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That guy in the orange hat? Yep, thats AniMat.
"In the world of animation, there is known to be a legend. A wise man with all the knowledge of its history. A critic in pursuit of excellence. An expert on the world of Disney. There are many more thing to say about this legend, but you may know him more as AniMat."
— YouTube Channel Trailer of Electric Dragon Productions
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AniMat (a.k.a Mat Brunet) is an internet reviewer on RVT and has several main shows, all focused on animation. The shows are:

  • Animation Lookback: His flagship show, which takes an in-depth look at the history of various animation studios (such as Pixar) and animators (such as Don Bluth).
  • AniMat's Reviews: A Video Review Show that looks at new theatrically-released animated films in a critical light by judging the story, animation, and characters (and, when necessary, the songs) separately.
    • He also has AniMat's Classic Reviews, which is exactly like his normal reviews, except they're about older animated films not in theatres.
    • He has also reviewed live-action films and other media that have to do with animation, such as the Epic Mickey games, Persistence of Vision, and Saving Mr. Banks. Here, he ditches the Story-Animation-Characters critique system and just talks about what works in them and what doesn't work, and he's on-camera frequently. note  In 2015, he made an announcement that his fans can request him to review anything they want him to, as long as he's able to review them note  and if a fan donates $100 or more on his Patreon.
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  • The Epic Mickey Files: A series that takes a look at the characters from the video game Epic Mickey, as well as its sequel and spinoff, and talks about their first appearances, the characters themselves, some of their later appearances, and their role in the game.

You can view his videos at the above links, as well as on his YouTube channel. He can also be found on his Twitter account, Patreon account (where fans can support his work), deviantART account, and the Animation Lookback Facebook page. He also used to have a Blip account, but it is now deleted due to Blip shutting down. A Recap of the episodes of his shows can be viewed here.

Here is a list of all the animated films AniMat has reviewed, both regular and Classic Reviews, along with non-animated films or other media that he's reviewed. Please note that this does not include any films or other media that he only reviewed via crossover, such as the Scary Godmother duology review with Hewy Toonmore or the live-action Smurfs review with Cartoon Palooza. Bolded denotes films that he's reviewed in his Classic Reviews. Italics denotes special reviews that were requested by fans via Patreon. Bolded Italics denotes films reviewed in AniMat's Classic Reviews that were requested by fans via Patreon. Also, while the film are listed in alphabetical order, the only time they won't be is if a film and it's sequel(s) get the same rating, in which case, they will be listed chronologically.

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     Films He's Given the AniMat Seal of Approval 

10/10

  • Fantasianote 
  • Inside Out
  • The Iron Giant
  • The Lion Kingnote 
  • Perfect Bluenote 
  • The Prince of Egyptnote 
  • Princess Mononoke
  • The Road to El Dorado
  • Soul
  • Spirited Awaynote 
  • Toy Storynote 
  • Toy Story 2note 
  • Toy Story 3note 
  • Toy Story 4note 
  • WALL•Enote 
  • Waltz with Bashir
  • Who Framed Roger Rabbitnote 
  • Wolfwalkers
  • Yellow Submarinenote 
  • Zootopianote 

9/10

     Films That Don't Have Either Seal 

8.5/10

8/10

7.5/10

7/10

6/10

5/10

     Films He's Given the AniMat Seal of Garbage 

4/10

3/10

2/10

1/10

  • Foodfight!note 
  • Where the Dead Go to Dienote 

     Special Reviews 

10/10

  • Gravity Fallsnote 

9/10

  • Castlevania (2017 Netflix series)note 
  • Cowboy Bebopnote 
  • Cybersixnote 
  • Death Note (2006 anime series)note 
  • Epic Mickeynote 
  • Hot Fuzznote 
  • The Muppetsnote 
  • Persistence of Vision
  • Tangled: The Seriesnote 
  • Young Justice (Season 1 only)note 

8/10

7.5/10

7/10

6.7/10

6/10

5/10

4/10

3/10

2/10

  • Serenity (2019 film)note 

1/10

  • Bratz (2007 film)note 

Not given any rating

His videos provide examples of:

  • Arch-Enemy: He refers to Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs as this. Time will tell if Norm of the North, a film he considers worse than Cloudy, replaces it.
  • Berserk Button:
  • Big "NO!": During his Nightmare Sequence in the “Top 10 Worst Films Based on a Cartoon” episode.
  • The Cameo:
  • Catchphrase:
    • “Hey guys, this is AniMat.”
    • "Let's find out!"
    • “See ya later, dudes!”
    • “What the fridge!?”
  • Caustic Critic: Averted. While AniMat isn't a professional film critic, and his reviews are, for all intents and purposes, an entertainment web series, he mostly gives a fair criticism for the works he reviews. He does get rant-y when it comes to reviewing a work he dislikes, though.
  • Cliffhanger: Used at the end of his review of Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two. The following review is the spinoff game Epic Mickey: Power of Illusion.
  • Content Warnings: This is used prior the Number 1 Worst spot of the “Top 5 Best & Worst Animated Films of 2012” (Hotel Transylvania).
    Voice Over: Warning: The following animated film may cause blindness of rage and angry comments due to it being on the worst list at #1. It may contain arguments about the film that not everyone would want to hear. If you’d like to avoid this, please skip ahead to here (20:13). If not, then please listen and try to understand the reasons why it’s at #1 on the worst list. You have been warned.
  • *Cough* Snark *Cough*: He considers Dracula from Hotel Transylvania to be a ripoff of Marlin from Finding Nemo because of the Overprotective Dad role, and another reason.
    AniMat: (coughs “dead wife”)
  • Dork Age: invoked What he feels Sony Pictures Animation is going through. He believes that after the first Cloudy film was released, they started going on a downward spiral (not counting the Aardman co-productions), fueled by poor corporate decisions and other matters. He claims in his review of Surf's Up that if they don't progress, then eventually they will be shut down. However, he has expressed positive interest in Smurfs: The Lost Village, praising the character designs revealed in a photo and the animation in the teaser trailer, considering it promising overall. Unfortunately, though, Mat thinks that it might not save the company since it, and The Star, are at high competition with other movies (Mainly, The Fate of the Furious and Star Wars: The Last Jedi, respectivelynote ). To make matters worse with The Star, it is mainly a Christian movie, so Mat feels that it most likely won't bring in a large audience. And to add extra salt to the wound, they made The Emoji Movie...Yeah...
  • Double Standard:
    • He has repeatedly taken a potshot against films that are primarily aimed at younger audiences because they tend to be lazily written to squeeze money out of the most gullible of all audiences. However, he made an exception to My Neighbor Totoro, which he doesn't personally enjoy very much, but appreciated the thought put into it, and even gave it two separate grades (as a kid's movie, and as a movie in general).
    • He also did not seem to have any issue tearing Sony Pictures Animation apart for losing Lauren Faust as a director, while ignoring similar instances of this happening at other studios.
      • He also gladly tore Sony Pictures Animation when it was revealed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller that the studio mistreats creators and artists and not allow creative work there, but ignores or even gets defensive when studios like Nickelodeon face similar instances.
  • Everyone Has Standards: His "it's fine to have disagreements over movies and television" viewpoint comes to an abrupt end when it comes to Where the Dead Go to Die.note ).
  • Evil Laugh: During his “exit” at the end of the “Top 10 Scariest Disney Moments” episode.
  • Fan Hater: He has called people who like Where the Dead Go to Die "freaks", and urged them to get help. This however is actually something he's admitted to deeply regretting.
  • Fanon Discontinuity:
    • invoked During his Zootopia review, he mentioned that Zootopia is Disney's first computer-animated feature that uses a world full of anthropomorphic animals. As he was saying this, an image of Chicken Little popped up from the corner, and AniMat quickly shoved it away, screaming, "NO! Shut up! That movie doesn't exist!" Averted later on though, as he does openly acknowledge Chicken Little both near the end of the Zootopia review, and in its own review.
    • He's also implied to hold this sentiment toward Muppets from Space.
  • Fatal Flaw: He states that the addition of non-stop voiceovers in the Walking with Dinosaurs movie completely destroys the experience.
  • Formula-Breaking Episode:
  • Four Point Scale: Averted. He has a ten-point scale and tends to distribute his rankings evenly. Anything below a five gets a Seal of Garbage, and he only tends to give one Seal of Approval (9+) per year.
    • Only sixteen films (or seventeen pieces of media if Special reviews are counted) have a perfect score, and only three of them did so in the year they were released as opposed to being on AniMat's Classic Reviews.
  • Heroic BSoD:
  • I Work Alone: Most of his videos are made only by himself.
  • The Ken Burns Effect: Being a documentary series, Animation Lookback features a lot of this.
  • Leaning on the Fourth Wall: At the beginning of his review for The Ice Age Adventures of Buck Wild, Mat receives a video call from a Disney representative who wants to tell him about the movie:
    Disney rep: You're one of those cartoon reviewers, right? I hope I didn't startle you there too much.
    Mat: I'm actually more weirded out that you look a bit too much like me.
    Disney rep: Well, that's what happens when you don't hire other actors.
  • Medal of Dishonor: His "Seal of Garbage", which he hands to films he rates below 5/10.
  • The Mockbuster: He calls Turbo a full-on ripoff of Cars.
  • Nightmare Sequence: In the “Top 10 Worst Films Based on a Cartoon” episode, Mr. Coat members bombard him with “announced” live-action film adaptations of cartoons.
  • The One Thing I Don't Hate About You: He admits the only redeeming thing about Gribble in Mars Needs Moms is that he’s the only human character who actually looks like a human, as opposed to the others.
  • Precision F-Strike: From his review of The Emoji Movie: "So with that said, f*** Sony, f*** emojis, and F*** THIS MOVIE!!!"
  • "Psycho" Strings: He uses these in his "Top 10 Worst Sequels" when he shows the Yellow Bellies' song in The Land Before Time XIII: The Wisdom of Friends.
    • He uses them again in the "Top 10 Animated Box Office Bombs" when he shows some details of a planned CGI remake of Yellow Submarine.
  • Rage Quit: Animat Watches Bratz the Movie. Animat dropped a censored F* bomb and says that he is done with Bratz the Movie with only Twenty Minutes left of it's run-time. Also counts as Screw This, I'm Outta Here!.
  • Running Gag: Whenever a film is overly cutesy and trying to pander to a very young demographic (i.e. A Troll in Central Park, The Care Bears Movie, and to a lesser extent Trolls), expect him to use the phrase "happy rainbow butterfly pony flowers."
  • Shout-Out: Crossover links.
    • To the web series Vaulting in his review of Jetsons: The Movie.
    • To his fans who personally did the ultimate Patreon pledge in their requested review. (Click on the "notes" for films in italics or bolded italics for the names of the Patrons)
  • So Okay, It's Average: invokedThese types of films usually receive the 5-6 score from him.
  • Soundtrack Dissonance: He demonstrates in his review of The Legend of the Titanic how replacing the soundtrack can make Tentacles very threatening.
  • Spiritual Successor: He considers Epic (2013) to be the spiritual successor to Rise of the Guardians.
  • Standard Snippet: The end of reviews have one of five themes depending on how high a score the film got. These include:
    • The Seal of Approval worthy films get the celebration remix from Super Smash Bros. Melee Smashing... Live! Live Orchestra Music Track 5: Original Medley.
    • Films scoring an eight or seven get the orchestra "stage clear" theme from Sonic the Hedgehog (2006)
    • Films scoring a six or five get the tense $500,000 question music and the "Final Answer" jingle from Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?.
    • Films scoring a four or three play the Game Over music from Sonic the Hedgehog & 2.
    • Films scoring a two or one get a snippet of the demonic climax part of the "King of Pride Rock" score from The Lion King. However, due to copyright issues with Universal Music Group, the music was later switched to the Game Over music from Super Mario 64, starting with the Arctic Dogs review.
  • Strictly Formula: Anytime something he's reviewing has this, he ends with "Rinse and repeat."
  • Take That!:
    • When he responds to a question on why he reviewed the CGI/live-action hybrid Walking with Dinosaurs movie and not The Smurfs 2.
      AniMat: Look, Walking with Dinosaurs did it much more differently so that the animation plays a bigger role. How 'bout I say no and forget it so that both of our lives would be much more simpler.
    • During the CN Real segment in Part 4 of his Animation Lookback on Cartoon Network, he gives a little jab at Fox News with this:
      AniMat: If you take away the "Fox" from Fox News, then you would get a channel that would report real news from credible journalists that would respect women.
    • When bringing up the Misaimed Fandom of Coonskin in Part 2 of his Animation Lookback on Ralph Bakshi, he brings up pictures of Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, actor and far-right activist James Woods, actor and martial artist Steven Seagal, Fox News correspondents Sean Hannity and Tomi Lahren, alt-right leader Richard Spencer, and a klansmen.
    • The entire Office Space review is an elaborate one towards The Nostalgia Critic.
    • During Top 10 Biggest Animated Box Office Bombs, he makes fun of all the people who ship Jack Frost with Elsa.
  • Talking Poo: In his review of The Emoji Movie, he mocks Poop as being a possible mascot for Sony Pictures Animation: "A poorly-drawn animated piece of crap that spews jokes that no one would ever think is funny."
  • Tempting Fate: In the intro to his review of Open Season, he makes a side comment of how people will endless request him reviewing the Direct-to-Video sequels. Low and behold, that is what happened as he has managed to review the three in the span of a year.
  • The Stinger: Mat often ends Animation Lookbacks with these, most of them just directly hinting at the subject of the next lookback.
    • More recent installments have done a more traditional stinger. The History of The Thief and the Cobbler ends on a shot of four Disney films arranged in a circle while the words "10 Years Later" appears below them, and The History of Walt Disney Animation Studios+ ends on a upward panning shot from Mat's Disney film collection to a poster of The Muppets while Rainbow Connection plays.
  • This Is Gonna Suck: Has this reaction in his review of Jonah: A VeggieTales Movie when he finds out the franchise is a Religious Edutainment series, and of course religion does have a tendency to lead to widely heated discussions online even if he tries his best to review the film objectively.
  • Why Won't You Die?: Brought up word-for-word at the beginning of his review of Ice Age: Collision Course:
    I would like to categorize Ice Age as a zombie franchise, where no matter how many times you keep shooting at it, it always comes back and all you can do is shout out "WHY WON'T YOU DIE!?"
“See ya later, dudes!”
 
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Video Example(s):

AniMat's 2020 Expectation List

AniMat lists off the movies that will be coming to 2021, only for the list to be moot due to COVID-19.

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AniMat's 2020 Expectation List

AniMat lists off the movies that will be coming to 2021, only for the list to be moot due to COVID-19.

How well does it match the trope?

3.29 (14 votes)

Example of:

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AniMat's 2020 E...

"When You Miss ...