Score: 4
"Looks good at first, but numerous flaws hinder it."
date: April 3, 2007
I'm not really a big fan of the style of animation you're doing in this flash, and this personal prefernence of mine influences my review heavily. The detailed, separately drawn backgrounds contrast so much with the simplistic animation style that although either one would have worked on its own, in tandem they are visually unsightly for this viewer. The style is the same one that Disney used for stuff like Bambi and other older feature-length films, but since then greater care has been taken to blend the moving animation in with the background. Try to do this.
There were some techical problems I noticed with the flash as well. Some of the backgrounds seemed blurry , the audio seemed out of synch with the animation at the beginning, and in general I was left wishing that you had uploaded the larger version, somehow.
The animation of the charicters seemed generally fluid and well-done, but I did not like the audio that accompanied them. The sound effects were almost painful to listen to , as they were cartoony, unneccessary, and distracting. Examples include the sound that played when the eyes blinked, the carrot-munching and the walking (is that CS sounds I hear?). Improve or do away with these in the future.
Perhaps some of the cartoony sound effects were intentional, however; I couldn't really tell because I couldn't tell the direction the flash was intended to take. Was it funny? If so, animal slapstick humor and toilet humor (poop!) stopped being funny in flash a while ago for me. I couldn't follow the story, and would have been unaware that there was a race going on for the first part of the flash if not for the title. Many of the animals looked similar and I couldn't keep them apart. I appreciate that you wanted to leave with some sort of a cliffhanger, but I need to be following some sort of a story to be engaged enough for that.
So I guess I disliked it for the above reasons. However, these are very fixable flaws and you've got plenty of potential.