Wow, that was amazing, St_Jons. Allow me to comment…
The story is great, it references a lot of movies (whether intentional or not), from Dumbo to Psycho, Elvis to Sergio Leone, A Bug’s Life to one of my favourite episodes from Chowder. It’s simple, it’s funny, the timing is perfect, I even chuckled a couple of times. I did feel sorry [spoil]for Howard, and I really thought Carl was going to hand his toupee over to Howard[/spoil], but that’s about the only criticism I can pick with the plot.
Soundtrack is well chosen. Love the use of ‘Peer Gynt’ and ‘Entrance of the Gladiators’ at the opportune moments. The use of the [spoil]Wall-E greeting[/spoil] was a bit jarring, but it was a nice homage to Pixar, I guess.
Now we come to the technical bits. First thing… Generiman! Argh… that guy… 
He gave so many sleepless nights, that pain in the ‘ascot’… we had to practice with him for our animation classes in my course, and I did two graded assessments (one was simple body animation, and another was a lip synch), so yes, I’ve used him before. I don’t mean to trivialize your efforts, but using him’s heck of a lot easier than trying to rig a human character on your own (believe me, I still haven’t figured out human rigging), and I understand why you might resort to him due to time constraints. I liked his macho stroll, the eye twitching, and that grin at the end.
Harold is of course, much easier, since he doesn’t have those tricky opposable joints/backbones/neck, etc. I think you should’ve worked on his weight and locomotion more, especially in the beginning when all his feet left the ground at the same time when he jumped, and when he stepped into the ring, he looked a little ‘jerky’.
Hermione (though, really, I think it should be spelled ‘Hermoine’ a la Harry Potter) was pretty well done. Inverse kinematics, right? (Just attach her feet to the pedals and watch her go!) Again, I suck at rigging, so I applaud your skills!
What else? The flag was a nice touch. My team had a major nightmare handling cloth simulations for our final project alone (our characters actually wore items like a jacket, scarf, and skirt, and it kept intersecting!). Did you use Maya nCloth?
Uh… nice lightning. You know your 3-point lighting… ‘spotlight’ is pretty easy to achieve, so nice trick using a darkened tent as your setting (again, I understand you have time constraints, and I respect that).
Overall, it’s quite impressive. Carl’s animation (is this another Pixar reference?) impressed me the most, though Harold and Hermione were pretty good too. Story could have done with a more cohesive and traditionally ‘happy’ ending, though yours was an unconventionally interesting alternative, too. I hope you’re not offended by my honest criticisms, and I can truly say I enjoyed this film, even with its shortcomings. Hopefully there’ll be more awesomeness to come from you and your crew in the future! 