Kolter's movie Reviews on Newgrounds

[your art is shit]

Well-done animation and affecting narration with very appropriate background music. A compelling message too, though rather a little melodramatic. But still a very keen observation of the artist's mind and their constant struggle with their art not being "good enough". It's true enough that a lot of artists get thoughts like that. However, stating "your art is shit" like it applies to everything is fallacious.
You state it like a fact, but the only fact is that art is subjective. Even those amalgamations of other people's styles can be original; just because someone takes inspiration from another artist doesn't mean they're unoriginal and pretentious. Those previous artists had to take inspiration from something or someone else too. In fact, everything we make is essentially stolen from others - standing on the shoulders of giants if you will.
You can't count all art as being shit because art's quality cannot be quantified objectively. Each individual has their own experiences and will perceive art differently. That's the main point of art - art is not good because all the critics are raving about it; art is good because individuals are emotionally impacted by it and its existence enhances their life. That art will be shit to some but those individuals that appreciate it will think it's beautiful.
You're probably aware of this, and maybe this video wasn't meant to be taken from an objective standpoint but from the point of view of the artist with low self-esteem who feels the need to compare him/herself to other artists. In that case, good work on the "shit" art.

PS
One part really rustled my jimmies.
00:29 "A Frankenstein on canvas"
People often mistakenly believe that the name Frankenstein refers to the monster in the story, but that name is actually attributed to Dr. Frankenstein - the scientist who brought the monster to life. The monster doesn't really have a name and is often just referred to as Frankenstein's monster.
Or maybe you are aware of that fact and "A Frankenstein on canvas" refers to the fact that the artist is emulating what Dr. Frankenstein did (Dr. Frankenstein collected body parts from corpses and combined them together to create his monster). Maybe you meant it in the way that people mean it when they say things like, "that's totally a Dali" or "That's a classic van Gogh" and so on. I'll assume that's the case and give you the benefit of the doubt.

PPS
Nice description.

dylan responds:

"but every song's like gold teeth, grey goose, trippin' in the bathroom
blood stains, ball gowns, trashin' the hotel room,
we don't care, we're driving cadillacs in our dreams.
but everybody's like cristal, maybach, diamonds on your timepiece.
jet planes, islands, tigers on a gold leash.
we don't care, we aren't caught up in your love affair."

- beyoncé, 2013

[Sonic Dimensions Ep 10]

There are so many things wrong with this movie.

The introduction was sort of okay but it was drawn out way too long. Do you think that 46 seconds(!) of panning from the sea and the sky to a pixelated Sonic sitting on a deck chair is entertaining? It's not. The pixelated Sonic also ruins the ambience of the scene btw.
In the next scene, Sonic is having a "conversation" with Knuckles. However, he remains pixelated on that chair, and the standing Knuckles is pixelated too. Neither of them actually move or talk! The dialogue is very monotonous and boring. The font is shockingly bad; it looks like the font used on karaoke lyrics; are we supposed to sing along using their conversation as lyrics?
Following that is an atrocious purple gradient background. The "animation" is a bunch of low resolution pixelated images that don't move around. You could say it's "sprite animation" but the sprites are not animated at all so it's not. The dialogue is, again, not very engaging, and it has awful grammar to top it off.
Next scene. Wow, Sonic actually moved. And he... smiled? The teeth you drew looked way out of place.
Next comes an introduction sequence, and what do we have? A bunch of low resolution sprites that mostly don't move, some images, and some music, all of which you don't have the rights to, nor do you credit your sources.
Next is a boring fight sequence between Sonic and Knuckles. Kudos on actually animating this time, but that fight sequence was very uneventful (you didn't even give Knuckles a chance!) and their "wounds" at the end were as unconvincing as Sonic's drawn on smile. Also, wasn't Knuckles supposed to give Sonic some chilli dogs or something? What happened to that?
Now we're back to stationary sprites and now the background is also low resolution. Great! Bad grammar and writing make a return.
And on to the next scene. We have large text that fills up the entire screen rather awkwardly. The mixture of animated sprites and the lacklustre non-animated ones is very unprofessional. Bad grammar is back again.
Next, Sonic is at home with Amy and gets kicked by Shadow. I thought Amy was worried about destroying the new house? If she really was worried then why is she starting a fight? This makes no sense whatsoever.
Next there are low resolution sprites again and ugly text, Then a picture is overlaid on top of that with even uglier animated "To Be Continued" text.
Last sequence now, with still images and music, which, again, you don't have rights to.

I've basically pointed out a lot of the things wrong with this animation. Now I have a few pieces of advice for you:
1. Improve your grammar. You don't have to be an English nerd or anything, but if you're telling a story you need to have good grammar so it doesn't break away from the immersion. Also, don't just liberally use swear words like "shit". It's bad form, and should only be used for emotional effect. In the instances you used them they felt very forced, kind of like you were just trying to show off that you have "shit" in your vocabulary.
2. Use better fonts if you're not going to be doing any voice acting. The fonts you're currently using are very obtrusive and they take away attention from the important participants because they just stand out so much. With subtitle fonts, subtlety is key. You don't want them so big; you want them to be readable and NOT distracting.
3. Learn how to animate PROPERLY. Your fight sequence animations were quite awful, except for some of the sprite animations which actually weren't that bad (unless you stole those). The energy balls(?) are very poorly done. They're just coloured circles that look very awkward as they fly towards an opponent. The sprites don't move around most of the time and they look very ugly almost all the time.
4. Learn how to put images together neatly. A lot of the time (actually all the time) it's obvious you just mixed a bunch of sprites and backgrounds together. Maybe one of them is too big and the resolution suffers, or they just look like they don't belong where they are. This applies to the text as well. Don't just settle for karaoke font and call it a day. And what's up with that "To Be Continued" animation? Do you think that looked good? Your introduction and ending sequence could also use some work. As of now they're just poorly done montages. It's like you just picked a bunch of images, did a bunch of animations, and called it quits. You took no effort at all to actually do a full animated sequence, or even a seamless collection of images. This flash animation is full of those seams. You need to stitch things together in such a way that it looks like they were never separate at all.
5. Don't use copyrighted material you have no rights to without giving credit. Seriously, it's illegal. You should at least tell people where you got things from.
6. Have interesting characters. The characters in your story are not very well-developed. I don't think I'd feel sympathy for any of them if they should die. They're just like hollow to me. To add to that, your characters all seem to have one type of personality. The dialogue you wrote could fit into any one of them.
6. Have an interesting and consistent plot! Seriously, if your characters have no personality at all your plot will have to be stellar. But your story is boring; it doesn't go anywhere, it's inconsistent, it contains plot holes. Your delivery of the story is not very good either, in part because of your bad grammar. If you have bad characters, bad animation, you need to have something good, but it seems that your plot is not good either.
I honestly felt no excitement whatsoever to anything that happened. There were no cliffhangers, twists, red herrings, adventure, mystery, not even any considerable action. I'm sorry to say this but there just wasn't anything engaging about the plot.

There are many more things you need to work on, but I'll stop there. You'll have to figure out yourself in which direction you'd take your art.

tl;dr - This animation has no redeeming qualities whatsoever so to make better ones in the future: fix your grammar, fix your art, fix your story-writing skills, actually put work on your art and use your own imagination and creativity to actually entertain people and not be boring.

sonicguy322 responds:

Wow... Really? Thank you for your advice :D Now i know what i did wrong xD

(I'm just a beginner so don't expect me to be a pro or something)

[Kakashi Vs Tobi]

Meh.
The animation was very simplistic and very childlike. So was the animation and the dialogue, which was in text by the way. As can be seen by the excerpt "Is very strong how beat him?", the dialogue isn't really going to be the central point of the Flash.
So now, on judging the action sequence. It's just a totally horrendous reimagining of Naruto that doesn't do the anime any justice. It's a boring fight sequence that looks very half-assed.
It was a waste of time watching this. You're much better of actually watching Naruto.

xdsebaxd responds:

Try to improve, thanks

[The Packer]

ok.

sorry to be a semantic, but how could he survive 37 years later without eating or sleeping? lol But.. on the animation, good animation. Nice use of black and white color to represent the monotony and lack of color of the degrading and menial task the protagonist has to undertake. Might be a reflection on the unfortunate lives of people who have to work similar sorts of jobs just to survive. Very impressive, hope to see more from you :)

SirHappy666 responds:

I was going to add some short bits of animation showing the machine feeding him and stuff but I couldn't really come up with anything apart form him being connected to the machine being fed with tubes and such. if I make a sequel I'll add more details.

thanks for the review

[-Feelings-]

umm

do you do this with all your flashes? the title is very misleading.. ok for people who clicked to watch this. It's a total waste of time, it's just an animated guy dancing, don't even bother waiting for it to load. crap. 1 point for pity

thehoopz responds:

dunt fucking spoil the ending

[DEIMOS]

nodanks

what the hell happens when you say no?

and what's up with this? It's unoriginal and uncreative IMHO

Impkid responds:

he wakes up... didnt you get it? it was a nightmare...