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Contest:
2:00 AM on 11.13.2009
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This doesn't feel right ):
(It is a neat watch if you're into the Halo universe at all, even if they do a splendid job of not explaining which prophet they're after, and why killing him would cut Covenant supply lines to any significant degree.)
Still, it doesn't quite capture the kind of gritty-yet-beautiful style that Halo seems to have. Emphasis on the grit.
Guncannon: Why not Robotech?
But as a quick story meant to establish Spartans as they are and give us a glimpse of ODST it was okay. And I'm not even a huge fan of the Halo story.
It's not that bad. All along I was thinking that the spartan was hiding some bewbs underneath that armor.
Halo = Homo.
In the end, it is still a disappointment. This Japanese treatment of Halo source material is getting a bit whacky. Will wait for more.
At least watch the first half before you make random assumptions and end up looking like an ignoarant ass.
1) I guess they still use paper maps in the future? Sure we have technology to make super suits but a digital map? Fuck that!
2) lol at the Spartans body growing to triple the size as he rips off the door while his head stays the same size.
3) I think any doofus saw the whole "ZOMG IT'S A CHICK" thing coming after they emphasized the word "HE" and "HIM" like 50 fucking times. Halfway through I'm just thinking "for gods sake, just show its a chick and move on!"
4) I guess spartans don't have shields anymore? Just one hit to the face and it's enough to kill them? Fuckin lame.
5) Worst. Captain. Ever. The spartan is supposed to be leading the group and never says a word? Yeah great leading asshole. I'll just bumble my way into this base as you stand around silently trying not to let on your a chick.
6) wtf was with the spartan jumping around like a goddam monkey while fighting the brute? I sure as shit never saw a spartan move like that in the games!
7) Wtf was everyone doing while the spartan took the shot? He made it all the way past every "elite" helljumper without even one of them just saying "oh btw, brute in the room". Holy shit, worst soldiers ever. Doesn't anyone know how to guard a door?
8) Nice super bright orange visor, I don't think it was supposed to be that bright. Good luck hiding behind a bush while your suit blends in with green camouflage while your goddam visor shines like a beacon.
Overall, terrible animation, terrible voice acting, TERRIBLE writing. My day is ruined and I've not even got a coffee yet.
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.
Haha, no kidding! They hit a fair number of anime cliches. Still, I enjoyed it. Somehow they're better than the Halo books.
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.
You have lots of money now. So spend some on animation. Specifically lip movement.
Sincerely
Animation Community
It won't be everyone's cup of tea, but I still think, overall, its a good thing. I haven't read any of the Halo books, but if you stick that same material in anime or audio form, I'll check it out.
Only problem I have with this thing, is that I would have prefered a full 13-26 episode Halo series, than they seven individual episodes we are getting, which would have allowed more to be told. I'd prefer on clear vision of Halo, than seven. I hope if this does well, MS might think about getting more done.
I'm still looking forward to the 2010 Ironman anime series more than this, I guess.
@Rosseh
To answer that, I think you need to look up what anime really is. For you to expect disney quality animation is over the top. These techniques have been and are used to cut production and time down, as not every studio has the staff and resources of Disney, or produce as detailed work. Another fact to consider is translation into different languages. If lips animation is more detailed, translation and dialogue has to match it and be more stringent. This doesn't always work well, and may also differ for any anime, depending on who designs the characters etc. Also, if this was any other animation, you'd probably not be getting a 20min episode this quick, and on Live for free too. Remember that word free, as its nice to get four for free, and the last three on dvd.
So, if you want lips in your anime, try Blood: The Last Vampire or Cowboy Bebop. I too have question whether MS chose the right staff for
this project. I would have prefer Katsuya Terada or Shinichiro Watanabe of the above works, to give the Halo universe a more realistic, detailed feel and higher quality anime to boot.
One down, six to go.
howd she hide all those long flowing hairs in that tiny little spartain helmet?
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.
Lame AND boring. Hopefully the other ones will be better...
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.
The art style is definitely not reminding me of Halo. At all. Soon as I saw the SPARTAN's face, I vowed to never watch another of these.
@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 would like to see accurate budget records for both a typical western and a typical anime piece but I expect that's hard to find.
The reason why I believe that some of these methods are being accepted as convention is they have always been used. Look back at the quality of things like Fist of the North Star or Cobra and you can see a difference with today's anime. You have more shading, better lines (with some exceptions), better colours, sharper look overall. As technology is improving things become cheaper to achieve than before. But certain aspects within anime aren't changing, those aspects that are cheaper to improve upon these days.
Would you rather watch this or a Don Hertzfeldt?
The anime industry has some serious flaws, but you realize for things to move well, even a simple styled cartoon like Samurai Jack costs $500K+ an episode, right? God knows what Clone Wars must have cost. While I can't find overall comparisons of anime and American 'toon shows' production values, let's just say we wouldn't have outsourced to them if they weren't noticeably cheaper than us.
In fact, look at Avatar. It's decidedly anime influenced, hiring Korean studios that mainly did anime, but moves a lot better. Even in some fight scenes where the studio brings up its more detailed, anime stylings. Why? It has an enourmous budget of a million dollars an episode. Big O had a lot of the same people who animated episodes of Batman: The Animated series, with similarly simpler character designs. That didn't make it better animated than Cowboy Bebop by the same studio. It all comes down to the money going in, and we sure skimped on Halo Legends.
Getting back to writing, you can't blame much of it on Japan when we're the guys who came up with the original stories and English dialogue (not to mention the horrible voice acting that made them even harder to listen to). Making all anime characters sound annoying and all their exchanges braindead is our tradition in cost cutting. We do it a lot worse than they do, which is why English anime voice actors aren't allowed 10 miles within one of our own shows.
The character designs definitely have no excuse, though. All those wide, happy eyes and cliche hairdos were freaking horrible.
I'm interested in where you get your figures from. I can't seem to find a good source for media budgets.
Aside from that I think it's probably a combination of bugetary constraints and conventions of the genre. Even in Halo Legends the soldiers all had different shaped faces and features so it wasn't like they needed the crazy hair to distinguish the characters.
While there is some gold I suppose it's just like anything else. The majority of people who work in any industry adhere to the rules and rarely change.
By the way, do you know what kind of budget Studio Ghibli were working with when they made Whisper of the Heart or Spirited Away?
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.
I agree that money is the biggest contraint but I still think people are somewhat to blame. If you look at people like Hertzfeldt; He says he never had a real job in his life. He just animated. Then he set up things like The Animation Show, which still involves his passion, allows him to live and still work on things he can be proud to put his name on. I think it's a shame that guys end up in tweening pieces like Halo Legends just to keep a roof over their head.
I'd also really like to see how that money is spent. What kind of wages do people in each position of an animated piece get paid? I'd love to get hold of a budget sheet for something, just to see how the funds are distributed so I can understand more clearly.