Istari's movie Reviews on Newgrounds

[Xiao Xiao No. 7]

Xiao Xiao 6 location

Yes, I'm the jerk who submitted this in the first place, and just in time for the weekly update, so now XiaoXiao 7 is at the top of ALL 6 of the portal's lists!! (top 50, top 20 weekly, top 20 daily, daily feature, weekly choice, AND review crew pick) Complete domination!!! My duty as a XiaoXiao fan is complete =)

As to why I didn't upload number six, frankly, it sucked... Just a longer and crappier version of #2. However, if you don't want to take my word for it, here it is:

http://file.barunson.com/u pfile/ani.../xiaoxiao07.swf

[Xiao Xiao No. 5]

#1 at last!!!

I was disappointed, to say the least, when this movie debuted at far below the top 50 entries. But the popular will prevailed, and it has risen steadily to the #1 spot.... Long live XiaoXiao!!

P.S. Xiaoxiao means "small small" in chinese, and is the first two characters in the phrase "xiao xiao zhi zou", or "a little something I made".

[The Bard's Song]

Top 10 it is!!!

One of my favorite movies, like many other NGers I like to leave it on as I do other stuff.

This movie has hovered around the 50th mark for almost as long as I've been on Newgrounds. Yet, every time it gets knocked out of the top 50 it somehow claws its way back. I've lost count of the number of times I thought it was gone from the portal for good, only to find it back the next day. ENOUGH OF THIS, I SAY!! LETS GET IT BACK TO THE TOP 10 AND NEVER WORRY ABOUT LOSING IT FROM THE PORTAL AGAIN!!

[aurora:episode 2]

shows promise

I could tell that you put a lotta work into this, so I'm gonna write a real review, for once. First off, good effort. Preloader was cool, the fight scenes must have taken time to make, and the motion blurring was neat. However, the character designs were bad, the repeated shots(where u repeat the same animation several times) was horrible, and the dialogue(both the sound and the writing) was downright disgraceful. My suggestions:

1. Learn to draw better with pen/pencil. The gods of the type of flash that you're trying to do(people who made Genryu's Blade and Ninjai) all use the same technique: they draw the characters on paper, scan it, import the image into flash, magnify it, and trace it with the mouse. NEVER just draw with the mouse in flash. Magnifying it and working at 500%-1000% resolution is how they made the lines so smooth.

2. Watch the Genryu's Blade trailer frame by frame(right click and choose "forward" after it starts running). In the technical aspect, GB is the best flash animation on the web that I've seen. Shockanime, where the whole thing is, is down right now, but when it comes back on, there is a 7-page behind the scene look at how GB was made, where the author tells u how he created GB, step by step. Read that.

3. Drop the dialoge and plot altogether. Focus on the action for now. Focus on the movements and choreography of the fight. Look at XiaoXiao #3. There is no talking, no plot. If you freeze one frame of it, any 2nd grader can draw it. But when it runs, it is one of the best Flash movies ever made. The plot and dialogue that we saw in aurora ep 2 was cheezy and cliched-better to just drop it and go for the action.

[Cowboy Bebop Music Video]

Nice Graphics! but....

Why do I get the feeling that it was traced straight from the series? I remember seeing each and every one of those scenes in the show, especially the final one.