"Stay incredibly shiny, Animaniacs!"
— CellSpex's Catchphrase
CellSpex is an online film critic who focuses primarily on animation. She's often represented by her avatar: a purple-haired shadow with an aqua bandanna. She's also a member of the MLP Analysis community and is the one who puts together the Analyst Bronies React videos.
Her YouTube channel can be found here,
and her Twitter can be found here.
CellSpex shows examples of the following tropes
- Abandoned Catchphrase: Her phrase "Stay incredibly shiny, Animaniacs!" was originally "Stay awesome, Animaniacs!", but she changed it following the release of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014).
- Art Evolution: Her avatar gets an upgrade in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012) second season finale review, and another one starting in the Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation review. Following the release of her Elemental (2023) review, her avatar received another update, with slightly more detailed hair and bandana.
- Art Shift: Her recap of the plot of Strange Magic is done with sock puppets.
- Author Appeal: Her favorite type of characters tend to be snarky, intelligent badasses.
- Bait-and-Switch: At the start of "My Weird Beef with Soul Criticism," she praises an inspirational film that arrived near the end of 2020 that brought to light new possibilities for animation... not the subject of the video, as you might expect, but the more obscure Wolfwalkers.
- Berserk Button: Touch her bandana and she will bite you.
- Catchphrase: "Stay incredibly shiny, Animaniacs!"
- "Holy/Thank deities!" or some other variant.
- Breaking Old Trends: Subverted — she did a Worst to Best for animated adaptations of A Christmas Carol at the end of 2020, but did a regular animated film one a month later even though that year had seen a forced decrease in theatrical films.
- Country Matters: She uses the word to describe Lavinia from Princess Sarah in her review of Goodtimes Entertainment's A Little Princess, although the word itself is bleeped out.
- Cluster F-Bomb: Flies into this in her review of Norm of the North.
- Curse Cut Short: In her review of Smurfs: The Lost Village:CellSpex: But I do have something personally invested in this movie, and THAT IS SHOWING UP THESE ROTTEN PIECES OF SH-(abrupt cut)
- Deadpan Snarker: She can be pretty sarcastic sometimes.
- Department of Redundancy Department: The list of things she thinks is bad about Norm of the North: animation, music, animation, voices, animation, script. "Did I mention that the animation is kind of shit? I'm sure no one else has!"
- Face Framed in Shadow: Her Avatar is a shadowy figure with only the eyes, hair, and clothing visible. And the mouth, when she needs to emote beyond just the eyes.
- Guilty Pleasures: Discussed with Strange Magic. She thinks it's bad, but she understands why it has a cult following — in her words, "it's a surreal, awkward romance-fantasy-musical. That combination of words practically screams 'guilty pleasure'".
- Hell Is That Noise: She considers The X-Files's theme to be this.
- Laughing Mad: Breaks into maddened laughter upon revealing that Norm of the North got a wide release, despite much better movies getting limited releases.
- Musical Episode: Her 2015 Worst to Best List is done to the tune of Christmas songs.
- Narm: In her Trolls review, she calls out Branch's backstory and the "True Colors" sequence as both being so melodramatic that they come back to being hilarious.
- Obligatory Joke: In her 2015 musical review of animated movies themed around Christmas carols, she sets Inside Out to "Joy to the World" and immediately points out how obvious the joke was.
- Pet-Peeve Trope:
- She's not a fan of the abundance of romance in media. She later clarified that she's more annoyed about romance in media done wrong than romance in and of itself.
- She absolutely despises the Boyfriend-Blocking Dad trope. The Bumbling Dad trope also tends to earn her ire.
- Being a former kindergarten teacher, any situation where children are put in danger by irresponsible or lazy adults is a major source of fury for her.
- Sarcasm Mode: The entirety of the "Why Bronies Are The Worst Thing Ever" which is actually satirizing the show's
Hate Dumb and counter-arguing against certain criticisms such as the Animation Age Ghetto, Girl-Show Ghetto, and Perverse Sexual Lust. Sadly, however, many viewers missed the point and thought that it was a serious rant video if the comments are any indication - Shipper on Deck:
- She was rooting for Korrasami to be a thing long before it actually happened, and despite being rather anti-romance, she was positively giddy about Varrick and Zhu Li getting married.
- Going off her saying that The Owl House was awesome shortly before showing the clip of Luz asking Amity out, she's a Lumity shipper as well.
- Shout-Out:
- In her review of Death Note (2017), when voicing the characters, Ryuk shouts "HEY KID WANNA SEE A DEAD BODY?!"
- Her 2016 Worst to Best opening montage was originally set to "History Maker", and in the list itself mentions one of the show's signature scenes in a very silly way when reviewing Doukyusei -Classmates- (which has YoI's ending theme as the BGM).CellSpex: Oh yeah, this is just a thank you for being my coach! It's nothing more than that! Why would you think that?
- "You'd think "There's no way a movie this cute is suddenly gonna get super-dark and depressing and gruesome," right Madoka?"
- During her 2019 Worst to Best, she says that what Studio TRIGGER does best is make colorful explosive battles while people scream "I AM A MAN!".
- During her review of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, she comments on Lily Tomlin playing the voice of Aunt May:"And Aunt May is a boss! That's my Miss Frizzle!"
- So Bad, It's Good: In the Norm of the North review, she says that Foodfight! is entertainingly bad, while North is bad in a boring way.
- Sophisticated as Hell / Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe: Played with at the start of her Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse review:"Hear ye, hear ye! And let it be known, my fellow ani-psychotics, that on this day I did proclaim...that THE HYPE IS REAL!"
- Synthetic Voice Actor: Due to losing her voice because of the flu, her review of Justice League vs. Teen Titans is done using a voice synthesizer.
- Take That!: Several against Teen Titans Go!.
- She also seems to dislike Rise of the Guardians, since she calls the movie out using tropes like Clap Your Hands If You Believe and Adults Are Useless without any hint of irony. She also calls Jack "
Not Elsa's Boyfriend" in her Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse review. - She's also not a huge fan of Illumination Entertainment.
- Points out that more time was very likely put into Sausage Party's script than all of the preceeding movies of the 2016 Worst to Best list. She does not take it back.
- The other reason her Worst to Best lists from 2009 to 2012 were taken down was because...CellSpex: Believe it or not, YouTube's copyright system used to be even worse than what it currently is now.
- Her opinion of Disney's live action/photorealistic remakes of their classic animated movies is growing hatred, reaching a boiling point when The Lion King (2019) came out and earned a dishonorable mention on the 2019 Worst to Best. Mulan (2020) was an excuse to just let it out, given how bad the year had been in general at that point.
- She also seems to dislike Rise of the Guardians, since she calls the movie out using tropes like Clap Your Hands If You Believe and Adults Are Useless without any hint of irony. She also calls Jack "
- That Came Out Wrong: From her recap of Book 3, episode 5 of The Legend of Korra when we're introduced to Bolin's Love Interest Opal:CellSpex: Heck, even Bolin has something to do this season. Oh wow, that was a bad choice of words!
- Voluntary Shapeshifting: She switches to her pony OC when reviewing My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. Although in her "Rainbow Falls" review, it was involuntary.CellSpex: Really? So this is mandatory for anyone who wants to analyse an episode? (sighs) Whatever.
- Wham Shot: During her review of Wonder Park, the Deus ex Machina ending causes a cut to her real life self for the first time to deliver a Flat "What".
- What the Hell, Hero?: As much as Sausage Party got a surprisingly high placing on her 2016 Worst to Best, she made a strict point to call out how badly the film's animators were treated.CellSpex: You were better than most this year Sausage Party, but practice what you preach and treat others with respect.
