Great animation, nice message as well
I really wish people would stop picking on twalrus, though. I agree entirely with him.
Indeed most of you are romantacizing (sp?) your lives, thinking you're the only unique person in the world. But it's the false sense of enlightenment about this movie is one of the reasons you get an eight from me and not a ten. As you can tell from all the reviewers claiming to be able to relate to this kid, theres more than one non-conformist in the world. In fact, this whole trend of being dorky is actually a false layer of reformity, trying not to be preppy but you really are just conforming to a subculture. You exaggerate way too much on the whole popularity thing. But I'm not insulting the message, it's very strong and that you were able to have so many people relate is great. So good job, still.
As for the story itself, I would have liked it better if someone else (preferably a girl) came walking home along that sidewalk at the end crying and beaten up, as the same thing happened to her from the females of the school (it was really strange that there were no females, since you didn't explicitly point out at it being an all males school, or whatever.) Then she would help him up and they're walk home together in the rain. It would give a more hopeful message, rather than condemning uniqueness to always being an outcast. The end would be a nice shot of them walking away from the camera, down the sidewalk in the rain, with thier neighborhood nearly out of sight at the end, metaphorically showing that they'll go through these hard times together and eventually triumph and reach thier goals at the end. It'd be a more conclusive ending.
Sorry for only critizising you so far, but I always point out the bad things. The story and message were great by themselves, just offering suggestons.
As for the animation, that was really awesome. It all flowed smoothly, with great use of all Flash is capable of. I loved almost all of the animation, and there is nothing I could say would improve it. I also liked how many of the nerdy kids went through identical animations, to further push the message. The facial expressions of the protagonist was awesome, I like how he fell down the stairs and got up smiling again, that was really cool (though it doesn't fit with the ending.) Another cool part was when he was entering the bus, how he was looking back and forth; really smooth.
The sound was okay, like most people said the song didn't fit, but it's okay. The lack of voices also helped, using actions to convey what you wanted to say rather than words.
Anyway, I voted a 5. Nice job.