Loved the style and color!
It was a little slow and short but i enjoyed it, especially the art style and colors. You have talent my friend, keep it up!
Reviews for "Dante's Inferno w/ Mario"
Good, If u havent read the book
Yeah it was a good film. But I actually read this thing and Virgil never goes to heaven. he sits in hell. You also need another person in Satans mouth. But otherwise okay.
A Great Start to a Potentially Good Parody
You definitely have a good concept going here using Dante's Inferno. I really did enjoy the flash, I'm summarizing some of my ideas and others. (Considering I can't use flash, it automatically makes you better than me ^^;) After reviewing what other people have said about the flash, I seem to have agreed with some problems that the flash has.
-First, let's go with the good comments about the flash.
Aside from the small populous which thought it was from Devil May Cry, I believe most people did establish that it was indeed Dante's Inferno. This just merely states that you have done well to combined the Mario idea but still make people understand that it is about Dante's Inferno.
The animation was definitely fluid (I know it is a terrible term to use but I can't think of a better one). There were only a few times within the flash where I thought that the animation was a bit choppy or lax. (Mainly, when they are on Yoshi, they are completely solid and do not feel alive and when they are about to cross the river stix, the walking seemed very lax as Charon is just moving right and bouncing up and down.) The facial expressions reminded me of Charlie Brown for some odd reason.
-Some things that seemed off
First, let's talk about sound effects, music, and background effects - There are times in this flash where there is no background music or sounds. This is one reason that can cause people to say that some parts seemed a bit stale. As we all know, sound and music are an extreme essential to convey emotions and moods. When you did use music, it definitely enhanced the feeling and mood. To integrate a small and subtle background sound might not have been a bad idea ("Have" meaning that I am unsure that you will actually edit this flash). However, using Mario music and only Mario music is essential, which I believe you did for the most part (I didn't detect a time where there was different music).
The next topic that should be addressed is the voice acting (as you probably read in other people's posts). Though you did a good job with the tone of the voices, you have to also integrate more emotion into each character (especially if there is no other noise in the background). Since Toad is talking for the most part, he was the biggest problem within the film when it came to voice acting (Sorry if that sounded mean, it is really hard to change your voice and have emotion with it if you are trying to imitate toad regardless).
The next problem is establishing the parody. If you are going to use a Mario Parody scheme, then it might have been wise to change King Minos, Charon and the other none Mario characters into the Mario world characters (There are a lot of characters, so I'm pretty sure that you can come up with something for those parts).
The last problem that I had with the flash is clashing parodies. It is difficult to establish two parodies at once and you will get some confused responses because of this. I know that is hard to establish two parodies but for future reference, if you are going to intergrate a Mario Parody of Dante's Inferno, then I would have just merely made it so you are not establishing that the characters are supposed to portray other beings. Use it as if you are taking these characters and putting them in the situation that occured in Dante's Inferno. Doing so will most likely increase the parody's feeling overall. If you try to forcibly give people titles such as labeling Mario as Dante, then it is going to lessen the quality of the parody. Let the viewer establish who is who, it will help when it comes to the choppiness that the flash had. Of course, if you do this, it could potentially be bad because people might not be able to establish who is who, which would be sad because it would merely suggest that they didn't read Dante's Inferno that well. This will also help with the whole Cerberus incident (I would go into detail, but I'm running out of characters...)
Overall, you have done a good job and since it was for a school project, it was very inventive. I hope this review was useful for you.
JonBro responds:
I've never played Devil's May Cry, so I don't really understand why some people are confused. Maybe I should play it to see what they mean. And while I do that, maybe I should read Dante's Inferno, too...
You're right about the character's animation being inconsistent. The way I animated sort of depended on how I felt at the time, and how detailed a character was. Toad's body was still most of the time when his mouth was smoothly active, whereas Charon had active body motions and an inactive mouth, probably because I didn't want to redraw his mouth too many times. I guess I was trying to even the animation out, or something.
I think there were a lot of reasons I didn't have background music for most of the movie, but I can't decide if they make sense. Most of my movies don't have voices, so I make up for that with music to fit the mood. This movie had a pretty simple 'humorous' mood that didn't really require background music (at least, I thought) especially since there were voices for most of the movie. Another reason I didn't add background music was probably to make the more "dramatic" parts stand out (like seeing the gate of Hell and entering Satan's Circle). Or maybe I was simply influenced by the way gags were presented in the earlier episodes of Blockhead. I'm not really sure.
As for the characters... Well, I just went with what BlueEyedSweeTie told me. She said Mario should be Dante, Toad should be Virgil, Peach should be Beatrice, Bowser should be Satan, and Yoshi should be Geryon. She doesn't really know many video game characters besides them. I know plenty of Mario characters, but I couldn't think of very many that could replace the Dante's Inferno characters as they appeared on Google and Wikipedia. The only one I could think of was replacing Cerberus with Triclyde from SMB2, and the other characters I just drew from Google Image pictures in a more cartoony way.
It's hard enough just to voice act for Toad. I consider myself a decent voice actor, but not when I try to do high-pitch voices. Then my voice just cracks a lot, and my highest priority simply becomes making it easy to understand. I was pretty proud of myself with the part where Toad eats cake while he's talking, heh.
Thanks for the gigantic insightful constructive wall of text!
Not so acurate
It s a good flash if it is just for laughs but I have 2 say that this is nothing like the divine comedy (which by the it is long as shit). So I give an 8 for a nice chuckle and for the artwork of course.
yeah...
thats pretty much what happens....