TharosTheDragon's movie Reviews on Newgrounds

[Creaturing : Begins]

Magnificent

I just checked out the Monster Engine, and I must say your work is fantastically better than Dave DeVries'. Here's why.

DeVries starts with the kid's drawing and literally uses it as the outline for his. He takes the shape the kid creates and fills it in with nice realistic shading and applies backgrounds and such. It's little more than a parlor trick. He's going through the motions like he does in his job as an industrial artist, using little more creativity than some street artist drawing cartoony portraits of people.

But the kids don't know anything about perspective or proportion, so why would you count their drawings as an accurate idea of how these things they're imagining are shaped? I remember being a kid and not knowing the first thing about drawing something to really resemble an object from my imagination. You Newgrounds artists have used your own creativity and imagination to figure out what the kids might really have wanted to draw. DeVries looked at a kid's drawing. You looked at a kid's vision.

DeVries may have failed because, despite all his talk, he's forgotten how to really see through a child's eyes. You Newgrounds artists haven't forgotten at all.

RicePirate responds:

I really appreciate the kind words. I did love the idea behind the Monster Engine.

But for a number of the reasons you listed, I thought this would be a fun sister-project. Rather than copying the line art and filling in the gaps, to have artists go the distance of fully embracing their characters and giving them their own life... I thought would be really exciting. And you're right, these artists really did it. I'm so grateful to these artists.

I just really hope it's seen less as "Hey kid, watch me make a better version." and more of a "Your imagination inspired me to create this version."

One of my favorite parts of this whole project (it's still very much in it's infancy), is seeing the variety of styles each artist brings to the table. Variety of style is something that (while I really respect Dave's talent) I would have liked to have seen in the Monster Engine.

[Animation Transformation]

Ha ha, nice

I recognized fewer than half the styles. I think you should include some indication on the screen what exactly it is you're mimicking, like how in collabs they indicate who made each specific segment.

I'd like to see a Miyazaki-style character, more NG animators like Hot Diggety Demon or Happy Harry (although in a way he already mimicks old cartoons), maybe a furry in there. I think maybe it would be more interesting if instead of yourself you had a girl character transforming into everything. But that's just me.

Yeah, so do ZONE-SAMA, or VadimGoD. Ha ha.

Oh I just remembered I really like marsoupskin's style. He's the guy who does Faux.

[G.I.N.A part 5]

What the fuck you lookin' at me? Go!

Big fan of your work, as always. And the bad, or uh, less than perfect English just makes it all the more enjoyable.

Her face sort of looks different in this one, but maybe that's because we never saw her face as clearly before.

Also, needs more nudity.

[The Last Man on Earth]

Really cool

Incidentally there was a live action black and white movie from the 50's or something called "The Last Man on Earth," based on the book "I am Legend." So people are even less justified in misunderstanding the title.

[Sean and Such Ep. 5]

Brilliant

The comedy is very clever and well written, and the voice acting is perfectly natural. And it's made even better by the New York accents. "I'm sorry ma'am, but your dog is most likely dead." That line by any other actor would've sucked, but this straight,, dry humor is just brilliant, and believable to boot.

[Did You Hear That? vol 2]

Very creative

Coughing-dog was my favorite.

I watched JonBro's twice and I still don't know what to think.

So how did the author logos come to be? Did the authors have any say in them?

[Thinking about her]

Damn

Girls suck.

[Divided by Zero]

Perfect

Reminded me of Number Ninjas.

[Realm Of Inconceivability]

Nice job

4-dimensional tesseract is kind of redundant.

@RadioactiveKitten: Read the author comments once in a while.

[Simple Tests]

Nice animation

But everyone knows you get infinity when you divide by zero! The result of division is the number of times the denominator fits into the numerator, and zero can fit into anything infinite times. Flash knows what I'm talking about. I could write you a line of Actionscript that returns Infinity when dividing by zero.

Of course, if you divide zero by zero it equals zero and infinity and everything in between all at the same time. Because zero times anything will always equal zero. Unless you multiply zero by infinity, which is the same as dividing zero by zero. In Flash, it's NaN, or "Not a Number."