In 2006, when I first heard about Newgrounds from a good friend of mine, I took a look around the site and I thought: "This is something I'd like to be apart of." This was only a few months after I'd learned how to animate, and I was fairly worried when I submitted my first cartoon, Stuck in the Desert. At the time I was pretty proud of this cartoon, it was the first one I made that actually used backgrounds, all my others were just the characters floating in white nothingness, kind of like Brawl Taunts.
Surprisingly the first thing I ever submitted passed, and needless to say, I was elated and inspired. All the nice reviews made me want to submit more of my work, and work harder on my new animations, which I did. It was nice to have constructive criticism and praise for my work (something I never got when I made cartoons solely for my family's entertainment).
One thing I always sort of prided myself in though was the use of my own original characters, simple though they may be. The star of this original cast of characters being "Jim." A 9-shaped human-like chibi sort of figure. Now, ever since some of my earliest cartoons, I've had people tell me that they "like Jim, but think he could use an update graphically." Now, way back when I made my first few submissions, I honestly couldn't animate a more advanced character without it either looking choppy, or getting to confusing to keep track of all the layers; now I don't update him just because I like the simplicity of him, which is hard for some people to understand.
To this day, I still get people sending me messages and a few reviews telling me I need to update Jim, and to each one I say no and tell them what I just told you here. He is not meant to be an advanced looking character with tons of detail, he's supposed to be simple and silly. Although I did cave in and get him a voice actor, I have still kept him mouthless. This is for two reasons. Reason one being that in Koolmoves (the program in which I animate) timing up mouths is a much harder process than in flash. Reason two being that it seems like (with him being such a simple character) the constant movement of a mouth would detract from the slight body language, and eye movement he uses to convey emotion.
Now let me just clear up something quickly. I can draw and animate a lot better than I could when Jim was made! Some people seem to think that chibi style simple characters are the peak of my drawing ability, which is a fairly understandable assumption I suppose considering somewhere around 80% of my cartoons involve Jim and crew, but just for the record, I can in fact draw a lot better than that now. I have yet to release any of my "well-drawn" cartoons to NG because, to be perfectly honest, none of them are done. I always start them off with a lot of gusto, but start to lose steam at about the 2 minute mark. I do intend to finish them at some point, but for now they're kind of on the backburner while I work on Jim's Time Cartoon Part 1.
I suppose the whole point of this is: If you see a Jim cartoon in the portal, please don't downvote it because the characters are simple or because they don't have mouths, that's how they're supposed to be! I'm perfectly fine with constructive criticism to help me make it funnier, and if you don't like the cartoons, that's okay, I am just sick of people telling me to update him or add a mouth when he isn't supposed to have one and doesn't need one. Also, please don't make fun of me for "not being able to draw well" because I can, I merely choose not to for those cartoons, and someday you guys will see my well-drawn cartoons and characters.
Thanks for Reading,
~Jimtopia
