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Good Production Value and Not Much Else

(review contains spoilers)
Joseph Blanchette's long-awaited return to the portal has unfortunately turned out to less than triumphant. Arguably the most well-known out of the trio that produced the Legend of the Black Book, his name recognition and the group's overall production skills arguably are what have carried the viewership of this comedic World-of-Warcraft-inspired short, and in the end are the only things worth noting.
For a comedy short, the laughs are dismally few...the jokes seem to be consistently bland, leaning on tried-and-true (and uninteresting) cliches, funny voices and weak non-sequitur anachronisms to carry the funny. Add to this the droll pacing and a horribly derivative storyline and you're left with a production badly in need of a new scriptwriter, and a new director.
The voice-acting is nothing to phone home about - the voices all feel over-acted to compensate for the script, and feel over-the-top, but in the wrong direction. The except to this is Edwyn Tiong (Omahdon) as the cult leader, which becomes the best and only memorable part of the entire short.
The flash isn't without its good parts of course - as mentioned before, the production values of this short are good. The entire sequence where the lich king is released from the book is visually impressive and a lot of work has clearly gone into the re-design of the characters and the production of the set-pieces.
The animation itself never gets above par and Joseph Blanchette's animation skills don't seem to have improved much since his last effort, though that's somewhat forgivable since this is a comedic short, with relatively little action or drama. Taken with everything else though, it actually ends up climbing on top of all of this piece's faults and pushing them down even further.

What you guys have here, ultimately, is well-produced but mediocre. Nothing here is really bad, but almost everything, from the basic concept upwards, is uninteresting and more or less forgettable.
My recommendation would be to pass any future scripts by some other writers with some proven comedy chops, and to think more carefully about the pacing and timing as you're putting together the next iteration.
You guys seem to be a really inspired team, and it sounds like you want to make a lot of cool stuff. But until you brush up your chops in some critical areas, your efforts are in danger of being very quickly forgotten, which would be unfortunate considering all of the work and love you've clearly put into this.

Toonwerks responds:

Joseph responds:

A fair review, but you were mislead in a few places:

1) This is not a "LegendaryFrog" cartoon. (I was kinda annoyed that my name appeared 2nd on the actually) While I did help with the script, it was primarily written by Casey and we all chipped in when we could. One of the weakness, we release, is Casey tends to ramble. We hope to improve this for the next one and have the story move along quicker.

2) LF also did not do the animation. That was handled by Mark. (th1rt3en) In my opinion, its light years of what I'm capable of. Which is why Mark did it! I did the artwork, because it's what I enjoy to do the most.

Most of the criticism against the movie we noticed near the end of production, and it's our own fault for letting it get that far. Things like overlong scenes and sound quality, we all think can be improved on next time.

Regardless, thanks for the honest feedback, and I hope the next part is more to your liking!

Fire, death and pie.

machiavelli33 @Voinaimir

Age 39, Male

Starving artist.

Brooklyn, NY

Joined on 10/20/03

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