Postby Xocrates » Thu Jun 28, 2012 12:06 am
Right, I need to get this out of my head.
So... Meet the Pyro. It's bothering me.
While the short itself was fairly good, it doesn't quite work, and that's bothering me since plenty of its problems appear obvious to me, which makes me wonder quite why Valve choose this option.
As such I want to present my analysis of it:
What works:
The start. It does a really good job at establishing the Pyro as a complete psycho and the interviews are probably the funniest bit in the short.
What doesn't:
Candyland goes on for too long. I think the problem here is that Valve took the punchline and stretched it into the joke. However this would be fine if not for the fact that...
Candyland/Real World don't sync well. Sometimes the short shows a near 1:1 relation between candyland and real world, but oftentimes what's happening in one side makes no goddamn sense in the context of the other, which wouldn't be much of a problem if they hadn't already shown a 1:1 relation.
What's debatable
The Candyland/Real world contrast. I get that the point here is that by contrasting the whimsy with the gruesome, both end up amplified. The problem however is that I feel they end up with the whimsy feeling too whimsical and the violence feeling too gruesome, essentially killing what's funny about both of them.
What would I do differently
Like I noted before, I feel like Candyland is a punchline, not the joke. As such I would extend the part that does work, i.e. the interviews with cutaways for the violence, and spend more time establishing the Pyro as a true psycho before cutting to the candyland at the ending. This could be as simple as interviewing the remaining classes as well or just coming back to the ones they do have more times.
my 2c