. It's a shame too, from what I see the animation is good so the final product would have kicked ass. 2 stars for the stuff that actually was done looking alright.

wappa responds:

I feel you, man. I sometimes wish that I had a hyperbolic time chamber or something so I could take my time for the sake of quality.

[Game Grumps Animated - Scientific "D"iscussion (Roche Limit)]

This was really nice! I loved the animation and colors quite a bit. Wasn't quite a fan of that sound clip you used after the cartoon, you could have been just fine with the sound clip usually used after GG animations. The style is really simple in an appealing looking way. I also noticed that you used two shade colors, it was a nice touch however it might look a bit better if you made the light shade color ever so slightly darker at times to make it more noticeable, I didn't really notice it that much until looking kinda closely. I really liked the backgrounds, they look insanely pretty. My favorite part of this was how imaginative it was, with all the interesting scenery and all of the things you animated while the Arin and Dan presented everything, it's something I should try to do when I do "_____ animated" type cartoons.

AngryWhiskers responds:

Well thank you for such a well thought out critique! A lot of people seem apprehensive to say the things that need to be said criticism wise, but I appreciate your honesty with both what you liked and didn't so much like about it.

Just to address some of the things you touched on:

~ The sound clips I used were my little 8-bit covers of the original Game Grumps Animated "jingles." I'm assuming that's what you meant by the "sound clip" afterwards. I wanted to do something different for these jingles, to kind of add a little personal flair to the Game Grumps style.
~ With the two shade colours, looking back on it, I agree with you on them. One thing I've been trying to improve on a lot lately is using more of a bold colour scheme, because even though stuff like this might be a little easier on the eyes, I'm starting to get tired of having washed out looking colour schemes. I did really try to work hard on having a huge contrast between the 3 different sections, being the day portion, the underwater portion, and the sunset, so this might also partially contribute to the less noticeable shading in some scenes.

Overall though, thanks. I worked for months and months trying to polish every last little scene in this short animation, so I'm glad to see that the level of detail I tried to put into this didn't go unnoticed. This definitely has been one of the projects I'm most proud of, so I'll do my best in the future to out-do even THIS cartoon! Bigger and better, right?

Anyway, to cap this off, thanks again. I'll take into consideration all the things you said. I'm constantly trying to improve, so any feedback like this is greatly appreciated. :D

[MOANCORE]

That was pretty funny, I liked it.

[Little Skatey - SleepyCast Animated]

While there wasn't always a whole lot of movement with the characters in this one, it was still really good, a hell of a lot better than I can do. I really like your animation and art style, and the jagged looking lineart had a nice charming look to it.