mr-johnson22's movie Reviews on Newgrounds

[Sadder Day Mourning Cartoons]

relatable

[Breakfast With Blockhead!]

This is uncannily close to a real Blockhead episode, including the voice acting! And Blockhead is such a great fit for the jam. Well done!

[SHC's 2020 so far]

relatable

[chillphin 2]

...this isn't very good, but I like it.

[Peck Goes to School]

Woah, what happened here? This is nowhere near as good as Peck 1. To be fair, the art/animation and voice acting are top-notch and somehow even better than last time, but the humour just isn't the same. The magic of Peck 1 was how it felt like some kind of fever dream: it starts off as a cute little cartoon about schoolyard baseball, but then things get kind of strange, the plot flies off the rails, and by the end of it you have no idea what the hell you just watched. This one was just "Coach is a grade school bully." That's pretty much it, and pales in comparison.

The biggest problem is that without things being normal for a while, there isn't much of an impact to Coach's antics. What helped the humour in the first episode was the unexpectedness of everything. Here, things start off weird, and it plays off the same kind of weirdness straight through to the end, so you get used to it after a while.

Even disregarding that, there isn't all that much to what Coach does in this episode, either. He just does some typical bully/frenemy stuff to Peck, which is really only made funny by the fact that he's a flabby middle-aged white guy going to school for some reason. The humour of the first episode came not just from the un-plot, but how every angle of Coach's personality was played to the extreme. He was a LIVID coach. He had HORRIBLE nightmares. He was an ENTHUSIASTIC husband/dad/???. This one comes close with the ending, but by that point I just feel sorry for poor Peck!

And that reminds me of the other big problem: Peck didn't do squat the entire time! Other than seeing his test answers (which were funny), Peck spent the whole episode standing around looking kind of sad, or getting beat up like a sandbag. Sure, watching a wimpy, blank-faced cartoon wiener-boy being the butt of abuse can be funny, but first he needs to be a foil to Coach for the insults and slapstick to mean anything.

I write this big long review because you guys have a good thing going with these cartoons and I can see them going places if you can hit the right marks. Keep going with them and I'm sure Peck will capture the hearts of many.

[The Price of Living]

What was the moral of this movie, exactly? It's clearly trying to portray money in a negative light, but the metaphor of money people is all over the place. So because people are money, spending money is bad...but the protagonist isn't spending money, they're investing it, and is getting back more money, so shouldn't that be a good thing? I was half-expecting the protagonist to be able to replace their ripped-off money-flesh with all the cash the investment earned, thus turning them into a giant super money-person. A story about money-people who get "spent" to death (including the ones we see in the alley near the end) doesn't make any sense when said people have apparently been making plenty of money.

Also, the money-people concept equates putting money into an investment to sacrificing pieces of your body to some kind of evil government/corporate entity...but it also unwittingly suggests that a person's identity and self-worth are synonymous to how much money they have. This is especially confusing because despite how the movie is dripping with an anti-money sentiment, it is accidentally very pro-money, and is giving the (rather poor) lesson that the purpose of money is for it to be hoarded. Something tells me this isn't what you were going for, and it muddles whatever message you were trying to convey.

And are you really trying to say that investing money is morally objectionable? Is that really the worst thing about money to dedicate a whole movie to? You could have made the movie about the evils of consumerism; or corporate greed; or wealth disparity; or the dangers of poor financial education--all while keeping the money-people concept. If you absolutely had to attack the concept of investing, maybe you could done a story about money put into bank & government loans getting used by the banks & governments for nefarious purposes, thus dooming investors to guilt by association. Even that's a bit of stretch, but I just have a hard time believing that something as tame as putting money into an investment is as bad as self-mutilation to appease a flesh-hungry corporate deity.

The 3/5 is for the animation & mood, which were done well, but the actual content of this movie just didn't sit right with me.

(By the way, I wrote this before reading too many other reviews so that I could come to my own conclusions before being influenced by other people's. My apologies if some of my concerns have already been addressed by other reviews.)

[Peck!]

I watched this and I laughed. I watched it a second time laughed even harder. I watched it a third, fourth, fifth, etc time, and now I feel warm and fuzzy whenever watching it again.

I must say, though, if you're going to make more Peck cartoons, you HAVE to keep the coach, or at least some kind of foil for Peck. Peck himself was only really funny because of how he abused that poor coach's patience. Peck getting beaned in the outfield (twice) is funny, but the coach's desperate pleas for him to just do something is what really made it funny. "PECK, YOU GOTTA RUN!!" Hilarious. And that voice work! Darn. I crack up every time the coach barks Peck's name.

The scenario shifts (or whatever you want to call them, you know what I mean) were great too. I think you guys are getting the hang of pulling those off consistently. It's kind of like in your Obama cartoon when Obama takes a sudden interest in the other guy's plans, except in this cartoon the shifts just keep coming. It almost feels ad-libbed and it makes no sense, but it somehow feels so very right. I don't know if you're trying to work out a "style" for your cartoons, but I don't think anyone would mind if you made a habit using that gag.

I didn't get the commentary video (yet??) so it's entirely possible I'm saying things you're already aware of, but I think there's value in reviewers giving their first impressions. Plus, I wanted to give you a hand for making a darn funny cartoon.

Emrox responds:

Thanks man! I think you hit on a lot of the stuff we really liked about Peck, and it's cool that you appreciate all the same stuff we did. One of the most common complaints I've gotten is from people who don't get what the characters' real relation is or what their motives are, so I guess the idea of the plot just doing a 180 and having that be the joke is kind of lost on some people. But you got it, so great!
Rest assured if we ever do a Peck 2 coach will be there. Not 100% on what it would be yet, but we're working on something.

[FAKE]

Very nice work! Animating a dramatic track is a cool idea, and you did a great job of capturing the atmosphere of the scene, even if it is typical shonen anime fare. It's clear that you put a lot of effort into this; the backgrounds are ornate and professional, and the characters look great and on-model.

I do have complaints about the animation, though. It's often jagged and rough (like with Copy X's arm gestures), and most of the time there isn't much animation at all. Line art on things that have animation also tends to look uneven, with various degrees of thickness. My biggest gripe, though, is the lip-syncing; when characters talk, their jaw moves way too much, and sometimes even disconnects from the rest of their face a little bit. I also think there are too many distinct frames to the talking mouths, which draws too much attention to them. For me, that was the main aspect of this cartoon prevented it from looking authentic, as mouth movement tends to be a lot less elaborate in this style of anime (or at least that's what I recall it being like).

Despite those issues, it's clear you're a skilled artist. I think you just need to clean up your animated assets a little bit to give it the same level of detail as your still image art.

[It's Barack Obama!]

Oh wow this is really funny. Was this all ad-libbed? Your chemistry was amazing all the way through and I can't believe you didn't break out into laughter during every line. Also, it would have been nice if the visuals were a little bit less "sketchy," but the flow of the animation made up for it.

[Urinal Buddies]

You're getting pretty good at writing & delivering "awkward" banter. It had me smiling throughout. It's also not a problem that it didn't end up being a Clock Day short, as the premise didn't need to be Clock-related to be funny. Good stuff!

Brewster responds:

Thanks, yeah the whole clock thing worked out because besides the character design it really had nothing to do with clocks.