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hate to be negative nancy...

...but i'm not REALLY being a negative nancy. i'm just, you know, being, like, honest, so you can, like, you know, improve and stuff.

i gave you five stars because you had the patience and dedication to make a 22 minute short film.

i gave you another star because the phone-head-thing was cool, and as far as i know, an original idea.

i gave you another star because the plot wasn't completely and utterly god-awful, i suppose. i mean, you were trying.

...buuut it was still kinda lame. hence the 7. sorry. there was just too much sap, too mcuh emotion that you hadn't earned. this might not be obvious, but creating emotion in a short film, especially an animated one, is difficult, and requires hard work and time. to make an audience sad, you have to do more than drop a sad face on a sad character in some arbitrary sad situation and put on some sad music.

actually, that's a complete lie. judging by the reviews you're getting, you can reach about 90% of Newgrounds-farers this way. nonetheless, it takes more than this to sway an intelligent audience. if you want to evoke emotion, you must first strive to create characters with complex, dynamic, believable personalities. here's a good place for you to start: work on portraying emotions that aren't at their fullest extremes. the mood in this movie was relentlessly melodramatic, nearly always so-sad-im-gunna-cry or so-happy-im-gunna cry. real people aren't like that. if you understate some moods, the bits that really need to be intensely emotional will be much stronger. you should do this by actually considering how a real person might feel in the certain situation and toning down the mood if you realize it wouldn't be such a big deal, as well as by writing in scenes and situations that are less dramatic. try writing a few scenes that aren't dramatic at all, but just help develop characters or ideas. this will make your work seem less like bad soap opera.

also, even if its 22 minutes, it's still a short film. try to keep it to one idea or theme: in your case, the relationship between Lucy and the inventor. all that stuff with the boy and the spaceship at the end really just shouldn't have been there. you should have some kind of positive emotion going on, but it should be worked into the main storyline. don't just throw a cute boy out of outer space to give it a happy ending.

i hope this will help you in future projects. please respond telling me i was helpful, or an asshole, or to tell me i take things too seriously.

Touching

Even though it is slow in the begining and upsetting waiting through all that is worth it the end brings a smile.

Hmmm let's see...

This is what think...
We're gonna start with the music and voice actors. The music fit very well for the flash but it didn't really work as a whole for me, but all the same its fitting and that's the point. The voice actors did a pretty good job but they were kind lacking in some scenes, not saying that their bad just need more practice.

Writing is next....I'm no writer so I can't really say much in that department, the story was okay, it could just be my taste but it was too sappy for me.

Finally the art/animation. The art style has potential to be quite interesting if you work on it, but your character designs are overused though Lucy's dad looked just like Zack from FF7, Lucy kinda looked like a cross between lil red riding hood and Rei Ayanami, the boy she meets looks like her dad and a few other characters I know of, and the solder dudes look like storm troopers...but hey it worked fairly well for you. The animation gives the flash an awkward feel just work on smoothing out your animation more.

Overall-7 out of 10 just felt weird, not bad though.

it was good

I thought the animation was fantastic, but I felt like there were some plot points that we had to fill in ourselves, which in this case I felt detracted from the movie. Why were they after her father? How did she end up with the inventor? I felt like it wasn't a great moment when she finally escaped. I do think it was a good animation, and better written then most stuff on newgrounds too, but I think some improvements can be made on the delivery and small details. thanks for posting, i appreciate how much time you must have put into this production.

Seen it...

This flash tries way too hard to seem sad to the point where it's just annoying and cliche.