» Mon Mar 22, 2010 9:07 am
I have a pretty expansive anime library at home, and appreciate the medium and then some. Even did some stills in the long ago. But even with that appreciation, as I said, the only company I would trust with a world as visually diverse as Morrowind would be Studio Ghibli. The Oscar they won for Spirited Away proves that anime, as a medium, doesn't svck. There are gems, and there are some that use all the detractors, which for many, are the facets called "emoticons". Just seeing one of those in an anime normally makes one relegate the medium, albeit incorrectly, into a lumped sum.
But given the "look" of the game we love, with its high resolution 3D style of graphics, don't you (collectively) think that to get those that appreciate the games, and those that have never played it ever, all on the same page, that a movie would be best kept in the same style of the game? Many gamers of the Final Fantasy genre hated the movie because it lacked the spiky hair and oversized gun-swords. They rather wanted more on the same vein as Advent Children. But for a standalone movie, the Spirits Within delivered. The beginning was creepy. The premise was interesting. The characters, hate-worthy or fairly likable.
We'd need that for Morrowind, and with the huge full on fantasy look of the game, as I mentioned earlier, only Guillermo Del Toro would honestly do justice to it to make tangible Guar, Nix-hound, or even Atronachs. The way he did the HellBoy Golden Army prosthetics shows that he isn't all CGI worshipping, and that is good. All of us have to admit, there is some pretty terrible CGI out there, and the same goes for some 3D, as evidenced by the shameful way the movie Dragonlance:Dragons of Autumn's Twilight was produced, in an age when you could have the likes of the detail of The Spirits Within, Beowulf, or even the first Starship Troopers.
A live action would only be best served if the actors truly cared about the franchise. Some disagree, but you can see a difference between an actor who is doing it for the check and those that have been waiting for a vehicle that moves them. Even with some of it's rather bad CGI and filming of action sequences, the Lord of the Rings movies at least had actors that really wanted to be in the movie. A great many said publicly how they just loved the world of Tolkien, or some, just to play an Elf for the first time. That is what we'd need for a Morrowind movie. Some actors, and craftmen, that would approach the project enthusiastically, so you'd know they do their best.
Oh, and one thing we should really kind of understand, is that a great deal of "Western" animation is actually drafted and celled in Korea and elsewhere in Asia. Only a respective handful are really produced, directed, and celled in the States proper. The voice casting would make or break any Morrowind movie. In this, given her extensive success ratio with regard to animated media, the only person I would trust would be Andrea Romano, of the animated Batman, Justice League. Avatar:The Last Airbender, and many other works. She knows how to hunt down some pretty impressive voice talents, even those actors whose name has long faded into obscurity, but their voice, remained timeless.