Not as bad as I thought it would be when I first heard the words "Halo" and "anime" in the same sentence.

Still, it doesn't quite capture the kind of gritty-yet-beautiful style that Halo seems to have. Emphasis on the grit.

Robotech...I believe you should have said Macross...

I expect many youtube redubs of this show, a la GI Joe style. I wonder what the next "porkchop sandwiches" will be?

I dunno. As a Macross fan, I feel obliged to say something whenever someone mentions Robotech. Though, I'm not a fanatic purist on that long-running anime "debate".

hey look it's a young, gay spike speigal

Well this was such an ego glorification for Master Chief

OMFG, the japanese are from another planet. Makes sense actually with all their advanced technology & weird behaviour.

It's not that bad. All along I was thinking that the spartan was hiding some bewbs underneath that armor.

Different than I expected and better than I thought.

In the end, it is still a disappointment. This Japanese treatment of Halo source material is getting a bit whacky. Will wait for more.

Let the Japanese fuck up Halo with their queer characters. Just great!

That looks like Konoko from Oni...you know, the OTHER game that Bungie made. If the internet wasn't completely worthless here I'd have a look and find out...:(

Not the greatest animation I've ever seen, but far from the worse. If nothing else, it is really interesting to see them experiment with different art styles within the Halo universe. Having Eastern civilisation-esque forerunner ruins instead of just western ones is kinda cool.

My guess is the spartan is Linda (I think that was her name), the super-sniper spartan chick in the Halo books. But that wouldn't add up because I think she iether died in one of the books or ended up with Hasely on Onyx... hmmm... The Halo Universe is usually surprisingly good with consistency, so maybe this is just some other random spartan chick who is a good sniper.

Wow, talk about cliché twists. Nice animation, not the best, though.

Amazons are always good in my book, but long flowing hair and non-military regulation haircuts in the military... ARGH!

Thanks for posting the vid. Was this last Saturday's show on Halo Waypoint, because I thought they were showing the "Making of Babysitter"? The schedule for this week never mentioned the actual vid either.

Dear Japan

You have lots of money now. So spend some on animation. Specifically lip movement.

Sincerely
Animation Community

Wasn't bad, it was okay. I would've preferred that it were a tad longer, but it's better than nothing. What was weird was the Japanese architecture on a Forerunner planet, and the haircuts were just silly. If you're going to hire a studio to do work based on your most popular franchise, at least make them get the simplest things right.

I'd say that was worth 10 minutes. Any longer would have been too much.
I know Spartans are supposed to be very tall, but seriously, there were some scenes where the ODST fools were about as tall as her knees. It had a taste of every anime cliche there is too. They did miss one though. The brute's hammer should have knocked off her armor completely to reveal her glistening F-cups as she was whacked to the side.

I think she was the unlockable Spartan from DOA4. That would totally explain the mad hand-to-hand skills AND imply that she DOES have massively awesome anime boobs.

Cool, I'm going to have to pick this up to get the rest. Animatrix was great, and this seems good, I love how Sci Fi movies do this! :D

As a Halo fan, I like. As an anime fan, I've seen better, but it was still decent. Looking forward to the rest of these shorts.

@Cowboy - I understand but I still don't like it. Firstly, who is that impatient? Do you really need to see this that badly? I can sympathise more with weekly series but for a one off like this? But then again the simpsons and family guy can do it so why can't they? They don't have over 100 people working on mouth movements alone. This was a one off and going directly in to english it just makes it seem like the studio don't actually know how to animate properly.

As for lip sync. Anime has never synced anyway because of the amount of movement for words in different languages. Just look at dubbed anime, they throw in useless words and the dialogue sounds like garbage anyway. Once again, western animation is dubbed into multiple languages and it doesn't make a difference. Then at least the animation quality is higher.

I'm no animation wiz, I'm ridiculously amateur, but it takes me roughly an hour to animate decent lip movement along with body movement. Now, a weekly show is about 20 minutes long and there are 168 hours in a week. So a team of professionals can't handle it?

Are you talking about Blood the movie? Both Blood and Bebop have slight variations in lip movement but it's still mainly up and down. I don't know if you've ever looked at someone when they speak but the movement is far from just a jaw moving up and down.

My perception, which may be wrong, is Japanese animation studios have taken the budget methods of their predecessors and made them into conventions of the genre. Animation is animation and it shouldn't be contrained within these conventions.

Why did I get the feeling Japan would get the blame for everything in this crapfest, including the writing?

@Rosseh
Are you kidding? The Simpsons and Family Guy are colossal shows that have a budget well over a million dollars an episode, all with a very simple artstyle to make move. In fact the Simpsons is over $2 mill a pop now. You couldn't have named bigger exceptions. Hell, it's rare to see an anime go even $200K an episode (say Gurren Lagann, going way over its intended $120K budget), whereas even crappy cartoons like Sabrina the Animated series got $300K a pop.

Them Japanese animators aren't cutting corners so much as trying to keep alive, doing more work than ours on 1/3 the salary. And in case you haven't noticed, how well they sound in English has little to do with the animators but the guys who write the English dialogue and janito--I mean voice actors-- who read them. We're the entertainment industry with all the money and we sure as hell aren't giving them the budget to fix any of these, even in our own titles.

I realise Hertzfeldt is another exception. But what I'm saying is his simple style is still smoother and more appealing than anime. Along with better writing. Maybe the anime industry is just inherently flawed and can never become more than what it is now. Either way, it's not very good in general.

I should have mentioned. If you take the writing away from Hertzfeldt's style, you're basically left with those retarded Pop-tart commercials. 95% of the appeal comes from the writing.

Oh, man, this is going to be long. I appologize for what could turn into a retardedly off topic rant ahead of time.

TV budget info is scattered and hard to find. Here's an article mentioning Samurai Jack's budget as "$500,000 and $1 million per episode," so it could even be higher than I mentioned.
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/'Samurai'+Next+Battle+for+Cartoon+Creator.(Brief+Article)-a077758378
Avatar's million dollar budget is pretty infamous. But I didn't know even Sponge Bob was $500K.
http://www.chrisdiclerico.com/2005/06/01/avatar-the-last-airbender/

Movie budgets are often on wikipedia unless they were made on peanuts, and I can't find Whisper's. Ghibli's got the priciest animated films in Japan, but even Spirited Away was $19 million compared to Lilo and Stitch's $80M or Treasure Planet's $150M. The original Toy Story was a surprisingly measely $30 mil but Pixar's budget has since exploded to $175 for Up! While not animated, remember back when we were remaking all those Asian horror films? As an example, Ringu was $1.2M and we remade it with $48M. That's how much money our entertainment industry, with its infinitely larger audience, has to throw around. People barely remember Speed Racer or Voltron in Japan but they have a large enough fanbase for remakes on our side, just because they aired here.

And conventions of the genre nothing. Most Gainax TV shows aren't that well animated, but their OAVs with their higher budgets like FLCL are much, MUCH more full of motion thanks to actually having the cash to make it happen. Look back at some old shows that had scenes done in Japan.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERmAiXrsR1I
See the amount of detail with the hand painted shading? It's not exactly hampering the motion. In fact you can tell that despite the shape of the characters' faces, the motion and shading style are pretty distinctly anime. Yet it's actually moving, thanks to the good old American money going in. There's a reason why we had all the episodes involving Clayface's scenes done in Japan.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Qd_IsxgAf8
Along with some other things.

It's sort like kung fu movies. You could argue those "conventions" like the wire-suspended jumping in Crouching Tiger were retarded (and they are, much like repeat footage and overuse of stills)... but then the movie was made on $5 million. Even the first Matrix movie got a $63 million, and that kind of money goes a long way in making anybody look like a martial arts master.

Money is the biggest limiting factor there is, and very few things can cover for it. Not counting stuff done on your free time like Hertzfield. Which brings us to the Meaning of Life you mentioned: As good as it is, it's still mostly stick figure repeat footage aside from that folding scene you mentioned. And we would hate that and its cheapness if it ever became the norm. Granted in the case of something like Halo Legends, I wouldn't mind if everything came to a standstill and it turned into stick figures squiggling in place rather than those characters staring blankly.

PS - Thanks for all this great information and a good conversation.