Yeti and Squidworth's Halloween Nightmare: Good Edition

Sprawling epics full of plot twists and heavy character development with 2+hour runtimes can be great. However, at times it's great to have a 5 minute movie with a simple concept (cartoon birds slashing each other to pieces, in this case) that's just purely entertaining which you can load up when your bored and need something to pass some time. "Yeti & Squidworth's Halloween Nightmare: Good Edition" is a great example of this variety of movie. It's not only one of the best holiday movies in 3dmm, it's also one of the best shorts that you can download for the program.

The idea behind Y&SHN: GE is simple- a bird gets struck by lightning, and subsequently goes around killing other members of its race (and one unlucky guy at a bus stop). It's incredibly well animated, well directed, and of course, needlessly violent- you gotta love it. The movie has such a great kinetic pace it doesn't get boring for even a fraction of a second. On top of all this, every joke hits its mark, something that normally never happens (not even in short movies). It's not rocket science that gratuitous "Itchy and Scratchy" esque cartoon violence equals good entertainment, but hey, it works.

Technically the movie is perfect. The animation is flawless, and the sound is basically perfect in every category imaginable-especially the expert use of the song "Thriller". I have to say, these birds could be my favorite hand-made characters ever (just under Steven Seagal from "Stranger 4" of course). Every facial expression is 100% believable, every "Loony Toons" style movement done so well you feel you should be watching this on Cartoon Network. In short- Jon Barton is becoming too good at animating hand-made characters, and must be stopped if any of us other 3dmm directors are going to ever stand a chance.

There really aren't any problems I could find in this movie that wouldn't require an annoying amount of nitpicking. The only *real* problem is that it ends so quickly, it's so much fun to watch you want it to keep going! Here's hoping that we see this cast of characters in a full-length 3dmm movie sometime soon (or at least a few more shorts, as long as they're this good). Not much else to say really, being as it's October 29th now's a better time than ever to grab this movie if you missed it when it was released last halloween. If it were longer, it would get a perfect score from me, until then, it will just have to live with a 90% out of 100%.

Oh, and just to wrap things up-
My personal favorite death scenes-
1. The scene where the evil bird kills the two other birds walking down the sidewalk. I don't know why, but when he swings his scythe and yells " 'Eeeeey!!!" at the end of this scene I always burst out laughing...
2. The whole alien chest-burster scene. CLASSIC, and bound to fly way over the heads of those who haven't seen the "Alien" movies, SERVES 'EM RIGHT!!!