Hey, now here's something I'm always happy to see. Ambitious Flash Americanime? That's what I'm fuckin' talking about. There's some great presentation going on here, and I appreciate the time you gave to showing us the characters living rather than just having them be marionettes being dragged along by the overarching plot. Ideas first since that's where's the soul's at. The characters aren't bad, as in they don't inspire face-palms; but they aren't exactly interesting either. Generic pseudo-medieval worldâEU¦ once again not terrible, just flavorless. The idea of the tribes doesn't bother me, but the way you presented it does. It wasn't necessary for you to tell us about that, because it didn't have anything to do with the events in this episode, at least to us as viewers who are oblivious to the story at large. The exposition at the beginning did nothing to enhance this short whatsoever, but it did place a lot of future obligations on you to involve all of these tribes and the war into the plot, which you might regret later.
Execution. Here's where you shined at. You have good taste and great director sense brewing in you. The audio is well-handled, and you have no idea what volumes of good adding those instrument strokes and riffs during yelling, certain fast actions and fluctuations in the mood of the dialogue added. Or maybe you doâEU¦ Your actors aren't bad. They didn't make me cry, but they did their job. You're clearly inspired by anime, and they definitely sounded like animeâEU¦ Wouldn't go for that in my toons, but it's neutral in my book. Your heart's in the right place with the action scenes, there's some cool flips and acrobatics, but I would try practicing your animation more before embarking on another one of these. Learn more about the classic process, then start breaking rules. For long, story-driven toons like these, you have the right idea, the anime route is a smart choice (simple shots for dialogue and scene-building, save the intense frame-by-frame for the action sequences). Just make sure you're giving us something as jizztastic as possible with the action sequences. Do me a favor, go to YouTube, type in the word "sakuga". Study it, as much as possible. Find Yutaka Nakamura, Norio Matsumoto, and Hiroyuki Imaishi's scenes in even the cheapest anime and ABSORB IT ALL. Comedy's nice, quick, well timed.
Other than that, there's some points where the image doesn't cover the entire canvas and there's distracting blocks of white, and the copyrighted music isn't necessary. Use the music of musicians you can talk to, because if you saturate your baby with copyrighted material, you don't particularly own it, and you won't be able to do much more with it than just smalltime internet expositions, and I'd hate to watch all this budding talent and work not be lucrative for you in other ways. Speaking of that, I don't know how I feel about the fact that you spent 3 years on this. That's a little much, and projects that huge tend to cause artistic/director skill to stagnate. I hope the next one won't take so long for your sake, because I tell your heart's in it, not that I won't be excited for Episode 2. Just consider cutting the episode lengths to under 5 while it's still early, trust me on this, I've done what you're doing before thrice and it doesn't end well. You're going to grow as an artist while you're working and it will be very difficult to be satisfied with your work after a while. Like what I'm seeing though, keep it up man.
