MovieChat Forums > Halo Legends (2010) Discussion > Anime was wrong for Halo.

Anime was wrong for Halo.

posted 14 years ago by black_ice_1138
7 replies | jump to latest

After playing the games for so long and reading the books and stuff I just don't think anime was a good choice for the animation. It just seemed so cliche to me for some reason, everything seems to be anime for some reason, especially things like this, ie Animatrix and Gotham Knight. It seemed more like a saturday morning cartoon than something trying to be serious, especially Homecoming and Babysitter.
The writing could have been better also, The Package felt like an old Power Rangers show.

[–] CondemnedFEAR 14 years ago

I agree with you, I could not stand the Anime. I am a pretty big Halo fan, I have all of the games and have read most of the books and comics, but the stories were either too dramatic or had too many anime cliches to be taken seriously. Anime every now and then is great, Akira, Cowboy Bebop, and Ghost in the Shell were amazing anime series/movies, but to be put with Halo just seemed to forced. I would have loved to seen an westernized version of this that was more focused on the Halo Universe and less carried away with artistic expression. Even the last short "The Package" which looked really cool, was just that it only looked good. Halsey looked in her early twenties, when she is in her late fifties at least, Kelly had purple hair, and John didn't even have his normal voice actor playing him. Not to mention the a lot of the dialogue had those normalcies from anime carried over, and in a universe like Halo it just seemed odd. The whole time I was watching Legends I felt like it was an extended Dragon Ball or Gundam episode, and I had a really hard time taking any of the shorts seriously. If you are a Halo fan don't expect much, if you like anime it's all yours.

[–] 14 years ago

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[–] salman4202 14 years ago

Goddamn...I am sick of people complaining about how anime isnt right for Halo...Did u peeps actually try watching it?Believe me,when they announced that it was going to be anime,I was honestly enraged.I freakin' hate anime.But being Halo,I couldnt just boycott it or anything.Gave it a shot,and actually liked it.Still hate anime,but Legends was pretty good overall(I'm going to ignore Homecoming).'Origins' was just plain awesome,mostly due to how the music matched the mood perfectly,'Duel' was extremely sentimental,but in a good way.'Babysitter' was alright,I guess,but only if you ignore the character animation.'The Package' was cool,it probably felt most like the video game,action-filled and with crowning music of awesome.
You have to re-watch it,you kinda get past the 'but-its-bullfreakin-anime!!' and really enjoy it

[–] theyellowsign 13 years ago

I'm watching it right now, and I'm thinking the same thing. This doesn't feel like Halo at all. It just feels like a hodgepodge of anime cliche (I believe 'anime' is actually Japanese for 'cliche') crammed together. Typical anime design. Typical anime themes. Typical anime plotting. It just has Halo skins put on top of any given anime. Blah. Any one of these could be an aside for Robotech, Voltron, or Cowboy Bebop with only a little tweaking.

This should have been better.

http://www.inthemouthofdorkness.blogspot.com/

[–] Dancougar82 12 years ago

When you say this you do realize that Anime is actually a borrowed French term for animation, coined by the Japanese, and that the scifi and fantasy genres themselves are chocked full of cliches going back to time immemorial don't you? There hasn't been an original plotline in fiction that hasn't been done and redone in thousands of years. This is just another rehash of the old powerful valiant warrior fearlessly defending against the ruthless invading hordes storyline.
--Dancougar82

[–] theyellowsign 11 years ago

I do realize that stories are mixes and matches of previous plot threads. I don't believe there are only X number. I think that's something collage literature professors say to make their students say 'Wow.' But, I do know that cliche isn't new, nor is it exclusively the property of Japanese animation. However, I've sadly watched a LOT of anime, thanks to anime fans typically being proselytizers who just don't understand how someone could not like what they like, and being a complete movie whore. I will watch nearly anything if you give it to me. So, after years of saying 'I don't like anime' and having anime fans pass videos to me saying 'you just haven't seen the right one' I can even more surely say that 'I don't like anime.' And that anime running the spectrum from their creepy sexualized school children comedies to giant robot smash'em-ups trumps even Michael Bay for mindless devotion to archetypes and tropes. If you look at pretty much any other animation industry, even at one specific and dominant company like Disney, you see wider variety in story, design, and technique. With few exceptions (there are always exceptions) anime while not uniform, fits within a very, very narrow window of design and story. So, I understand why some people like it. They like that narrow band. But I don't.

And I don't think it was a good fit for Halo.

http://www.inthemouthofdorkness.blogspot.com/

[–] LaLlama 11 years ago

Halo was certainly not going to be done in a Western style of animation.

Figures, it seems like American animation studios dread the thought of a "cartoon" having mature contents and themes. Simpsons, Family Guy, and the like don't really count, as those are just comedies, and not really mature in the sense of presenting a serious story-line. They figure "We'll just let Japan do the nasties, and we'll keep doing our rainbows and fart humor", not that there's anything specifically WRONG with rainbows and fart humor, but if this is what's mostly on the menu, well, that sort of just alienates your audience a bit.