You are watching Scribble Kibble, a weekly show about animation.
I had time to binge watch Betsy Lee’s entire No Evil series and I have to say that after
watching all 20 episodes I am genuinely interested in what will happen next.
I even bought the comic to get the scoop on the prologue.
This is the best independent online animated series I have seen so far.
Sure, I’ve seen series that use really minimal animation, but No Evil is way beyond stick
puppet characters.
The art and voice acting are good, the story and writing are good, and the series didn’t
fall apart after two or three episodes - which is the fate of most online serials.
By some sort of animator magic Betsy Lee has created 95 minutes for this series over the
past four years.
An hour and a half.
That’s a movie!
Of course No Evil starts out a little bumpy at first, particularly in terms of the audio
work because you can hear the white noise from the microphone whenever a character speaks.
That goes away in later episodes.
Sometimes the voice actors don’t enunciate or they speak too fast, and many of the characters
have unusual names that come out of folklore (primarily Aztec lore), so fortunately the
subtitles work.
Click them on if you need to.
Now!
I have some recommendations on how to watch this.
The first is to set a movie night and let the No Evil playlist run from the beginning.
That’s the best because Betsy Lee knows how to let the lore in her story unfold.
The second recommendation is to watch up through episode ten, or to only watch episode ten.
That’d be good if you don’t like human-ish animal characters but want to get a feel for
the series anyway.
This is the place to make your choice, because the next thing I’m going to do is give a
synopsis of the No Evil story so far, for anybody who needs a refresher.
The next time I start talking I’m going to spoil a lot, so… yeah.
The world of No Evil is populated by spirits (magic animals who can take on human form)
and humans.
All live in harmony thanks to the power of a mirror.
However, the humans and spirits argue over who should command the mirror.
Because the existence of the powerful magic mirror actually results in disharmony, the
frog spirit Tlaloc uses a tuning fork and trades his life to break the mirror.
It shatters into four aspects, or Tezcatlipocas: red, white, blue, and black.
The aspects are scattered around the world, only to resurface years later.
In particular, the Black Tezcatlipoca spreads like a plague.
It kills any plants it touches and puts any living creature it touches to an endless sleep.
To stop the black plague from consuming everything, four spirits combine their powers to create
a force of will strong enough to seal the black away.
Of course there’s a price.
The raven spirit sacrifices her life, while the three monkey spirits each give up one
sense: sight, hearing, and speech.
See no evil.
Hear no evil.
Speak no evil.
A few years later, the seal breaks when some punk kid shows up and starts tearing the pieces
of the Black Tezcatlipoca off of the spirit guardians.
The main characters in No Evil must now try to find a way to suppress the black plague.
A healer and a shaman can individually cure most cases, but to actually solve the problem
their best bet is to find the being who can wield the Blue Tezcatlipoca.
Yet thanks to loco power-obsessed kid, the first course of action is trying to get the
other two pieces of the Black Tezcatlipoca and keep them safe.
And that’s it.
That’s where we are now.
No Evil is a super inspiration to anyone thinking of making their own series.
Watch any episode and you’ll notice there aren’t buckets of special effects.
The camera movements, when there are any, are very simple.
Everything is drawn by hand in Flash.
Even the backgrounds are in Flash.
All of the voice acting has a do-it-yourself feel to it; Betsy Lee does several of the
voices herself and most of the characters are voiced by people she knows.
They all get together and record in the same place.
Everything about the animation is completely doable.
You can make this.
Granted the animation in the very first episode still outranks a lot of what I see on YouTube,
but!
You can make this.
All it requires is true dedication and a story that you’ve written that you can work off
of and expand on.
You don’t have to have the whole story finished when you start, but enough that you know where
you are going.
Take your time, start small with short minisodes one to four minutes long, keep drawing your
cartoon, and after a few years you will have a legitimate series with dedicated fans.
Not fans of some other show, not fans of fan art, your fans.
Your fans.
There is one aspect of No Evil that is highly unusual for an original series, and that is
the singing.
It’s fantastic.
That’s why I suggested episode ten, because that was the episode that made me take a hard
look at the credits.
It has an amazing triad song, which is an adaptation of the 1934 fast paced boppin gospel
tune “There Ain’t No Grave.”
Betsy Lee and the male voice actor Mr. Shoes arranged their own version of the song to
be very slow and haunting.
She sings the two female parts and he sings the male part.
It’s really quite spectacular.
You don’t get that anywhere else.
People try to sing duets and it sounds off key.
Let alone three parts.
Heh.
It was so good I had to see the credits because I thought the characters had different voice
actors to do the singing parts.
They don’t.
In terms of visuals, the only thing that is different are the patterned dresses and items
you’ll see from time to time.
They’re pretty, aren’t they?
It just so happens I put up a tutorial on animating textures like this that you can
see here, but to summarize: you can download images and use them as texture fills in Flash.
If you’re on the level with masking (something I didn’t cover in the tutorial) you could
also mask the pattern onto the clothes fill layer like this.
No Evil doesn’t push too hard on animating the textures, just a few simple changes in
the pattern position to give it some kind of movement.
Oh, oh, one more thing.
The sign language in episode 17.
Wow, what a lot of work to animate all of that.
You thought lip sync was tedious to animate.
How about every artist’s favorite thing, hands?
Hand lip sync.
Seeing sign language animated was pretty sweet.
Wow, after making this episode of Scribble Kibble I feel so inspired!
I hope you do too.
This seems like a good episode to post all of the anthro themed Scribbles art you’ve
sent me.
If I were a spirit in No Evil, I wonder what my power would be?
Ink!
Of course ink.
Yes, the power to inspire creativity.
What would you like your ability to be?
Healing, water bending, shapeshifting, reanimation, being a soul-sucking, murderous little *quack*.
Hopefully not that last one.